It's a shame SEAS makes this useless class as required. Waste of precious time of people should be considered unethical.

Why is this class mandatory for engineering majors? This class needs to get rid of the essay portion or the discussion section because we learned the material in English and the ethics "ideas" are useless. The lecture material and the midterm and exams are more than enough for a class like this. All of my friends and I practically BS the two essays (basically submitted our first draft) and we all got perfect scores and so did a lot of others. If the essays were technical reports and not another English essay then it might be something useful for our careers. Many other top engineering schools don't even have an "ethics" class but have a technical writing course. What a waste of my time.

Take his 183ew summer, really useless full of crap time consuming class. At beginning more than 100 students sitting, after first week 30 students there, then 15. There two exam 2 paper and a team paper. TA supposed to help write those papers, but they fooled around, I took three TA, all crap. The last one I think her name magen or something. The whole section read paper, then each of you express comments, done. She just observed there do nothing. I want my money back! I don’t understand UCLA recurring him as teacher and offer such course as must finish engineering course

As a heads up, this class is taught by both Don and another person, Jon J Fong. This review will be about Don’s part of this class. Also, I took this class during the coronavirus pandemic, and poor Don was sick for about half of the quarter.

His first 3 lectures weren't very good. He talked slowly in a monotone, and the powerpoint audio could not be sped up. Then, there was radio silence. We were given vague instructions of "Reach chapter 3 and 1 chapter per week." We had no idea we were supposed to read the ENTIRE book.

That said, he did listen, and he changed the presentations to audio format which could be sped up.

The ethics portion of the class seemed half-baked. Basically, the method of learning actual ethics was through reading the book. I literally had no clue what to read, by the way. Then EIGHT DAYS BEFORE THE FINAL, he drops THREE lectures and the WHOLE textbook as a portion of a final. Basically, we had a week to teach ourselves a quarter worth of materials for the final. That said, he let us take the final open everything, and the final itself was straightforward. Just abuse the Ctrl+F key, and you should be good. The final had an average in the upper 80s/90s, and was normalized in our favor (the top grade was set to 100%).

Next, the essays had pretty unclear instructions to say the least. Even worse, it was up to the TAs to guide you through the essays. So basically the TAs teach you to write, and they determine what you have to hand in.

The essays took forever to write, and had an overly tight deadline. For the second essay, we had to write a rough draft in just one week.

Don't get me wrong: the lectures were boring and the subject probably not super interesting to most people. But when compared to the reviews of the other ethics/writing engineering courses, this seems much, much less painful. The grade was just midterm/final and two papers. The papers were graded pretty generously, and had a lot of time to write them. The tests were incredibly easy because the questions weren't adjusted for the COVID open-book policy, so without ever watching any of the lectures, you could get a decent score just by CTRL-F-ing the textbook or just googling. All-in-all, one of the easiest and lightest courses of the quarter. I advise you take it: the alternates suck worse.

THERE ARE IN-CLASS QUIZZES NOW. AT 8 AM. NO MAKE UPS. One of the worst courses and professor I have taken at UCLA, as a senior with only one quarter left. Professor Browne is uncommunicative and puts little effort into running the class. First off, he has no syllabus for the class on BruinLearn, so students are left with little to no expectations for the class and nothing to refer back to. His main problem is that he lies to students constantly and never responds to emails. He claims over and over again to email him if you have any problems and he will get back to you, yet despite my many emails to him this quarter, he has never responded to a single one. My section had problems with a missing TA our first section and he said he would email us that night and later in the week with information on what was happening, yet he never emailed us once about it, and the only way I knew what was happening with our section was by having to talk to him in person after class. He has the most boring and bare lecture slides, and his voice is quiet yet he doesn't use a microphone so you can't even hear it. Try not to fall asleep in class challenge, impossible. For this being a class about ethics, he only discussed case studies and almost every time blamed it on the management not the engineers. In a class that's supposed to teach ethics to engineers it feels wrong to just always say its never the engineer at fault and always the management. One time in the quarter, he switched to zoom due to the storms, but posted the wrong zoom link so no students could join the lecture and never addressed the problem. He also promised to post the recording for that lecture and never did. And of course, since he never responded to any emails, I couldn't contact him about the course problems. Another problem with the course this year were the in class quizzes. This was the first quarter with in class quizzes and they went terribly. He said there would be 10 quizzes, and you literally have to bring paper every class for them, he is too lazy to even print them out. By week 7 there had only been 3 quizzes so far, so he basically lied about the number of quizzes and every time you came to class without a quiz you felt like you just wasted your time. Overall the class needs major improvements and the professor needs to put in more effort. Don't know why this class is ever a requirement as I likely lost braincells taking this class.

