DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS OR THIS PROFESSOR! The wording for the assignments and exams is weird and often misleading. The format of the class does not help you learn. The material is easy, but the professor often finds a way to make it hard by wording the questions weirdly. One of the assignments has a lot of questions that are subjective, like counting the number of a weather phenomenon in two ways, but only providing one blank space for each of the answers. (most of the students got a b- or a c for that assignment). It also took the professor 2 weeks to grade the final exam. It is a relatively easy/light class if you only want a pass for upper-division credits though.

To be honest, if I were to give a rating for Professor Ward, as a person it would be a 5/5. However, I am not sure if I can say the same for the class. As someone who completed 2 internships in meteorology which in hindsight this class should be review for me, I found the coursework to be very difficult. Here is the grade breakdown:
Assignment 1 (10%): Honestly, if you did not go to office hours, you were screwed, the content was not gone over in the lectures and basically The TA had to hold a last-minute office hours which helped a bit but if you did not attend this I am not sure how you could have done well on the assignment.

Assignment 2(10%): This was a train wreck honestly and the mean was about a 54% on this one. I think the reason why everyone did poorly was it involved counting El Niño and La Niña events which seems easy at first but it’s very subjective and most well-knowledgeable sites had different considerations as to what ENSO events are. It didn’t help either the answers were very close to each other. I think you basically needed luck to be able to pass this assignment.

Assignment 3 (10%) This was probably the most reasonable assignment out of the 3 and the average was around an 80. A couple of questions I thought were graded rough but I think this was significantly better than Assignment 2.

Discussion Posts (20%): Honestly, pretty straightforward you have to post a response to questions and respond to a classmates. The grading was pretty light and honestly as long as you had a good faith response should get full points.

Midterm (25%): Honestly, it was okay in my opinion. The multiple choice was a bit tricky on some parts but free response was fair. I think the average was like an 80%.

Final (25%)- I have to take this still.

Overall: Professor Ward is honestly a remarkable person who may appear condescending at first but when you talk to him more; he is definitely quiet pleasant to be around. However, his class needs major work as the coursework is nothing short of a huge mess. The only way to survive the first 2 assignments is to ask your TA as much as possible. As someone who is quite passionate and knowledgeable in the field, I feel the coursework was very subjective and I think is not a good measure of one’s understanding of the tropical climatology. While Ward is a great person, I think unless you have to, you should take another class.

Do not take a class with this professor.

I cannot tell you how stressful he is. There is no accountability. He and his ta offered different answers during office hours for assignments. Friends and I worked and completed assignments together, then received different scores for the *exact same work. When I confronted him, he quietly changed all of our grades to the same. Unclear grading rubrics on assignments, office hours are mandatory to receive clear instruction for assignments (that should have just been in instructions). He teaches class in a casual, hip, and funny manner. He is interesting to listen to in lecture, and he is a funny guy. However, his tests are rigid, tricky, and you need a technical understanding of the material - the colloquial man er he teaches in will not suffice for a good grade on his tests. He takes forever to grade, for ex two outstanding assignments with necessary info for final, not graded by time of final. He submitted grades weeks past the deadline for my course. I can't tell if he curves or not, I was expecting b+ and got a-. Fwiw, I am an all-a 4th yr student and have never struggled as much as I have in his class. Avoid.

I’m going to say this as clearly as I can, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS WITH THIS PROFESSOR. DON’T DO IT. This professor is everything that a professor at UCLA should not be. He is extremely unclear in his grading criteria. The assignments that we had throughout the quarter were misunderstood and he also even got incorrect answers on his own, and marked students including me also wrong even though we were right. He makes claims saying there are margins for error on assignments that are one number and then changed it when he graded them. His lectures are a rambling debacle of information that leaves you without the ability to even formulate a question. The exams are somewhat manageable but then you’re left with his subjective view on the largest parts of the exams. I’m sure Dr. Ward is a nice guy, but he does represent what I have expected out of a college professor let alone a professor at UCLA. Oh it also took him 5 weeks to grade our midterm; and worse, it took him over a month (and 10 days over the deadline) to grade our finals. No one knows how he graded them. He changed grades multiple times on assignments throughout the semester for more than just 1 or 2 students. I spent years in community college and NEVER had a professor carry themselves as unprofessional as this one.
I’m going to add that this was taken during the UC strike in fall of 2022 and despite a ton of students urging him to change the format of the final he did not. He had no help from TAs grading and still chose to make it extremely difficult by not changing the format. Every other professor I had changed it to be able to get the grades in on time. Regardless, we’re still left to his subjective view because of a complete lack of a clear grading rubric.
This class should have been easy. The material is easy, but this professor makes it complicated in ways it shouldn’t be. The workload isn’t even that much, but again the professor made it so complicated that it was nearly impossible to get 100% on any of the assignments. He didn’t have a clear concrete correct answer for any of the assignments.
Unless this is absolutely mandatory and you cannot wait til this is taught by someone else, please do not subject yourself to this. I should have listened to the other reviews that I am attempting to echo.

