Not an easy class, but doable if you stay on top of the material and know going into it that it is going to be a little bit more difficult than some EEB classes you take. Make sure to do the EC field trip because it can make a big difference at the end of the class! Going to office hours before the exams really helps and both Gorlitsky and Lipman are very nice and willing to answer any questions you may have.

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I could tell that Dr. Gorlitsky was very passionate about what she teaches. She tried to incorporate many examples and videos showing different animals and their behavior, but she goes incredibly fast through lecture. She covers ~40 slides every lecture, and to be honest, it was very difficult trying to pinpoint 1) what was important 2) what was the takeaway / purpose of presenting all of those examples. The lecture felt extra long just because of the sheer amount of material.

The midterm covering animal behavior was unnecessarily confusing such that multiple answers could be correct. After reviewing the questions with the TA's (who were very unhelpful), I still do not understand why the answers were correct compared to other choices. This felt very similar to LS in the sense that you walk out of the exam feeling like you knew all the material but just unsure if you picked the answer they were looking for. Overall, the concepts were fairly easy to pick up.

Discussions were pointless and reading the articles and writing questions about them were unhelpful.

Professor Gorlitsky is one of my favorite professors at UCLA. Her lectures are super interesting and engaging and I happen to love studying animals, which makes this class even better for me.
There were two midterms for the class, along with two mini projects, and then a final presentation. Everything is very doable and the projects are always guided and explained by your TA way before it's due.
You will not regret taking this class with Dr. Gorlitsky!

I took this class with Professor Gorlitsky and Professor Lipman. Professor Gorlitsky taught the first five weeks and I really enjoyed it. The material was super interesting (animals do the WEIRDEST things!) and she included tons of interesting videos that I loved watching. The way her class was structured was she gave narrated powerpoint on each week's material, and then had live not-recorded sessions where she just went into more detail and had us to activities together. But you weren't required to go to live sessions, and she said for exams all the material you needed to know should be in the powerpoint videos. They were pretty long and you can't watch them sped up which was slightly irritating. The midterm took an insanely long time to grade, we took it Week 4 didn't get it til Week 9, so that was a bit stressful. But the workload isn't too bad, there's a weekly quiz, a midterm, and final, and a few short paragraphs due each week in discussion, plus one group presentation.

I took this class is session A of summer 2021 as an asynchronous class, and she taught the animal behavior section. She uploaded narrated lectures that we listened to. Her office hours were EXTREMELY helpful and if there was a lull in the OH session she would give you more information to study!! We had weekly quizzes and when the animal behavior section ended we had a cumulative quiz, then the ecology section started which had the same. The ecology section was taught by Dr. Rachel Chock who also uploaded narrated powerpoints. She was also extremely helpful and also works with San Diego Zoo and Wildlife Alliance. Overall really great and if you can take this course with them I 100% recommend it!

The lecture component of this class wasn't bad. Online, we just had to show up to a lecture once a week (the other lecture was designated office hours). The exams are just three 1-2 page papers that can pretty much be on a topic of your choice, you just have to use peer reviewed sources. So the workload for the lecture part wasn't bad. The labs however, you dont really need to even show up (if you plan to get pictures from other people), but in the labs you're basically just taking pictures of specimens to memorize for the lab practical. The lab practicals (two of them) require multiple days of studying hard to get an A. This was the worst part of the class. You have to memorize a TON of random info for like 100 species. Definitely stressful, but it's doable. I would take this class again just because the weekly workload is so light, and the only bad part about the course are the 2 practicals.

I enrolled in this course because I had the professor before for other EEB classes, and she was awesome (still is!). However, even having a good professor was not enough to make up for how difficult/stressful this class was. There were 2 lab practicals that required an unrealistic amount of memorization, and then 3 research essays that were not as bad in comparison (but still a lot of work). This class burned me out more than any other class had at UCLA, and I probably wouldn't recommend it unless you really love animals.

Professor Gorlitsky is a great professor but the quality of the course strongly depends on whether you get a good TA or not. Mine was meh, so lab sections were meh, and lab practicals were pretty tough.

The lectures were asynchronous and we had meetings once a week that you would either attend and get credit for attending, or submit a summary instead of attending. Labs were in person. You basically handle/study either taxidermied animals or animals preserved in isopropyl alcohol; these would be fair game for lab practicals. There were also some animals not in the lab that we were expected to know. It was kind of a mess.

There are 3 essays, 1-2 pages each on one of 3ish prompts they release. It sounds super easy but my TA graded it pretty ridiculously sometimes making it hard to figure out what they were looking for. It's not not doable, I got over 90% on all three, but it can feel like a lot.

There is an extra credit field trip to the Natural History Museum of LA. This is probably the most pandemic-dependant aspect, since in October/November 2021 there was no particular variant to freak out about, and people felt relatively safe. It's super easy if you're local and totally worth it just because that museum is awesome. If you went with the class on the field trip (again, covid related), all you had to do was show up. If you went on your own, you had to draw a specimen or do paleoart. It's nothing unreasonable. It's actually pretty fun.

Overall, amazing class if you love vertebrates. If you're pre-med idk why you would take this if you didn't absolutely have to.

I really like Dr. Gorlitsky and her lectures are pretty interesting but my TA was a mess this quarter. We didn’t have grades for anything until the last few weeks of the quarter and she would dock off tons of points with very little explanation. Since pretty much your entire grade is based off the TA, just make sure you have a decent one. There is extra credit available and a majority of your grade comes from this one group project. I still have the plant Dr. Gorlitsky gave out on the last day of the quarter, it was a really nice gift

This course is TA-taught. The only interaction my group had with Dr. Gorlitsky and Dr. Lipman was through an hour-long office hour they held, in which we received optional feedback for our initial research project idea. Because the class is TA-taught, your grade will heavily depend on your TA, and the professors will only be accessible if you request extra meetings with them (the professors seem to often be busy, as my group emailed a meeting request and did not receive a response). The course revolves around a group research project in which you write a prospectus (proposal) for, present on twice, and write a final paper for. This class was more work than I expected as several of my group members did not pull their weight, and the only consequence for this is a lower group participation grade, which is a small portion of the grade.