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 :).

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-.

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.

The lectures feel repetitive and boring. But honestly, theyre not, I just think it is just that the lecture block is too long for this class and it should be shortened to a 50 minute lecture. It is hard to listen to a person talk and talk for that long regardless of how interesting the content is.

There are three essays that make up most of your grade and all the other small assignments are quick and easy. The TA has a huge part of your grade as they are the ones grading the essays. The professor is nice and the subject matter is interesting, it just depends if you get a good or bad TA as they decide your grade for the most part. Not a lot of guidance is given for the essays and they are graded pretty hard.

I am extremely grateful to have had Dr. Gallagher for this course. While her lectures were very information heavy and st times hard to pay attention to, they had everything needed in order to get a good grade in this class. Here was the breakdown for my session:
Take-Home Midterm Exam -- 25%
Take-Home Final Exam (Mult. Choice & Essay) -- 25%
Discussion Quizzes (5 out of 6 counted) -- 15%
Section Attendance/Participation -- 20%
She was extremely flexible with my accommodations and always willing to help out more with explanations. Readings at times seemed overwhelming, but that is also considering some disability-related issues I had to face during this course. The important aspects of readings however are highlighted in the slides.

I chose this class as a GE very last minute but it ended up being my favorite class of the quarter. Since I'm not into science or medicine, I didn't expect to find biomedical ethics as interesting as I did. Dr. Gallagher gave very clear lectures and the slides were very useful for the essays. The lectures could be a little boring but all the information in them was very clear. I learned a lot and am so glad I took this class. I also really liked my TA and the discussion sections were really well organized. This class is especially relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Highly recommend!!

This class is super straightforward and, in my opinion, a decently easy A if you do what's expected of you. I'm a high schooler and found it to be relatively easy. Everything you need to know for the quizzes and essays are on the lecture slides, which you can look at in your own time. My TA was super helpful when it came to giving constructive feedback for my essays and in general the class is easy enough if you put good work into your midterm and final essays.

I took this for my philosphy GE. I'd say it was worth it. The material is very interesting. Professor's clarity is a little questionable. The way she talked was like a published paper rather than like a human being. In other words, she would explain simple concepts in a roundabout way that made it harder to understand sometimes. Grading on essays was a little harsh. A is definitely doable. I never did the reading btw, I learned everything from lecture.

If you don't have to take this class for a requirement I wouldn't recommend it because it is a lot of reading every week, and the material is very dense. Lectures are not terribly engaging. Midterm essays are also graded a bit hard. However, I would say I learned ALOT about important concepts in biomedical ethics which I know will come up in my future. I think it's a useful but quite challenging class.