PH150. Dr. Detels has an extremely difficult final exam, which accounts to 66 or 100 percent of your grade (depending on your midterm score). The grade distribution above is from 2006 and now in 2014, he has increased the difficulty of the class by a tremendous amount. The class is mainly comprised of graduate students and his lectures are monotonic. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS- GPA KILLER.

PUBLIC HEALTH 150

HARD CLASS AND PROFESSOR! Do not take if you are an undergrad, because this class is composed of mainly grad students (medical, public health, etc). The professor is inaccessible and has a nasty attitude/temper! I was trolled by these previous posts.

Public Health 150

The good:
-exposure to many different aspects of PH.
-excellent guest lecturers (usually). 12 out of 18 lectures were given by people other than Dr. Detels.
-very chill day-to-day feeling of the class.
-only two 2hr lectures every week, which usually end 10 minutes early
-technically you are supposed to do the readings posted on the class website, but they're just a preview of what the lecture will be about. (http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/faculty/detels/ph150/schedule_2013.htm)

The bad:
-easy to get lulled into a sense of security.
-since you don't have any other assignments besides the midterm/final exams, they can sneak up on you.

The ugly:
-the exams. I ended up doing fine in the class, but that is b/c I switched from studying the lectures to learning how to answer Detels's exam questions. I disagreed with many of his answers, but luckily he recycles old questions! I suggest that you should definitely learn the correct answers to the midterm for the final, because he will put midterm questions that a lot of people missed on the final (easy points).

Take-away message: if you are very interested in Public Health, this is a great class to take. Don't forget that since we're at UCLA we have access to PH experts: Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Dr. Abdelmonem Afifi, Dr. John Froines, & Dr. Marjorie Kagawa-Singer to name a few. The curve is fairly generous, but don't expect any particular grade unless you can ace his multiple choice tests.

I took PH 150 with Detels. I went to lecture a couple of times, ended up with an A. Just study his lecture notes and you will be fine.

I took Public Health 150 with this professor. I only went to lectures a handful of times (lecture slides are posted), but really enjoyed them when I went. We had a lot of guest speakers who spoke about many interesting fields in public health. Detels is a knowledgeable, adorable man and it was a pleasure listening to him lecture. I was worried because I did not do that well on the midterm, but for this class if you do better on the final it counts for 100% of your grade. Luckily I ended up with an A. The tests are actually pretty easy, all multiple choice. Just a lot of information to remember, and some of the questions are pretty specific. Overall, I would highly recommend this class! Very easy commitment (only a midterm and final) and very interesting.

I took public health 150 (not epi 249, the system wouldn't let me submit this unless I assign any course in the list..but there was no pub hlt 150). If you are planning to take this class,
you will definately like it. Each lecture is held by an expert in each area of public health.
I really enjoyed the course, and if you are pre-health, you should definately wanna try it out.