People say Dr. Gallagher is a bit on the boring/dry side which is fair but she's also very clear and able to emphasize what she wants you to know. It's more that she can be somewhat repetitive and can have very long trains of thought, but nevertheless many of the topics should be at least decently interesting to the average person.

Among her strengths are that her lectures are extremely organized and, again, she emphasizes the main points that she wants you to know in lecture. This is absolutely critical. If you can force yourself to sustain that attention in class, you can save yourself hours of reading outside of class. What I ended up doing, actually, was to focus my energy on getting everything I could from her lectures and THEN doing the readings AFTER lecture instead of before lecture as suggested because then the readings were a breeze and I could ensure that I was making the connections and reviewing the points she wanted me to know.

The class grading is structured as follows:
Weekly quizzes: 10% - drop lowest 2 out of 9 weeks
Section attendance / participation: 15% - note that both actually count
Midterm 1: 20%
Midterm 2 :20%
Final exam: 35%

Quizzes were simple, 2 questions long and were there just to check that you did the bare minimum. People essentially almost always got 100%.
For attendance/participation, she has a clustered grading scheme where absences are punitive. In other words, it's set up as "0 or 1 absences" "2 absences" and so on as well as outstanding vs excellent vs good vs satisfactory vs unsatisfactory participation. It's somewhat convoluted and she sends an email at the end about it but essentially 1 unexcused absence will not harm you in any way whatsoever, but 2 unexcused absences with "excellent" (outstanding not allowed for 2 unexcused absences) participation automatically sets you back to an A- grade for participation.

Midterm exams were split into Part 1 and Part 2 sections, with Part 1 being multiple choice/short answer. I felt like these were quite straightforward and they were pretty lenient on grading. Part 2 was an essay with a prompt that they gave you beforehand. Going to office hours / review session is very helpful in getting a sense of the direction you want to take - otherwise it's easy to get off track and write an essay that may not meet what they're looking for or falls into some major philosophy traps.

Final exam has an additional Part 3 essay section where you aren't given the prompt beforehand and you must take an ethical stance and defend it on the fly for a case that she sets up for you. I personally felt that the final's Part 1 multiple choice was trickier and I regretted not reading the slides in more depth, something I didn't expect to have to do given that I had already put in a significant amount of effort into knowing each author's arguments quite well and her main points. However, I also ended up doing much better on the final than I had anticipated despite my concerns, and so did others.

Averages for the exams were as follows:
Midterm 1: nearly 87
Midterm 2: 88
Final: 89 (I asked her, as she didn't send a follow-up email as she did for the midterms)

All in all, Dr. Gallagher is a super fair professor and if you ever need help, she will be very patient in ensuring that you have your questions properly answered. This is definitely a decent class to take to fulfill your philosophy/linguistics GE and I also loved having Maddy as my TA :).

YOU NEED TO GO TO CLASS in order to get enough information to write the essays because you will NOT be able to adequately dissect these readings yourself. But the catch is that you need to PAY ATTENTION in class which can be hard because I have def napped in more than one of these lectures. Her voice is very soothing and the material can be boring so at any given moment you will find at least 2 people asleep. Please TAKE GOOD NOTES because you'll use them for the papers and to glance over before your quizzes in section. The readings range in difficulty and annotating the readings never took me less than 1.5-2 hours. Otherwise the class was not bad and discussion was very engaging (thanks to Sam). Philosophical writing is hard and different from other types of writing- so you will probably struggle a bit trying to change your writing style but because it is an intro class everyone is learning alongside you.

This is a really interesting GE to take. Yes, it's a bit more work than other GE classes, but at the same time, I found the information to be incredibly rewarding. Gallagher's lectures are a bit boring, but she conveys the information very well. Additionally, she's always ready to help, and the TAs in this course were also really good. I thought that the essays are graded a little harshly (and they're hard to write in general), but she has other 'cushion' grades like weekly quizzes and attendance. I would recommend this class to anyone interested in medicine -- it's definitely a GE worthwhile of your time.

