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.

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.

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.

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.

Since ethics is required, this is far better than 183, but it's a lot more time consuming than it should be. The majority of the class is a group project where you basically have an invention idea and have to go through the entire process of proof of concept, financial summary, possible areas of failure, and then pitch it to the professors as if you are asking them for kickstarter money. It doesn't have that much to do with ethics to be honest. But, the project is at least moderately interesting. The discussion sections are way too long and they're required. Lectures aren't required but they have random quizzes so you have to show up most of the time. Anyway it's a terrible class and get ready for more work than you probably expect, especially if you don't have the best group. It isn't hard, it's just time consuming

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.

I feel bad for Don and Jon when they teach this cluster of a class. The engineering department should be ashamed of making 183 and 185 EW as writing and ethics requirements for engineers. The essays are a joke and can be BS'd very easily depending on if your TA cares enough. The group project only depends on if Jon likes your project or not. We went to office hours every week and used one of Jon's suggested topics. He then went on to praise our final presentation report (probably because it was his idea lol).

Don's lecture was pretty much useless since the philosophy portion was half baked and the engineering case study portion was so boring. He spins this tale that engineering management is corrupt and that engineers are always there to save the day. I would suggest doing work for other classes or shopping online during Don's lectures to save yourself from sleeping. The essays were such BS since one of the essays was literally a summary of a engineering failure with some half assed philosophical analysis. They do not teach you how to write or make a proper essay even though they bring in an english professor to see how the essays are coming along.

Jon's project portion was VERY stressful and probably not worth the extra effort compared to 183EW. However, I learned a lot from this portion sine Jon discussed many important life lessons from industry and the product development cycle. Just follow the instructions and MAKE SURE HE LIKES YOUR IDEA.

Overall, this class is the worst one I have taken at UCLA and I am ashamed to have this as a requirement for all engineering majors. Please fix this SEAS. It just feeds into the idea that engineers shouldn't have interests outside of engineering.

I challenge you to take another writing 2 as a GE to see how to actually write and create a well studied and strong argument about a topic that you find interesting.