Dr. McIver is a genuinely good teacher and nice person, she was always super energetic and positive during class. The class was primarily readings as homework then in class discussion questions and sometimes a writing workshop in class. The only thing to keep in mind is that you DONT get a grade until the end of the year but she is very fair and if you take your time and write quality essays and are respectful/participate in class you will do just fine. 100% would take again, Dr. McIver is phenomenal!

The class mainly consisted of 2 formal essays and one reflection essay for the course as a whole. As someone who took supposedly hard STEM classes, this class still took up more time than both of my other classes combined. The essay topics that were given to us were about place/architecture and how it affected people and movements. In my experience and several of my other classmates, this was an extremely difficult topic to write about and form a thesis around. She didn't provide student essays for us and a lot of the peer essays I read were really different because we interpreted the prompt differently. The timeline of the essays and when certain drafts were due also made it difficult to finish everything especially at the end. For example, during week 10, the last essay's working draft was due Tuesday morning while the final draft for all essays, including the last one, were all due Thursday morning. During week 10, me and other classmates stayed up extremely late on multiple days to get things done. I had multiple occurrences where I would interact with people on my floor that just woke up because of how long I stayed up. Also, in the beginning of the quarter, there were weeks where there were 20 pages of reading due on one day and then another 30 two days later. Although I like reading, the readings we were assigned didn't feel completely relevant to the essays we wrote and were written by people who assumed the readers already had a solid grasp on the topic they were writing about. This made it extremely hard to read all the pages since the authors would reference terms of events that aren't common knowledge. Heavy workload aside, I do feel like I learned a lot in the class and I think office hours are extremely helpful since the professor directly points out things that you need to fix in your essays. She doesn't give grades throughout the quarter but if you ask her what she would give you, she'll tell you two grades. One will be in respect to what she expects at that time in the quarter and the grade she'd give if they were the final products at the end of the quarter. I think this was helpful cause it put into perspective how much work still needed to be done. She's also really nice and got us food at the end of the quarter and when we had to watch a movie outside of class hours. Biggest piece of advice is to go to office hours before the final drafts are due since it's the easiest way to guarantee an A in the class.

Okay, I'm not going to lie. This class was the most demanding of my study list and all my other classes were STEM, so... take that however you will. This class also had a theme (which I was not the biggest fan of but I thought it was cool - also I think it changes each quarter, though I am not sure). The theme was extremely and oddly niche, and that is what the entire course was centered around from the reading to the writing. I thought the course as a whole was really interesting but it hardly felt like a Writing I class. It felt more like those weirdly specific upper-division classes. The grade is based off a final portfolio you provide at the end of the quarter, and I still don't know how I feel about it. I've had instructors in the past use this approach to grading and part of me hates it because a lot of it is arbitrary and part of me likes it because it's so holistic. Nevertheless I really enjoyed what I learned in this class, and it was really impactful. I think it's definitely the type of class where you get what you put into the class. If you work hard, it will be rewarding and interesting. Definitely not my favorite but I'm also not the biggest fan of writing in general so I encourage anyone reading to take my opinions with a grain of salt, but definitely consider all the facts of the class I was able to provide.

I would definitely recommend taking this class with Dr. McIver. When I took it this year, our grade was based off of our final portfolio that we turned in at the end of the quarter. The portfolio consisted of two essays that we wrote throughout the quarter and their drafts, along with a learning letter demonstrating our growth throughout the class and any other worksheets or notes we wanted to include. I enjoyed seeing the improvement of my writing skills through turning in multiple drafts of an essay and receiving feedback instead of turning in an essay once and getting the grade from there. Dr. McIver gives lots of resources for help and always encourages questions and to come to her many office hours. It was clear that she truly cares about her students and their success in this class. I hope to have her again!

Take this class. I am a stem major and I literally hate anything reading, writing, or analyzing. This class was extremely manageable and I highly recommend McIver. Lowkey felt like she was passive aggressive towards me at times but that might've just been me, but she's really helpful. The class was graded as follows: 80% portfolio and 20% in class participation, discussions, attendance, etc. The portfolio consisted of 2 major essays, a short one and an analytical one, drafts leading up to the final draft, and then peer reviews that you did for other people's essays. I really liked how approachable she was at times, and the workload was literally just one discussion post a week (no word count) and some reading that wasn't really required just maybe skim over it and you're fine. I would definitely take this class again, and also this class was just kinda interesting. It focused on protests throughout Los Angeles and their impact so it was (although I literally hate writing with a passion), kinda interesting. This class is definitely a light workload, and not a class you should constantly be worrying about. I definitely recommend this teacher and I would definitely take this class again.

