Super easy GE, i finished the course by W8. Two 3-4 page papers but he drops the lowest and 5 quizzes during the quarter and also drops lowest so I only needed to do one paper and 4 quizzes. My TA only took attendance grades for 8 weeks so once I had enough I stopped going. Quizzes mainly based on lecture and not the readings. If there was a problem on the readings, I usually just hunted for the answer during the quiz instead of reading it before. Copy paste the lecture transcripts into a word doc to find some answers and have ppts up for quiz

This dude is the goat. Clearly passionate about anthropology/archaeology and it really shows.

Going into this class, I was kind of skeptical because archaeology just sounds like digging in dirt yada yada yada. I was gravely mistaken. Yes, you learn about digging stuff, but there's a big focus on human origins and how they came to be and all that, super interesting. Fair amount of reading but honestly not that bad. This class even counts towards the historical analysis GE category, and I 100% recommend this class over some typical boring and dense history class (history isn't my thing).

2 papers, 5 quizzes but he drops the lowest in each category so, like other reviewers here, I was done with this class by Week 7/8 which was great. Just copy his slides and write down what he says on a doc for quizzes as everything is open note, but if you pay attention to lectures you should be fine anyway.

Shoutout to Kristine Chua, best TA! Would always take some time to briefly summarize lecture material and was super kind and knowledgeable. Take her if you can if she TA's for this class (or any other class) again!

Prof. Li was the most accommodating and nice professor I've encountered during at-home learning. He pre-recorded his lectures and uploaded them onto CCLE, and you can view them right before a quiz and get an A. While this was nice, sometimes he would go over the slotted amount of time for lecture, as he often rambles about his personal experiences (though his work is super interesting to learn about!) He also tends to ramble a lot during office hours, so make sure someone keeps him on track or else he'll spend a majority of his OH answering 1 question. Overall, super cool professor and easy GE to get an A.

Class grade is split by:
Discussion section: 10%
Papers (best 1 of 2): 30%
Quizzes (best 4 of 5): 60%

EXTREMELY easy GE! If you need to fulfill your historical analysis/ social analysis GE, I would recommend you to take this class. Your grade is determined by your best four quizzes out of five and your best paper out of two. If you do well on the first four quizzes and first paper, you do not have to do any work for that class after since they will be dropped anyway. The quizzes consisted of ten questions each and the answers could be found in the lectures. Some questions were from the readings, but they were not super specific and they tended to be more general questions about the readings. The lectures were extremely dry and the professor definitely did go off on a tangent about unrelated topics for over an hour, so thank goodness they were prerecorded + 2x speed! We did have six mandatory discussion meetings with our TAs and during those discussion sections, our TAs helped us better understand and highlighted the key points of the professor’s lectures. They also attempted to engage us by discussing the readings, but majority of us did not do it prior to the discussion section haha. I felt super bad for the TAs since they would ask questions and it would go *crickets*. But yeaahhh, I personally did not learn much from this class, but it was super easy so (:

If you need a chill GE during COVID, I suggest taking this class. There was no midterm or final for the class, only 5 quizzes every other week (lowest score dropped) and 2 papers (lowest score dropped) Since the lowest score was dropped, you could essentially skip 1 if you got good enough scores on the previous tests/paper. I can't guarantee it will be like this in future quarters but even if it wasn't the tests weren't hard at all.