This was overall the worst class I have ever taken at UCLA. Dr. Hill was condescending and frankly did not care about students learning. Office hours were unhelpful. When the TA strike was occurring, Hill and Bouklas did absolutely nothing to help us and basically told us to learn on our own. Lectures did not tie together well and were all over the place. The only thing that was really helpful was the discussions and when the TAs left, I literally did not learn anything. The homework was not helpful whatsoever. The tests were extremely challenging, which would have been fine if we were given any sort of guidance, however, we were not. I genuinely cannot say one good thing about this class.

Dr. Moberg-Parker taught this class for the first 5 weeks and then it was Dr. Hill. Her lectures were ok, a little unclear and vague at times. I liked Parker because she gave us these learning objectives before each lecture so that you knew exactly what to focus on and what would be on the test. She also required online quizzes before the lectures which were easy points. She also used clickers. Dr. Hill didn’t have either of these things and he didn’t use clickers.

The exam questions required a lot of designing experiments, especially for Parker’s questions. Dr. Hill’s questions were more memorization based, but nothing too difficult. For studying I would recommend focusing on the learning objectives that Dr. Parker gave and the slides for Dr. Hill.

The grade breakdown was:
100 points midterm 1 (mean was 75.81, median 77.0)
100 points midterm 2 (mean was 74.78, median was 76.0)
150 points final exam (stats weren’t released)
45 points discussion worksheets (you can miss 1)
50 points discussion participation (you rate the other people in your group)
36 points clickers (3 dropped)
60 points pre-class quizzes (2 dropped)
10 points pre-class and post-class survey (graded on completion)

There was also this extra credit forum where you would summarize a news article about microbiology. I recommend doing this early in the quarter because you can’t repeat a topic someone else has done and it’s difficult to find an article when everyone else is at the same time and Dr. Parker was pretty strict about this.

MIMG 101 with Hill was the worst class I took at UCLA, although I put in tremendous error and hours of studying focused on mainly this class prioritizing it ended with a B I would highly recommend taking this class with another professor whose ratings are better in any was as his lectures were confusing and his question answer sessions ended in further confusion one method he would commonly apply is answering a question with an even more confusing and challenging question, CampusWire the platform we were meant to reach out and ask on was a hub for further mix ups. With my review I want to mention MIMG101 is a challenging subject but having Hill as a professor did not provide much guidance.

DO NOT TAKE IT. It was the worst class I have ever taken my entire life, I was studying more than 10 hours a day, and literally like it was the only class I was studying for and ended up with B+. Save your time, mental health and your grade. His office hours were useless, if I asked a question he would answer me with a question!! Even on campus wire, he was answering my questions with questions!!
Save your time.

First, I would like to say that I did enjoy the content of MIMG 101. The content is not hard but there is a lot of it so it does take sometime to memorize all of it for tests. I would make anki decks for each exam content and did well on the tests. If you are on top of your work, then this class should not be too much of a headache.

Now onto the teachers. I took this class with Hill and Bouklas, who is a new teacher. They had very different teaching styles so there were issues with consistency because Hill would put a lot on his slides while Bouklas had silghtly more minimalist slides. They both were not the best lecturers either because they would often go on random tangents during the lecture or minimally cover a topic that they would then make a big part of the exam. We had the TA strike occur during our quarter so we were asking for the final to have some accommodation since most of us began to struggle without the TAs help. They said the test would be mostly MC with some fill in the blanks, matching and short answer. The final ended up being about 17 pages with 90% fill in the blank like verbatim from slides. Most of us studied the same way we did for midterms which was understanding the main concept but not the very specific details because that was what we were told to do by the professors so the final was definitely unexpected.

Overall, this class is mostly going to be teaching yourself content and memorizing it. I did like the content but the class left something to be desired.

Dont take this class with Hill. I took this class during fall 2022 and there was a strike going on where we did not have any TAs for that last half of the class and no accommodations were made for the final. This is not the reason why I am I do not think you should take him. His exams questions are very vague and just studying the slides is not sufficient enough to do well on his exams. No curve and he only offers 4 points extra credit when the class is out of 430 pts. Save yourself the trouble.

I liked this class. Good way to weed out the weak pre-meds who can't handle real science and sequester them away to psychobio.

What can I say? An amazing course overall in terms of interesting and engaging content! However, the exams were not difficult perse (if you watched all the lectures back) but the grading was a bit weird. If your answers did not match the exact rubric, they would be reluctant to give you any credit, not even half credit. Overall the grading was just the worst part, other then the fact your extra credit skims from 4 pts divided among two easy assignments. If you do not do well on midterm 1 you will not survive midterm 2 (mostly Dr. Hill's lecture which are considerably harder). I would take this course again in a heartbeat!...just not at UCLA. I do not recommend taking this course with other difficult classes as studying for these exams took some years out of my lifespan.

Mimg 101 is such a fascinating class. I have never written a bruinwalk review, but after reading dr. Hill’s recent reviews for this class, I had to. I personally really liked the way dr. Hill lectured. It’s an experiment based class, which I think is where a lot of people ran into trouble. If you put in some time into working to understand all of the concepts, and the significance of experiments / topics lectured, I don’t think the tests are overly difficult, or that the class takes an extremely long time to study for. Overall, I would definitely take this class again, and recommend it to anyone interested in microbiology!

One of the worst classes I have ever taken at UCLA. Hill is a rude, unhelpful, boring, and overall horrible professor. He does not care about student learning whatsoever, and puts in zero effort to make lectures engaging or understandable. He is also very passive aggressive when answering questions so many students felt intimidated to go to him for help. Would not wish a class this horrible on anyone.