Dr. McIver did an amazing job making my first quarter of college such an easy transition! She is beyond kind and despite this course being asynchronous, she scheduled one on one Zoom conferences to meet with us three times throughout the quarter: the first to introduce ourselves, the second to discuss our first essay, and the third to discuss our final essay. Overall, the material is easy to keep up with and to do at your own pace. The final grade was based on three separate papers, the first being an analytical essay on police brutality, the second was an argumentative essay on one way to potentially eliminate police brutality, and then a letter to her about your growth over the quarter! She was very understanding of late assignments and was always willing to give feedback on different drafts of the essays or to answer any questions you might have. Definitely recommend taking her class!

I have very mixed feelings about this class. To start with the good, it was pretty easy with only three real assignments, all papers, required throughout the quarter: An argumentative essay, a persuasive essay, and an informal "learning letter" where you outline your progress and growth through each of your essay drafts during the quarter. Taking the course, I feel like I did improve my writing chops. Dr. McIver is incredibly qualified to teach this class, and can provide amazing help and feedback for each of your essay drafts, especially when you ask her specific questions about different parts of your essay. When she has the time, she's dedicated to her students and schedules meetings with us and community office hours. She's extremely forgiving of tardiness as well.
On the other hand, the transition to remote learning was rough. Dr. McIver has a two year old, whose daycare was closed due to COVID. Possibly because of this (and probably a whole lot of other factors that I don't understand), you could tell it was tough for her to stay on top of this class. She didn't post a couple of minor assignments, so we never did them. She was a bit late with emails (though with scheduled zoom meetings her advice is great). She didn't post all of the lectures outlined in the syllabus past Week 5. I understand that she can't devote all of her energy to this class during these times, but there were periods where I wouldn't check in to English Comp 3D for a week or two at a time, and face no consequences. Still, I was able to get everything done, partially since this isn't meant to be too hard of a class, and I felt like I benefitted from the effort that I did put in.
Overall, if you're looking to become a better writer, I can't really recommend you take this class online, since it's just so easy to get lost and lose all motivation to do anything if you know that there's nothing really forcing you to stay on top of things. Judging from the times I was able to meet with Dr. McIver though, I'd guess that the in-person, non-COVID edition of this class is MUCH better, and I'd totally recommend choosing her as your Professor.

I have really mixed feeling about Dr. McIver. She is one of the most helpful teachers I've ever seen and her classes are engaging and interactive with various forms of group work. However, when I look back at the whole quarter, I found the lectures, reading materials, and writing assignments (which are graded) are somewhat unrelated because you'll only need to read 2 manifestos to finish the writing. Also, she does not give specific scores during the quarter and you'll never know how you are doing. (Even if she gives a rubric for every revised draft, it doesn't reflect what grade you would expect.) Moreover, I'm not sure whether the advice from her to revise my essays was actually helpful because, if you ask for feedback, it's always even more advice but not how your essays already are. I received "you're all good and you only need to ..." all the time, but after I fixed all the stuff she mentioned I finally got an A-.

I found Dr. McIver to be really engaging and caring about her students. The reading workload was very minimal: we didn't need to buy any books as our readings were all from pdfs she posted, and all she expected was that we printed, read, and annotated the assigned readings (though she only checked annotations once early on) so we could discuss them in class. For my quarter we had 9 total readings (most of which were short), usually one for every class. The other classes were either writing conferences during a time slot that we signed up for (30 minutes, 2 students at once) in place of class, writing workshops on days we submitted working drafts, or a library workshop to help us for our research paper.

The grading scheme is 80% portfolio and 20% participation. The participation should be easy as long as you skim the readings, and the portfolio consisted of three major essay assignments plus a learning letter. She assigns due dates throughout the quarter for a working draft and revised draft of each essay (usually about one week apart), and though the final drafts aren't due until the end of Week 10, it's best that you try to put your best effort in so you don't end up with three complete essays to write during Week 10. The essays were an explication (750 words; kind of rhetorical analysis), a research paper (1800 words), and a personal manifesto (no word limit; this will probably vary later since the topic of our class was manifestos, but probably won't be in future quarters). I found writing pretty time consuming since I'm a math major who hates English, but I feel that with a reasonable amount of effort anyone can get an A. For the learning letter, she expected us to explain how our writing progressed between each draft of each essay (e.g. quoting specific passages that improved) which would be how she approached grading our final portfolio.

She encourages students to come to office hours, which were pretty helpful; she helps students one-on-one and tries to guide you towards the ideas she wants you to express in your final draft. Also, since she's a teacher union leader, she sometimes has us read and discuss articles on learning and college education in general.