Love this dude. Definitely cares about not only teaching, but getting your grade up lol. Well this is the last quarter this class is being offered here at UCLA, but he's teaching LS 7B, I definitely recommend this guy. Kinda take a good amount of work and memorizing, but overall thought it was very worthwhile. A lot of people say he's slightly harder than Kane, but IMO it sounds like amongst all UCLA Life Science Professors, Kane and Ellingson are the best.

This is actually for LS 7B, but the classes are essentially the same. Ryan’s a cool guy! And this class is pretty easy, so no complaints on my part about taking him. In the beginning, things are super dry with genetics. You can obviously tell that Ryan has no passion or idea what he’s talking about. It was pretty blah to be honest. But once we moved on to evolution, things got a lot better. We watched cool nature videos, Ryan talked about his gobbies, and everyone was happy. However, my favorite part was the last two weeks or so when we talked about conservation. Ryan was great at telling us how we destroy the earth! But he did it with such passion and energy that it was fun to listen to him, even if it was a bit sad to do so. Overall, if you can get past the drabness of genetics, then he’s actually a pretty fun professor to learn from. Sure, he can make mistakes here and there, but he knows his stuff for the most part. As for grading, it’s very standard and very easy. The whole Launchpad, clickers, lab stuff. Labs were actually pretty fun and actually good extensions of what we learned in lecture. I didn’t find them completely useless like I did LS 7A discussions. As for midterms, no problem at all. Piece of cake. Are there some tricky questions? Yeah, but that’s just the life science curriculum here. It’s not really that much of having the facts down, but being able to apply them, without having to know a lot of specifics, which is great. Appropriate level of challenge for a life science class i.e. little to none. Final was good too. There were even some questions that he took exactly from the practice exam questions on Launchpad.

Overall, A+ class. Easy, very light to moderate workload, and pretty good instruction.

This is a review for LS7B. If you have a chance to take LS7B with Ellingson, definitely do it! I think this may be the first major class I've gotten an A+ in as a bio major. The class is fun, completely doable, and a good experience overall. Just make sure to study the clicker questions a lot for the exams, as well as the practice questions on Launchpad.

I took him for LS7B. Would definitely recommend taking him. Great guy, and a clear professor.

I heard a decent amount of people complaining about the difficulty of the midterms, but honestly they weren't bad at all. If you study Launchpad, pay attention in class, and review the clicker questions you're gonna do fine. You just need to actually understand different processes and not simply memorize definitions. The questions on the exams are almost all application based. Again, they're very doable if you give yourself enough time to study and understand the material thoroughly

Absolutely one of my favorite teachers at UCLA. I love Evolution and he made me love it even more. He is an engaging and hilarious lecturer. I went to his office a couple times and we talked for over an hour about class material and nonclass material. Wonderful guy
If you are even considering taking Ellingson, Do. It.