I’ll be honest, this class was the most disappointing experience of my college career. I came in with high expectations, excited to learn practical financial advice from a professor that so many people held in high esteem. The sad truth, however, was that Ravetch’s nice, charismatic, and eloquent lectures hide his single biggest flaw - the dude cannot teach. His lectures and assignments were incredibly vague, and as others have pointed out, he uses a grading quota to curve down the number of As in his class to appear “tough,” without ever specifying his grading methodology in his syllabus. I had a 94% at the end of the class, but he curved me down almost 10% without ever explaining himself, despite my numerous emails. For Christ’s sake, this is supposed to be an introductory class, not some GPA killer like Comm 10. Anyway, my advice would be to take P/NP. He grades like an absolute dick, doesn’t care whether you actually get an A, and blows you off when you inquire further. You are a disappointment, Ravetch. Thanks for nothing.

This class did not fulfill any major requirements for me-- I just took it because I wanted to learn about finance. I'm pretty disappointed to say that I didn't learn too much. This class goes over a broad range of topics (buying a house, car insurance, credit cards, stock market, etc.) The thing is that each week/lesson goes into something new, and no topic is given enough depth, so in the end you learn such little information that you might have been better off just looking it up online.
He teaches each new topic by bringing in a guest speaker who works in the field, but the only thing is that many of the guest speakers aren't teachers and some of them really didn't seem that prepared to give a lecture. You feel like you're in some random presentation or even a marketing pitch for their company as opposed to an actual class where you're learning practical information.
Also, he computed the grades in such a way that even if you got an A based on points alone, you would not necessarily get an A in the class. The syllabus does not tell you how he will grade the class, it does not tell you how much any of the assignments or projects are worth, you don't know anything until you get the grade. I really thought I was doing fine in the class until I got a B+ at the end (for reference, I've never gotten anything lower than an A- in any other class at all 4 years of university, even much harder classes like computing or chemistry)
I will say that there was a few highlights where I did learn something I considered valuable. Additionally, the professor does seem to be really caring and passionate about the class. But if you want to take it and it's not a requirement for your major, I would take it pass/no pass.

I was really excited to learn about personal finance through Ravetch but felt his course assignments and project requirements were extremely unclear and hard to understand. He would briefly mention HW assignments for the week during the lecture and often times these assignments did not align with what was listed on the syllabus or on the CCLE page for that week. It was so hard to know what he wanted for each assignment and the grader was very harsh with points. In the end, a bunch of students got curved down, including me, even though we put in the work for the quarter to get good grades.

he's actually a dick. Grades super hard and makes his homework assignments super unclear or posts the instructions in three different places. The TA's grade hard as fuck and it's honestly really frustrating because even if you follow the directions you might get an 80. Class is easy and what not but for some reason he makes his assignments really confusing and then proceeds to grade harshly.

One of the few classes I've taken that I would NOT recommend. I found the course material mostly interesting and definitely practical/useful, but the organization of the material, assignments, and class in general ruins it. The assignments are not challenging at all, but it is incredibly unclear what you're supposed to be doing. Everyone does pretty well, but final grades are significantly curved down. For Spring 21, 97+ was an A, 94-97 was an A-, 92-93 was a B+, and 73-92 was a B.