If I had to describe this class in 1 word it would be: disorganized.

Professor Johnson took forever to get things going at the start of the quarter. He was deviating from the syllabus which said that participation, weekly homework, weekly quizzes, and weekly exams were going to be given. He ended up only doing weekly homework and exams. He wasn't great at communicating this so none of us knew whether the quizzes were going to happen or not until like week 3.

I was excited for this class but I didn't really learn anything. The content wasn't really about critical reasoning either. It felt more like a sentence and writing structure analysis class where you analyze whether certain phrases exist and how they related to other phrases. I don't think this is the professor's fault. The entire class should be restructured.

I didn't go to a single lecture after week 1 because I felt that reading the textbook was more helpful although it wasn't very interesting. Professor Johnson doesn't upload lectures until like 2 weeks afterwards either which was frustrating. Oftentimes the recordings were like 3 hours long too because he just forgot to stop recording.

I believe the weekly homework is submission based because we didn't get any feedback/grades. The weekly Gradescope exams were awful though. I got docked off points for the smallest reasons. It felt like he just had a bone to pick and wanted to dock off points to make it seem like the students don't know anything. The exams are short (30 minutes). They are out of 3 points so losing 1 point is literally losing 33%.

I don't know how I ended up with an A. There were 8 Gradescope exams and I averaged 0.4/3. Literally IDK how that means I got an A but I'll take it.

I am writing this years later but from what I remember this class really wasn't as bad as the other people said in their reviews. I found the professor pretty funny and it was a super chill class (despite being an 8am and me being nearly asleep, I somehow got an A+). Honestly ridiculously easy from what I remember and as close to no workload as you can get. I will say however . . . I didn't really learn anything . . . I don't remember a single thing from this class.

The first day of class, Professor Mark Johnson reminisced on how he didn't excuse someone from a quiz whose dog died and made them come to class and show him their dead dog as proof. I wish I was making this up. He rambled for an hour about how hard the class is and how experienced he is and speaks very condescendingly. He trash-talked "all the other books" other than the one he teaches saying they sucked which seems very narrow-minded. All this ruined his credibility for me and I am dropping the class but just wanted to warn others.

I would not retake this class because I did not feel like Prof. Johnson respected his students or our time. Nearly every lecture he went well over the designated lecture time and I would always worry that by leaving class to go to my next class I would be missing important material. He is extremely strict on his grading for the quizzes which is the bulk of the grade however I am writing this review in week 8 and he has not graded a single one of our weekly homeworks so we have no way to assess our learning or get questions answered prior to the weekly quizzes that will ultimately determine our grade. He speaks in a rather condescending tone to his students which creates a hostile environment for asking questions.