Class consisted of three noncumulative lecture exams and two noncumulative lab practicals. There was quite a bit of extra credit offered. A lot of this class is memorizing the slides, and reading the textbook is very helpful. This class seemed to require the same effort as some lower divs but it was actually very fun. The material is fun and the professor tries her best to keep the class from being boring. Lots of videos during class so thats a plus.

Took this class W19. Gorlitsky taught the first 5 weeks and A.Lipman taught the rest. Workload was not bad at all - just reading a short article and coming up with questions about it before discussion.

There are two tests (multi-choice) - a midterm and a final (during 10th week & NOT cumulative). I studied the day before each exam only, and I felt well prepared.

1.5% extra credit if you do a 3 hour ecological field trip-type-thing.

For me, I felt it was extremely easy to get an (A-) because the class follows simple logic, but I don't know what I would've done to get an A. Both tests, which make up a huge majority of the grade, had questions which had many weirdly worded questions.

***For the most helpful suggestion, please see point #2 at the end.*** I LOVED THIS CLASS. I'm honestly going to MISS IT. We haven't been issues grades yet, however, I am expecting an A because my group and I worked our asses off. It didn't feel like a ton of work because it was honestly fun and we learned SO MUCH. The class is basically taught by TAs, and ours (Eric) was amazing. Dr. Gorlitsky was totally available though and for our project, she was extremely helpful. MY ADVICE: 1. TAKE THIS CLASS! ***2. Go the extra mile in the beginning and think hard when choosing a research topic. Pick the one that is most interesting to you!!! This is VITAL for making it feel enjoyable. One way or another, you'll have to do quite a bit of work, so it may as well be a topic that you would pursue whether it was graded or not.

Fair exams but there is little room for error as a few questions missed can be the difference in a letter grade. Study early and know differences in the concepts covered.

I took this class with Lipman as well. The comments about the testing are all true from other people (nit-picky, hard to do well as missing just a few questions can change a letter grade, MC) so I'll just mention the homework. The homework was not graded fast enough to be able to incorporate feedback & had really impossible standards to meet. I would spend hours reading the articles and still get points taken off. My advice for doing the homework: incorporate your own potential ways of testing a certain question/reasoning behind a question; look for where the article could gather enough information, consider other ways why a variable may have occurred/what would have made it higher or lower — don’t necessarily try to question the article’s integrity. And really try to get your HW points because it is such a large part of your grade.

I could tell that Dr. Gorlitsky was very passionate about what she teaches. She tried to incorporate many examples and videos showing different animals and their behavior, but she goes incredibly fast through lecture. She covers ~40 slides every lecture, and to be honest, it was very difficult trying to pinpoint 1) what was important 2) what was the takeaway / purpose of presenting all of those examples. The lecture felt extra long just because of the sheer amount of material.

The midterm covering animal behavior was unnecessarily confusing such that multiple answers could be correct. After reviewing the questions with the TA's (who were very unhelpful), I still do not understand why the answers were correct compared to other choices. This felt very similar to LS in the sense that you walk out of the exam feeling like you knew all the material but just unsure if you picked the answer they were looking for. Overall, the concepts were fairly easy to pick up.

Discussions were pointless and reading the articles and writing questions about them were unhelpful.

Professor Gorlitsky is one of my favorite professors at UCLA. Her lectures are super interesting and engaging and I happen to love studying animals, which makes this class even better for me.
There were two midterms for the class, along with two mini projects, and then a final presentation. Everything is very doable and the projects are always guided and explained by your TA way before it's due.
You will not regret taking this class with Dr. Gorlitsky!

I took this class with Professor Gorlitsky and Professor Lipman. Professor Gorlitsky taught the first five weeks and I really enjoyed it. The material was super interesting (animals do the WEIRDEST things!) and she included tons of interesting videos that I loved watching. The way her class was structured was she gave narrated powerpoint on each week's material, and then had live not-recorded sessions where she just went into more detail and had us to activities together. But you weren't required to go to live sessions, and she said for exams all the material you needed to know should be in the powerpoint videos. They were pretty long and you can't watch them sped up which was slightly irritating. The midterm took an insanely long time to grade, we took it Week 4 didn't get it til Week 9, so that was a bit stressful. But the workload isn't too bad, there's a weekly quiz, a midterm, and final, and a few short paragraphs due each week in discussion, plus one group presentation.

I took this class is session A of summer 2021 as an asynchronous class, and she taught the animal behavior section. She uploaded narrated lectures that we listened to. Her office hours were EXTREMELY helpful and if there was a lull in the OH session she would give you more information to study!! We had weekly quizzes and when the animal behavior section ended we had a cumulative quiz, then the ecology section started which had the same. The ecology section was taught by Dr. Rachel Chock who also uploaded narrated powerpoints. She was also extremely helpful and also works with San Diego Zoo and Wildlife Alliance. Overall really great and if you can take this course with them I 100% recommend it!

The lecture component of this class wasn't bad. Online, we just had to show up to a lecture once a week (the other lecture was designated office hours). The exams are just three 1-2 page papers that can pretty much be on a topic of your choice, you just have to use peer reviewed sources. So the workload for the lecture part wasn't bad. The labs however, you dont really need to even show up (if you plan to get pictures from other people), but in the labs you're basically just taking pictures of specimens to memorize for the lab practical. The lab practicals (two of them) require multiple days of studying hard to get an A. This was the worst part of the class. You have to memorize a TON of random info for like 100 species. Definitely stressful, but it's doable. I would take this class again just because the weekly workload is so light, and the only bad part about the course are the 2 practicals.