Professor Borman is a great professor and highly engaging. He cares a lot about his students learning -- especially during covid times -- and is very flexible and open to scheduling additional one-on-one office hours, answering questions in class and via email, and making sure you can catch up on class recordings/notes should you occasionally miss class. Overall, he is very understanding and approachable. During class, he will call on people to offer answers, which at first might seem daunting but overall he cares about engagement and learning more than getting it right during class (and he will not mark you off for incorrect answers given during class, but rather will help you figure it out). He always adhered to the class times, and often would end early. Sometimes he would upload a 15 minute video lecture on the more mundane stuff and ask you to watch it before class, then start the live class 15 minutes after the regular start time and only lecture for an hour in order to not go over the allotted class time of 75 minutes in total. Very considerate!

The class consisted of a midterm, final, two homeworks, and a final project. The homeworks were exceptionally easy, by design. The midterm and final were very doable if you attended class and participated in the discussion; many of the test questions are based closely on examples from class discussion. Helpful, too, are reading CNBC or MarketWatch or other similar websites to improve your financial statement literacy overall. The final project which is a financial model of a public company is very interesting, appropriately tough, but graded very fairly. Everything mentioned above about his approachability apply extra around the time of the final project. Professor Borman made himself more available than usual during the weeks leading up to the submission date, he would spend time at the beginning of each class answering questions, and the examples in class would be from the companies that the project was on. So everything tied together.

For anyone interested in learning and who is tired of the high-stress, low-support accounting professors at UCLA... take this class with Prof. Borman for a supportive and low-stress experience that really teaches you a lot!