He's a great professor and a very nice person. I would 100% recommend going to office hours, because you can do almost 90% of the work in office hours and he will help you out a ton, because he really cares that you excel in his class and understand the material.

It's definitely a good amount of work, and coming in with little cartography experience made it a little hard for me. But after the first couple of weeks, the work load eased up because I understood a lot of the stuff from previous weeks.

Professor Burkhart is probably one of the most engaging/helpful professors I've had all throughout UCLA (just graduated); part of the reason why is because he actually loves what he teaches (he's like a rare Pokemon), and he structures his class to where you actually start liking what he teaches as well.

That isn't to say that this class is an easy one. You definitely need to put at least 10-14 hours (depends on how badly you procrastinate) a week if you want to get a good grade. The assignments are worth way more than the final project, so make sure you don't put those off. In addition, He's also an extremely fair grader: we had an incident in the quarter where we had an undergrad TA that was grading quite harshly, and after a couple of us emailed him, he announced that he would now personally grade all our assignments and gave back points to those who deserved them. I wouldn't say he's an easy grader, but it's just because there are a lot of things he puts on the rubric and a lot of people do the projects last minute and forget to include all the specified guidelines.

I got an A despite doing most if not all my projects last minute, and it included turning in an response assignment late and thus getting a 0. But that's because I just made sure all my maps included the guidelines he specified, and I also did more than expected to create more engaging and creative presentations. So just make sure you do really well on the assignments, and the quizzes & map critiques won't really matter.

Burkhart truly wants his students to enjoy learning about his subjects, and it doesn't matter if you're not into GIS. I certainly wasn't, until I took this class, and I realized these things were actually pretty stinking cool and useful in real life.