Mel herself might be a nice person, but she is extremely unorganized for teaching. She didn't post assignments/lectures on time and suddenly asked students to do those works after the end of the course.

While I liked this class overall, like many of the other reviews say, Mel is an extremely disorganized teacher. Her notes are posted online, but are quite unreadable. This class is also extremely scattered with Mel jumping around between many topics. This was one of the things that disappointed me about the class, with everything seeming to just be glossed over, making the class feel like a watered-down econ class that only gives you a surface level understanding of topics. It is also extremely focussed on microeconomics with macroeconomics only coming up in the last week of class.

Mel does have an extremely lenient grading scale with anything over 85% being an A. She is also very generous with partial credit on exams. This is definitely not a difficult class and will give you an intro to economics if you have never taken it, but is a bit disappointing in the lack of depth in the topics taught.

We simply have no choice but to stan Mel. She truly cares about your learning, and it shows, even if she can be disorganized. This class used to be much harder, as evidenced by the practice midterms/finals she releases from previous years. She's restructured it to focus on key topics that might some day be useful/relevant to your personal finances. You get a cheatsheet for exams and there's only a few homeworks throughout the quarter. The group project at the end is simple enough and boosts your grade with free points as long as you do it properly. One of my fave professors!

This class is quite an enigma to me. On the one hand, Mel is a very engaging and intelligent lecturer who clearly wants to teach better and help students understand the material. On the other hand, she struggles with this vision, rushing through concepts and not explaining them well at a pace that students like me (who don't have much of a background in economics) can understand. What made this even more difficult is the fact that those in-class quizzes other people mention in prior reviews are no longer optional; they are now part of your participation grade. So when she asks these questions right after explaining a concept, if you don't understand all of it well enough on the spot, it'll be pretty hard to get it right. The way she organizes the quizzes is kind of problematic too: she uses the UCLA online poll site, which no one could seem to log into 30% of the time. I just feel like there's a much better way to implement all this.

On the one hand, Mel is a very generous grader, with an average of 80 on all assignments being curved up to an A- (85% or above = A, 80 or above = A-, 75 or above = B+, etc.). I'm still quite confused how I got away with the grade I did, given my abysmal midterm score. On the other hand, I still felt like I was falling behind all quarter because the homeworks, practice quizzes, and some exam questions were very convoluted and confusing (sometimes completely wrong), and Mel seemed disinterested in helping resolve this. She also said she would answer questions on Piazza but then practically disappeared for days on end, which was a bit frustrating around midterm and final exams.

I can't really fault Mel for trying harder at making the course better, and I can't really complain about the generous grading either. But I feel like the concepts are being taught too fast and not being explained well enough. There are just so many wrinkles that should've been ironed out years ago.

Probably one of the most engaging lecturers I've had at UCLA.The trick to this class is to show up to every lecture and pay as close attention as possible! Mel often will explicitly state what material she's putting on the midterm and final, so just by showing up to class and listening to lecture you will be guaranteed at least 3/4 questions. We received extra credit each week by responding to a discussion forum and answering a form of clicker questions in class (no clicker required). Homeworks were pretty easy; you could work in a group on them. The best way to study for the tests are to do the practice problems in the book, and to read the textbook before class. Each lesson builds on the last one, so make sure you're staying on top of the material!

Mel is not very organized. It took until Week 2 of Spring Quarter to receive our grade for Winter Quarter, even though ALL number scores were inputted for over a week.
The class is not very good. The only useful thing you learn is compounding interest and how to think about if you should take out a mortgage or invest elsewhere, or pay it off early.
The class is pretty boring, she goes off on weird tangents, isn't engaging, or much.
If you're taking this for a tech breadth, I recommend MGMT 108 and MGMT 160 over this class, you learn much more in those.

I think she is the most disorganized professor I have had; 1 week into spring quarter and still no grade. The notes she provided were garbage and illegible. She means well but for some reason she cannot present clear and coherent concepts very well, often giving weak examples or just a fuzzy explanation. I think there are more capable prof's out there, sorry Mel.

Mel isn't a terrible professor but isn't a particularly good one either. She's certainly friendly and seems approachable, but her lectures were generally disorganized and hard to follow. I only went because she gives extra credit for doing her online polls during lecture. Most of what I actually learned (and studied for the final) was from slides made by my TA. Mel's own notes during lecture are largely indecipherable.

Homeworks tend to be short and not too hard, but sometimes they aren't assigned until the Friday before (and they're due on Sunday) so be on the lookout. I've had friends who missed homework assignments because they didn't know about them. Tests aren't too bad as long as you know the material and do practice problems. The final is harder just by virtue of the topics covered being harder, but is still very doable.

Extra credit is definitely worth doing - a bit tedious but worth it for the grade boost.

Overall, Mel is pretty mediocre lecturer but the class is fairly easy so its worth taking.

It's true that Mel is not a great lecturer. However, the material is not super hard to learn by yourself, so lectures are optional. Also, I would say that the pace of her class is pretty slow, so she'll most likely cram a lot of the material at the end to make sure that she covered those last topics.

Honestly, I think a lot of people come to this class with the expectation that it will be a free A with minimal work. That is absolutely not true. It is much less work relative to other engineering classes (i.e. computer science classes), but you still have to spend some time studying the material since it will be most likely new to most engineering majors who are taking this class. It's not stuff that you can figure on the fly. That being said, I would say to start studying for the tests two days before, reading the slides (shout-out to Alex Wong, whose slides are really good), and understanding how to do all the practice problems. Other than that, this class should provide a nice breather from your more technically demanding upper divs.

Horrible lecturer... long tangents and then crams material