In ALL case studies, it's always the management's fault and yet this class is "Engineering Ethics". Ridiculous.

Let's be honest. No one likes this class. It is, however, one of the two classes that satisfy the ethics requirement for engineers--and from what I heard from friends in 183, this class (185) is much better.
I took this class in Fall 2016, which was the first time that Don co-taught with Jon Fong, a guest lecturer of sorts who worked in industry for 30 years. While Don gives half the lectures and talks about ethical case studies (which are an absolute snooze-fest), Jon gives business-type lectures which help immensely with the group project. The group project (5-6 people per group) is a quarter-long project which essentially has you design a consumer product that fulfills an unmet customer need, and go through all the technicalities of it as if you were part of a start-up (feasibility, detailed specs, financials, risks, etc). Although this group project is a pain in the arse because Don and Jon give little to no direction on how to do it or even what they want, by the end of the quarter, I felt that I had learned something from it. That's the difference between 183 and 185; 183 is ALL ethics stuff, while 185 is half ethics and half business for engineers. Jon and Don are still working on their partnership and I think by next quarter or the quarter after, it has the potential to be a pretty neat class (well, Jon's business lectures at least). For now, it's an absolute disaster, with no concrete deadlines, no guidance as to what exactly they want, assignments getting submitted into the black hole of CCLE without ever getting a grade or feedback, and other annoying events.
One important point: TAKE NOTES. Our final was a (surprise) open note final, and I had stopped taking notes early in the quarter, so I regretted that. Don posts most of his lecture slides but there are hardly any words on them, so write down what he says.

TL;DR: frustrating class, and Don is an extremely boring lecturer, but it's better than the 183 alternative and you might actually learn something about business.

Since ethics is required, this is far better than 183, but it's a lot more time consuming than it should be. The majority of the class is a group project where you basically have an invention idea and have to go through the entire process of proof of concept, financial summary, possible areas of failure, and then pitch it to the professors as if you are asking them for kickstarter money. It doesn't have that much to do with ethics to be honest. But, the project is at least moderately interesting. The discussion sections are way too long and they're required. Lectures aren't required but they have random quizzes so you have to show up most of the time. Anyway it's a terrible class and get ready for more work than you probably expect, especially if you don't have the best group. It isn't hard, it's just time consuming

Mostly going to echo the remarks of previous quarter's reviews to illustrate that not much has changed in terms of this course improving.

Don does half the lectures on ethical case studies which are mildly interesting but can often be tough to stay awake through (doesn't help that it's (I think always) 8am). The contents of these lectures don't show up for more than 10% of the exams so I pretty much stopped going to them after the midterm.

On that note, the exams are a bit of a joke... they consist of 40% content from Jon's lectures, 10% content from Don's lectures, and 40% content from the textbook (which is barely, if at all) covered in class. All I needed to do to pass the exams was make a cheatsheet with definitions of the book chapters and notes from Jon's lectures.

As for Jon's lectures, they're highly relevant to the group project that runs throughout the course and are posted online so you can probably get away with not going to those lectures either. The group project itself seems like it has improved a bit from previous quarters but is still generally a hot mess that is confusing and redundant in terms of what needs to be included in the submission and ends in having to print over 100 pages at the end (colossal waste of paper, ink, and money).

TL;DR Don's ethical case study lectures are mildly interesting, exams are super easy, Jon's lectures + group project are cool but still quite disorganized.