I ended up getting an A, however I truly regret taking this class. The content of this class is abstract and all over the place. Each lecture consists of an introduction to a superhero, and then is followed by weird scientific ideas that somehow relate to the superhero. For example, we learned about Spiderman and the science behind spider webs??? Overall, the content was way too abstract for me to wrap my head around. Additionally, his midterm was super long and the TAs were so nit-picky on grading. In order to get a high grade, I suggest you verbatim spit out his lecture slides onto the exam. The class also consisted of a lot of busy work such as 2 page single spaced reflections, peer reviews, responses to peer reviews... In addition to the final exam, we also had a final project which could either be done individually in the form of an 8-10 page paper or with a group in the form of a 30-45 min podcast. If you're not into superheroes and are looking to take an easy EEB upper div, look further.

I took this class because I had heard great things about it. The counselor even specifically told me that so many students tell her they loved the class and that I was lucky that I was able to get into the class. These comments must have been from the first time this course was taught (I think Winter 2019), which would make Winter 2020 the second time this class was taught. Things must have drastically changed because I honestly regret taking this class. I was not super into or knowledgeable about superheroes. However, I did find a lot of the material discussed in class to be interesting and knowledge of specific superheroes isn't necessary to do well in the class. My issue comes from the extreme lack of organization, direction and clarity from both the professors and the TAs. The professor read word for word from his slides (some of which contained a full paragraph of 7-8 sentences of text). The slides were at times so dense and convoluted with text that it made learning difficult. The organization of topics and ideas within the presentation was often unclear. As the other review mentioned, a big part of doing well on the tests is pure and in depth memorization of every single detail from the slides. The discussions for this class were useless and often involved time to work on the final project (paper or podcast) and ask the TA questions. First off, there was often minimal instruction given on what they were looking for on some of the writing assignments (research notebook, peer review, outline, review response, etc.). With minimal instruction, we would find that many points were taken off from our assignment for not including certain things or not making it long enough or not in enough depth. It doesn't really make sense to take off so many points for things that we did not know we needed to do to get full credit on the assignments. Overall, I found discussion to be a complete waste of time and the TA was no help. The TA often answered our questions with a sarcastic question which offered no help. The professor was extremely unorganized in uploading assignments and submission links and sometimes we would find out we had an assignment the week it was due. Overall, I would advise that you think really hard about if you really are interested enough in the topic to suffer through this class. It is definitely not an easy class to fulfill an upper division requirement.

This class could not have been more disorganized. The syllabus was not followed and lectures were constantly getting switched around. The grading was completely arbitrary. The biggest issue is that HE WILL NOT RETURN YOUR EMAILS!!! I have never been more frustrated with a professor. He does not care about his students whatsoever. I tried signing up for office hours as well, and none were ever available. Least favorite upper div class I have taken and I would not recommend it.

A class on superheroes... sounds fun, right?

Wrong, this class sucks. Don't be fooled by the exciting title. Take something else, maybe something with a more boring title but you will learn and succeed in. Superheroes is only like 10% of the class, the other 90% is random, disjointed, confusing topics in biology that somehow relate back to some superheroes. You'll be memorizing the molecular structure of spiderwebs, trying to cram into your mind different muscular disorders, and repeat verbatim sociological theories behind artificial intelligence, in the worst way possible.

I agree with the other reviewers so far. There is very little guidance in this class - to succeed on the midterms, you are expected to know every Powerpoint word-for-word. You will get points taken off of every assignment for no reason, you're asked to do things like "write a 1 page reflection" with no further instruction, you write a good 1 page reflection, and you get a solid B because... because... I don't know actually, our grades were never explained, but I consistently got B's on homework for no real reason, as well as my friends in the class, which dragged down our grades. This silly little biology elective was actually one of the worst grades I ever got at UCLA (I have a 3.5+ GPA as a bio major which I think is pretty decent.)

I really wanted to enjoy this class, Professor Campbell-Staton seems like a good guy and he seems like he has an interesting podcast, but this class was not it. I think if he put some time into refining it and figuring out exactly what direction he wants to take in the class, it could be really exciting, but for now, I'm going to have to recommend you don't take it, despite the catchy name.

Professor, if you're reading this, some considerations:
-either give clearer instructions on homework assignments (ex: "Cite at least 3 sources in your reflection and please use vocabulary taught in lecture") or stop giving everyone a B when you give vague half-baked assignments like "Write a 1 page reflection"
-no one likes "memorize all lectures top to bottom" exams, try doing something like make exams focus on overarching concepts rather than one specific fact on one specific PowerPoint slide, or perhaps give a blank study guide with 50+ key terms/facts you'd like us to focus on
-don't make an extensive final project (podcast/10 page essay) due in the same week of our final exam, do something like one during Week 9 and one during Week 10 or Finals week

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this class. I liked this professor and I felt like he worked hard to give us an interesting glimpse at many topics in EEB including lectures on dinosaurs, death, genetic engineering, AI, etc. I guess I'm not mad that I know exactly how spiderwebs are made. My gripe with this class is its poor execution.

Discussion felt entirely useless, it was mostly dedicated to working on your final group project – either an 8-10 page single-spaced research paper or a 30-minute podcast. My group worked for weeks on our project, had it reviewed several times over, and I still don't think we did all that well. All of the little assignments leading up to the project were harshly graded and never explained. I felt like it didn't matter the time I put into the assignment, I'd try really hard on an assignment, get a C, proceed to submit something lazier and get a solid B.

The discussion after the midterm was basically people arguing with the TA over points, even though he claimed to have graded it "extremely generously." He strongly discouraged students from pressing any further, threatening that Dr. Campbell-Staton would "only grade it harsher." Had I studied any harder wouldn't have mattered; I still would've gotten tripped up on questions like "how would you use Captain America's vita rays to inject some engineered gene to confer some superpower?" You'd think that question had lots of room for interpretation, but there were only 2 right answers. Questions were very abstract and demanded pure memorization of slides, which proved to be insanely difficult and time-consuming when studying ~5-6 disjointed topics. The same was true for quizzes.

Overall, cool concept for a class but definitely needs refining and reevaluation to make it less frustrating. Exams could be less about straight memorization and discussion could be made clearer.