Professor Cooney is an amazing professor! She is engaging, interesting, insightful, and adds humor and tidbits from her personal life into all her lectures. Although she teaches complex history filled with confusing names and dates and places, Professor Cooney is an expert Egyptologist, which is truly evident in her lectures. The final grades composed of one midterm, one final exam, and a final minimum twelve page research paper. For the two exams, Cooney provides all possible questions beforehand, and two are chosen for each exam. She says these are essay questions, but they are actually more along the lines of long answers or extended response. The final paper sounds daunting, but if you start early enough and find a well-researched and interesting topic, it is not difficult to make the twelve page minimum. Additionally, she includes readings from a few novels and some online articles, but these are not necessary to read if your TA does not discuss them in section. Overall this was a great GE/ diversity requirement class that was interesting and not ~too~ work intensive!

This class seemed like an interesting historical analysis GE. HOWEVER, the structure of the lectures were highly unorganized, the material was all over the place and the syllabus was rarely followed. Class time is mostly spent with the professor telling us anecdotes about her own personal life and Egypt. The overall material was interesting but there was never enough time taken for any part of the class to gain a full understanding. The final project itself was extremely time consuming and required a lot of extra research, labor , TA help and time. I do NOT recommend this class unless it is for a major requirement and you are passionate about teaching yourself the materials.

Professor Cooney focuses mainly on Egypt, Greece, and Rome. We barely spent a week on India and skipped China altogether. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman lectures would be the main ones to focus on studying, especially for the final. While I enjoyed Professor Cooney, her lectures were all over the place and the structure of the class often unorganized. You really do not need any of the assigned textbooks to succeed in the class; the PDFs online are more than enough reading.

This is a really interesting class, but your grade and how you learn the information 100% is all on your TA. Professor Cooney gives really engaging, interesting lectures, but she is completely disconnected from all of the grading of the assignments. So basically, your grade rides on whether or not you have a good TA. If you take this class, make sure you don't take it with Tao Shi as your TA. He is extremely unclear, unhelpful, and can't articulate the concepts we were taught in class. He is completely disconnected from class material, and even when people in discussion would ask really clear questions he couldn't provide a concise response. That being said, the workload for this class really isn't bad. There's one written assignment due every two weeks and the final project is either a 12 page paper or a 10 minute podcast. There's also a written final but Professor Cooney gives you a list of all the possible questions before hand and then just picks two to put on the final. Highly recommend if you can get a good TA and are a strong writer, if not, I would try to avoid this class.

Selling all the required books for this class. Text me **********

Profesor Cooney is one of the most engaging lecturers and the course content is so interesting!! However I bought all the books and didn’t crack open a single one all quarter long. I really thought it would come back to bite me and it totally didn’t. Going to lectures and engaging in discussions are the best way to prepare. Cooney got rid of the midterm and gave the option to do a 10 minute paper or a 10 minute podcast. I picked the podcast which turned out to essentially be an entire paper plus recording/sound editing/mixing and while it was rewarding it was very time consuming. Stick to the paper if you just want to be in and out.

This class gave me anxiety. Your grade is completely dependent on your TA. My TA, Vera, was nice, but disorganized and took forever to respond to emails. She also incorrectly reported our grades as all F's and I'm still trying to get the Dean's honor list notation on my transcript from this quarter. Research paper was kinda hard. Discussion boards are a must.

Grading is handled by the T.A.s and for the reason that TAs often change, my review is mostly for Professor Cooney. Her lectures were interesting, although she unnecessarily injects her own political views into the discussion. This is a bit hypocritical, for when students asked about whether or not ancient Egyptians were 'black' or darker toned skin, she told us to stop "obsessing" about these types of issues and projecting our own ideas of 21st century race relations onto the ancient past. True, but she should also do the same.
What really disappointed me about Cooney was our after-class discussion. I approached her with questions about other Egyptologist's, like John Anthony West. She was very closed minded about new findings & research. She even told me to rely on wikipedia rather than on books I mentioned regarding these topics. When I told her wikipedia is unreliable for anything other then hard facts/general reference, due to biased/anonymous editing, she scoffed at me. I thought professors, esp. those at UCLA, would have better suggestions for research than wikipedia? What we had discussed must have angered her, because over the weekend, she had added a slide to the following class lecture. I know she added it because it had nothing to do with the day's subject, instead it had a photo regarding a topic I had mentioned to her. Specifically, it was a picture of a book, alongside a picture of a UFO. I could not believe how petty this was! The book doesnt mention anything about aliens, it was about dating the pyramids as older then 2000BCE, and written by a geologist. If she took the time to skim through its contents she would have known this. But instead, she tried to humiliate me in front of the class by associating new research to unrelated alien theories in order to defend her own dogmas. Not ok and very unprofessional. She is not a supportive professor, and if you disagree with her, she will use her status to try and demean you. Beware.

It was a pretty easy class overall. There's assigned videos and readings for each week, but you can get away with not reading them. Participation is pretty important, but as long as you say something once every two weeks, answer the weekly discussion question, and go to the 2 mandatory meetings with the prof, it should be alright. Final was a 10 page paper, and it was graded pretty harshly in my opinion. Recommend to take it if you want a fairly easy ge.

I'm writing this review around Week 9 so I don't have a grade yet, but I will update it when I get one. I wanted to point out something that I didn't see in her other reviews: Cooney straight up isn't educated about a lot of the subject material she's speaking on. She brings a lot of scientifically unsubstantiated and frankly misogynistic ideas into the course. She'll say "science shows" and then fail to provide actual scientific sources. Coming from a research background, it is also genuinely painful to see her misinterpreting the neuroscience studies that she posts.
Cooney is also not receptive to feedback—as others have pointed out, she will not listen to people who offer constructive feedback, even if it's worded in the most polite and concessive way possible. Her attitude is a bit bizarre. She always wants to challenge students that ask her questions even if it means deliberately misunderstanding them.
The one positive point to the class is that there is no midterm and final anymore, as you may see in earlier reviews, so the readings are even less important. However, the paper is super heavily weighted and there are some weird grading things. Assignments that are worth 10% of your grade are 10 points, 15% of your grade are 15 points, etc. so if you get a 9/10 on one assignment you've lost 1% of your grade. It's pretty harsh.