I really enjoyed the subject of this class as I have always been interested in climatology. However, even though I got an A, the class was confusing and stressful. The professor encourages everyone to go to his office hours but they weren't really helpful tbh. For the exams, I recommend watching lecture videos over and over again until you are ready to write about each concept and its mechanism.

Professor Ward is a good person, but not a good educator. He honestly does not know how to teach. His lecture slides were pretty clear and well organized but his talking makes no sense. The lecture material builds up and the tests are do-able. The assignments however, is material that was never covered in class and the TA only had office hours, by appointment on Tuesday. Which was not helpful. The professor's office hours are on Saturday but the assignment deadline is on the same day. Would not recommend, there are better professors in the Geography department

I can tell that Dr. Ward really likes what he does and I think he really enjoys his position as a professor. But, I have to be honest in saying that the way this course was run was haphazard and confusing at best. First, he rarely responds to emails, and if he does, it is well outside of the timeframe he says he will respond to them (2 days according to syllabus, only during the week). Second, he requires you to attend office hours in order to complete graded homework assignments. Meaning he did not teach us during lecture how to complete the assignments he gave us, so we were forced to attend office hours or fail the assignment. That is completely unfair. You cannot ask students to be available outside of the class time unless it is credited and stated during enrollment. Third, I do think that Dr. Ward tried his best to make things easy and clear to us, but I think it actually made things more confusing. For example, he spent a ton of time explaining to us that assignment 2 had rather subjective answers and that we would be able to argue our answers to him, but then it was graded objectively (numbers were chosen from a dropdown list instead of being a free response) and there was no way to explain our answers in the assignment. Further, so many people were upset with their grades for assignment 2 that there was no point in trying to argue back points. Lastly, it is obvious that Dr. Ward and his TA do not talk about how the course will be graded. I personally only ever saw the TA at lecture once or twice (to be fair, I missed 2 classes, so she may have attended these ones), and got conflicting information from her during office hours about lecture material. The assignments and midterm were not graded according to how Dr. Ward told us they would be, and he had difficulty explaining point differences on midterm scores, which were graded by the TA.

Overall, this class did teach me some fascinating stuff about weather and climate systems. I don't think Dr. Ward meant for this class to be so strangely difficult, but it was nonetheless. In the future, I hope he can be more involved in the grading, or at least be on the same page as his TA, make more clear and objective questions, and present assignments that are more directly related to course material.

Tropical Climatology with Jason Ward was my very first class taken at UCLA. I was very much looking forward to this class, and I must say I was rather disappointed. I can attest to the above comments saying that Mr. Ward is extremely unclear. When asked questions in class, he very often would say that he did not know the answer, or would go off on a long unrelated tangent that left the class more confused than before the question was asked. I understand that sometimes a question may stump even the most knowledgeable professors, but in this case, the majority of his responses were that he did not know. I joined a few of his office hours, but they were not helpful in the slightest. He could be condescending and combative in office hours, and was also often late to class. That being said, it's not an impossible class, but it can certainly be frustrating and you may have to put in more work than would otherwise be necessary to do well on exams.

Tropical Climatology with Jason Ward was my very first class taken at UCLA. I was very much looking forward to this class, and I must say I was rather disappointed. I can attest to the above comments saying that Mr. Ward is extremely unclear. When asked questions in class, he very often would say that he did not know the answer, or would go off on a long unrelated tangent that left the class more confused than before the question was asked. I understand that sometimes a question may stump even the most knowledgeable professors, but in this case, the majority of his responses were that he did not know. I joined a few of his office hours, but they were not helpful in the slightest. He could be condescending and combative in office hours, and was also often late to class. That being said, it's not an impossible class, but it can certainly be frustrating and you may have to put in more work than would otherwise be necessary to do well on exams.