In total, the essays (3 total) are worth 60% of your grade. The averages are almost always above 85%. My TA was open to reading our outlines and telling us when we could improve our outline structure. Altogether, it's fairly easy to get over a B+ on the essays. If you put in a little bit more effort, you can get A-s. So, it's not too hard to end up with an A or A-.

The class is ok. There isn't that much reading if you just want to listen to her lectures and not do the assigned readings, but some of the harder concepts may be unclear. The two essays are graded by your TA, I had Saraliza and she was wonderful! The first essay was more about explaining a concept and the second essay is a little more argumentative.

Pretty clear, straightforward class. Your grade consists of three papers and participation. The papers aren't too hard, especially if you go to your TA for help (I had Kyle Scott and he always gave me great advice for my essays). Participation does matter, so you do have to talk sometimes during discussions, not just show up. Again, I had Kyle as a TA, so he considered anything from asking questions during section to giving your own take on a philosopher to going to office hours as participation. There are also pass/no pass quizzes that go into participation that were pretty easy. Dr. Gallagher posts all the possible questions on the slides and pretty much all the answers were on the slides too. As long as you pass three out of the four, you should be fine.

Dr. Gallagher posts readings that you're technically supposed to read before every lecture. However, she explains everything really clearly during lecture so I personally don't think doing every single reading is necessary, just make sure you do the reading for the prompt you're going to write for your papers. She posts slides that have quotes and page numbers on them and I found that super helpful as a guide for writing my papers and citing stuff.

I honestly found discussion more interesting than lecture, just because we were able to discuss and debate the content. Basically, lecture's to help you understand the content in a concise, straightforward way, discussion's then a place for you to give your own interpretation.

Overall, I really did like this class, would definitely recommend taking it.

This class was fine, as it was neither great nor terrible. Grades are based on three essays (ranging from 20-30% each) and participation (25%). Essay grades, as I've heard, vary a decent amount based on your TA, although they do cooperate with grading.

The papers are not very long, as the shortest is 3-4 pages, and the longest is 6-7. There are also assigned readings (not from a textbook), but by the end of the quarter the amount of people doing them... diminished. Her slides cover a lot of the material very well anyway, and she posts them on CCLE.

The topics are fairly interesting, but for some reason I often found myself fighting off sleep in lecture. Even though I was intrigued by some of the philosophers we covered, I couldn't help but find my attention drifting off. After reading the other reviews on here, I am clearly not alone.

If you're interested in philosophy, this isn't a bad choice for a GE, but there may be easier options out there if that's what you're looking for.

She looks like a Karen. That is all. She gives off Karen vibes. This class is unfair because your grade is heavily determined by your TA. My TA graded more harshly.

This is a great class to take if you're interested in healthcare, research, or bioethics. The subject matter is really interesting but lectures can get tedious because they are long and there is a lot of information. This class is not an easy GE, you do have to work for your grade. With that said it's not necessarily a very difficult class either, you get what you put in. The majority of the class is based on your exam grades so it's important to do well on those. The midterms and finals consist of multiple choice, free response, and essay. They give you the essay prompt beforehand so that you have time to prepare for it and go to office hours for feedback before the exam. Professor Gallagher helps her students out and is a fair professor.

Overall a really interesting GE but definitely not the easiest out there. The class requires a lot of reading and although you can get by just paying attention in lectures when it comes time to write the essays you will probably need to go back and read if you want to do well. With that said the lectures were well done in my opinion and I always felt like I got a lot out of them. The papers aren't too long but that can be a challenge of its own.

No amount of caffeine or energy can compete with Dr. Gallagher's gift of compelling an entire lecture to want to fall asleep. Don't get me wrong, the class content is interesting and easy to understand, especially if you have an interest in politics, but the lectures are painful to sit through. Grade is dependent on three essays and four quizzes (not overly complicated). She luckily posts the lecture slides online, so you can easily get a good grade on the essays through a combination of using the slides and reading the passages.