Overall a great professor. Explains things well, covers the important stuff, engaging and interactive, fun.
You have to write 3 out of 5 essays that are assigned. If you do 4 or 5 then the best 3 will be chosen for factoring into your writing score.
The midterm and final are largely short answer and essays.
Although the class is "Cinema and the Ancient World" it really focuses on writing and the films. For the midterm I studied a lot of the Roman history stuff and hardly any of it was about Roman history. It was mostly about movies and just writing.

If you're a decent writer, attend lectures, read the assigned chapters, and do some basic studying you should do well in the class.

Once again, McDonnell is a great professor (but it's not necessarily an easy A class)

Great professor!!!!!
Every lecture is very organized and she prints out the notes so you don't have to take notes. She's super concerned about her students learning and is very approachable outaide of the classroom. Also, she's really good with names. I went to her office hours once for 5 minutes and she remembered me for the rest of the quarter. Also she let me make up points for a midterm because there was a misunderstanding with the essay. I therefore got a D on the midterm but she let me write an essay to make up the points I missed. I don't know very many professors that'll do that. As for the class, it's really interesting. Youre given 5 essays to write, but only the 3 best will be averaged into youre grade. So if you're good at writing you can only write 3 of the 5 essays, and if you're poor at writing you have the security of making up a poor grade essay with a new one. The essays you write are on movies that you have to watch on you're own time (which can kinda be a hastle), but McDonnell basically tells you everything you need to put in you're essay during class. And the movies/ topics are cool: Gladiator, Spartacus, Ben Hur, Star Wars, Monty Python's Life of Brian, etc. All in all take this class and take professor mcdonnell.

Professor McDonnell is a great UCLA professor!

Her lectures are pretty entertaining and fun to go to. They are highly informative and she likes to print everything out for students to take copies of. She also adds her own two-cents all the time and I think it's great! She is very passionate about the class which makes it easy to do the assignments (for me at least).

There are quite a few assignments though, but if you don't procrastinate it's not so bad. Some of the movies are pretty long and there are a total of 5 papers, but again, set aside some extra time to get it done.

Oh! And McDonnell is very pro-student. There are 5 papers but you are graded on the best 3. So if you want to skip some, she's totally cool with that. She even offered a project at the end to give us another chance for a good grade. Also, on the midterm she was more than fair. We had a choice for film clips to analyze and were only required to answer 5 out of 7 short answer questions. How many professors go out of their way to make things easier on the students like that???

I had her for the watching movies class.
Oh yea, sounded like cool.
Nah! after the third four-hour movie that I was forced to watch, I mean, it gets boring.
She is a narcissist that says "you only have to do 3 out of the 5 essays." Hmm okay.
But what if you have a very strict TA like Brian or Alex, you may have to do the 5 of them.
And the useless discussions are mandatory.
So it's a lot of work between week 1 and week 7.
The midterm is so unexpected, so you better study everything word by word.

One last thing, her first day of class, may sound that she's all cool and stuff but it's too good to be true.
I do admit she's a nice professor and comical but what counts at the end, how useful was the class, and what was your grade, not her attitude.