This was the worst lecturer I have ever dealt with at UCLA. The class content did not cover the globalization of Korean pop culture, and rather, Heejin didn’t seem to be knowledgeable on that topic at all. We learned about the dark secrets of Korea and problematic cultural norms, which I actually found to be interesting. However, what made this class so terrible was her whack citation rules. Each week, we had a short reflection to write that incorporated the articles we read. Somehow this class turned into a citation course, because if you made even the tiniest of errors in citing your sources, she would give you a zero, and say that you plagiarized the entire assignment. For the weekly assignments, we were allowed to revise it upon receiving a zero, to try and raise our score. Yet, she refused to inform us what the error(s) were, and refused to give us help. She made us take an Indiana University citation certification mini-course, so she claimed that should’ve taught us everything we needed to know. Many of us would constantly go to the writing center for help, and they’d say our citations looked perfect. Yet, Heejin would still give us zeros. One time she even gave me a low grade on my assignment, purely because she said the way I incorporated the quote from the article blocked the flow of the writing. So the grading has nothing to do with your mastery of the course content, just how well you can follow her non-existent citation rules, that don’t even follow proper citation guidelines. When it came to the final essay, she claimed that I plagiarized the whole entire thing, but refused to give me a reason as to how it was supposedly plagiarized. If you emailed her with a question, or for help, she refused to answer it, and made us come into her office hours, because she said it was somehow unfair to other students. But when I would go to her office hours, she still refused to answer my questions, because she said it was unfair to students who couldn’t make it to her office hours. Every time I would go into her office hours, she was so extremely rude, unfriendly, cold, and condescending. I ended up dropping this course on the very last day. I highly urge anyone who is interested in the title of this course to bypass it if Heejin is the one lecturing it.

Hands down the worst, the WORST lecturer I've had in UCLA. The classes were just watching movies and looking at music videos, and homework was just writing journal articles. Pretty chill. Until she talks about her very peculiar standards for "plagiarism," which then hauls this whole class downhill. Literally, I've spent much, much more time than in my engineering classes for this supposedly informative, and fun GE that covers Korean culture. Heejin literally makes this class into a miserable hazing of citations and paraphrasing. She doesn't even have clear guidelines and expects students to follow them; if not, then they get zeros on journal articles, etc.

Did I mention that my essay received a failing grade just because of citations and paraphrasing? Just because some citations were off from her arbitrarily convoluted guidelines, she gave me a B- in this class. It's supposed to be a summer GE on Korean Pop culture. To her, content doesn't even matter. All that matters is citations and plagiarism.

Take this class if you really hate yourself.

Literally, don't take her for this class if you are only looking for some fun kpop stuff. To be fair, her assigned contents and the manner of speech were pretty cool and chill. As long as you go to the class every time, you get full credits for attendance. Course grading was about 30 %attendance, 10 % presentation with a short 5 minutes speech, 30 percent weekly journal, and 30 percent final paper. The tricky part is you don't know what's her expectations. She seems to put a lot of attention on "Plagiarism", but does not want to tell you her version of the definition of "plagiarism". You get a zero on journals and the final paper even if you only have a tiny she-though issue. Trying to go to the writing center is not gonna help because she has made up her own rules of "plagiarism" that can even confuse the staff. It should be a fun, relaxing GE class that everyone can learn something about Korean Culture. She just made it a grilling that you would be tortured by her unknown expectations of not plagiarizing.

This review is for KOREA 50 and not 40, because Heejin was a TA for this class.

I really wish I'd read the reviews on her before having her as a TA. She is the worst instructor I've ever encountered. Previous reviews say that she is an unfair grader, condescending, and gives unclear feedback. This is all true because I went through it myself!! Here are the major reasons why I almost tore my hair out while in her section this quarter:

- She reassured us at the beginning of class that discussion posts would be an easy grade to achieve. This was not true AT ALL!
- Discussions are graded on a 3-point scale. Heejin would hardly give our class full scores because our answers weren't "descriptive enough." She also reprimands students for going above the 200-word limit. The issue is that she expects us to cover most key points in a short amount of words. EVERYONE in the class was frustrated because she would grade our discussions so unfairly and wouldn't give us a full score. I went to the writing clinic for help on my posts. They NEVER got full scores. Those who were lucky got a number 3 grade once or twice.
- She refuses to help students improve their discussion grades. If you're struggling in class, the most reasonable thing to do is to ask how you can improve your score right? If Heejin is your TA, your efforts are a complete waste of time. I've been to her office hours and they were so unhelpful. She always seemed in a bad mood and condescending. It felt like I was walking on eggshells with her. If you asked the wrong question you're basically disliked. She likes who she wants to like, it's disgusting.
- She doesn't allow initial reviews of our discussion posts, so we were stuck with figuring out where we went wrong after she graded them. If we get a bad score, she doesn't allow rewrites for the sake of "better understanding."
- Most of our time in section was her complaining about our discussion posts and how we could've done better. She doesn't mark you down for attendance, so I can see why people in class stopped going after a while.
- The professor in this class talks so much about using a personal interpretation of the material, and tells us to do this in our discussion posts. You can't do this if Heejin is your TA. She's horrible at allowing her students to freely voice their answers. It's either her way or no way at all.
- No matter how hard you try to work with her to improve your scores, it won't work. Going to office hours, re-reading the material, using the writing clinic, discussing with classmates is unhelpful.
- THIS IS A LOWER DIVISION COURSE! This section was unnecessarily difficult and agonizing because Heejin was my TA. Save yourself from future classes with her. I don't even know how they allow someone like this to TA classes.