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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Do yourself a favor and take a different ethics class. We had two individual papers and a group paper, which was a mess to coordinate and write. The tests were a mix of multiple choice (which was a joke, you can control+F the answers since it’s open book) and short essays. Other ethics classes just had the multiple choice. You also have to present on one of your essays in discussion. We had to stay the whole 3 hours every week in discussion even though there was nothing to do. The professor is extraordinarily dull and thinks he knows the perfect solution to every problem. This will be the most boring class you will take at UCLA and it won’t be close.

His lectures are like story time, which are pretty cool and engaging. Problem is that his slides, which are supposed to accompany his story, have no words on them. As a result, it is extremely difficult to study and understand what the main point of the lecture is and what you should be taking notes on. In addition, his lectures do not cover topics from the textbook, which the midterm and final are comprised of.

This class suuuuucked. Granted, it was during the COVID quarter. However, this was the most disorganized class I have ever been a part of. Browne stopped posting lectures week 2, and didn't tell us why until week 9, leaving us in total confusion for most of the quarter and forcing us to catch up in the two weeks before the final. Jon was a little better, but still not helpful whatsoever. You don't really have a choice in taking this class, though, so good luck. From what I've heard, 185 and 183 are equally bad.