Easy science GE with a lab. Attendance in lecture is not mandatory or necessary to do well in the class. All slides are posted on CCLE and exams are open note. Labs are very straightforward and usually open note. Highly recommend taking this class with Treu.

Professor Treu is brilliant! It was genuinely such an honor to be able to be taught by such a well-spoken and interesting professor. I never felt afraid to ask a question if something was unclear and he genuinely made an effort to ensure that he was making sense. My TA (Philip) was equally as helpful and the labs were not too difficult as long as you understood the lectures too. The tests are definitely not a walk in the park, but reading the Kudu textbook and making sure you pay attention during lecture helps. There were also some opportunities to raise your grade because the tests weren’t the only thing going into the gradebook. As for COVID adjustments, the lectures occurred on Zoom but attendance was not mandatory and the lectures were recorded and posted. I loved this class and recommend it highly to anyone willing to put in the work!

For someone who didn't really attend the lectures, this class was pretty easy to get through. The professor is really sweet but his lectures are kinda boring and hard to get through as someone who isn't interested in astronomy. I actually really enjoyed the labs though, my TA was Philip and he was really helpful. Just make sure you join a breakout room with people who talk and help each other out. I got low Bs on the two midterms and an A on the final. The extra credit helps a lot though.

The final was way harder than the rest of the class. Dropped me from an A+ to an A-, and I did better than the class average. No curve at all. The class overall was fine, but keep an eye out for the final.

This is my second class with Professor Treu because I thoroughly enjoyed taking ASTR 3 with him. I did well in the class, but I know that the midterm&final were not the easiest and that others struggled with those. My advice for future students would be to attend every lecture and TAKE NOTES + try not to rely on the fact that they are recorded and then skip because it is super easy to get behind. Also be sure to practice the math that is presented in the discussions. If you do that you will be fine.

I took this as a GE as a north campus major. I wouldn't really recommend it and there are lots of other GEs out there. This class involves lots of math and there's a lab every week.

I took this class during the online winter quarter and as a GE, so that might affect my review. I'm also bad at math

The concepts we learned were cool and the lectures/homework made them easy to understand.
overall I felt like this class was disorganized (not a big deal though because most people take it as a GE). The professor is also really nice, willing to answer questions, and explains the concepts well. If you are confused on topics there is a lot of resources online, within the homework, within the lectures, etc.
If you're better at math than me you'll do fine.

Overall though the class felt very unorganized. The class included 1) lectures 2) labs and 3) homework assignments. The lectures were not mandatory and the slides were available on Bruin Learn. Labs included a pre-lab and lab assignments, both were graded, but you didn't have to do all of them. My TA for the Labs was great but they often felt like busy work and didn't really expand or connect to the concepts in lectures in super meaningful ways. The homework was probably my least favorite part though - it's one of those homework platforms where you have to buy the textbook in order to access the homework, which is frustrating and makes it more inaccessible for some people. The homework questions were found on Quizlet which was handy but the videos were just crash course videos, so it was annoying to have to pay just to access the readings/videos which I could have found elsewhere. The midterms (there are two) /final are HARD and I did way better on the class assignments than the tests. Normally I don't mind if a class doesn't provide a study guide, since no one is really entitled to having one BUT I literally had no idea what to focus on because there was so much material and it felt disorganized. Practice midterms/final were given so we could "see what the exam would look like" but everything was multiple choice so that didn't really matter anyway. It would have been helpful if I had a more concrete idea of what to study, especially with the equations (write down ALL THE EQUATIONS!)

Here's why you can take it:

1. Not painfully hard.
2. Manageable workload.
3. Not a strict class.

Here's why you can take it, but you'll not like it:

1. $50 MANDATORY (BUT EXTREMELY POOR) TEXTBOOK - Kudu, the website for us to do all the homework and participation questions, is the most unorganized online textbook ever (you can easily find free textbooks 10x better than this) and it's very frustrating to use (no chapters, no concept highlights, no equations).

2. SLOW LECTURES WITH NO RECORDINGS - Professor Treu is a nice person, but don't expect too much from his lectures. He's often lecturing aimlessly with no real information given, while the slides are always not helpful at all and the topics are all over the place.

3. UNPLEASANT VIBE - For a class covering fantastic topics, this one is not inspiring at all: ambiguous, poorly structured, and often just boring. Astronomy should be some of the most fantastic topics to ever be made into a class, but this one skipped most - if not all - of its charm.

This class was not the worse despite how little effort I put into the course. Treu was a sweet guy and you can tell he is passionate about the topics, but the lectures weren't mandatory and sort of hard to follow along. You don't really need to attend lectures to do well in the course. The main part of the class that determines your grade is the exams (2 midterms, 1 cumulative final). The two midterms contained 32 multiple choice questions and the final had 40 questions. It was open-note but there are a good amount of application questions and to be honest, I can see why he made it open note because the exams were still a little bit confusing and difficult. There was some math involved but it wasn't the worst since he provided us some examples in the practice exams he provides, but some of the concept questions were difficult to answer. I will say that the first midterm average was like 78%, while most people did a lot better on midterm 2 and the final. However, there is not a lot of structure and resources in the course, and I typically felt pretty unprepared each exams because the practice questions were very dry and minimal. Besides that, he offered 1.5% extra credit this quarter for attending a live stream and writing what we learned, which was pretty nice. The grading distribution you see does reflect this course accurately as Prof Treu wants everybody to succeed and do well in the course! He is super accommodating if reach out to him and typically responds very fast. Overall, Astro 3 is highly dependent on your professor and I HIGHLY recommend taking it with Treu (typically teaches winter I think) to fulfill the science + lab GE requirement (5 units)! Definitely not 100% easy, but I would say easy/medium difficulty.

Although Professor Treu is extremely passionate about Astronomy, the way he teaches the class is not exactly the easiest to understand. I spent a majority of the quarter relying on what we discussed in Lab and Quizlet to pull me through the tests. Speaking of the tests, I felt as though a lot of the tests were not on things we directly covered in class or in the assigned readings attached to the homework. If you are thinking of taking this professor know that he is funny and passionate but a majority of the learning you do will be on your own and not in the lecture. The one big bonus was that lectures weren't required, they were recorded and the notes were posted and honestly, sometimes the information is easier to understand that way.