Very unclear, goes on long tangents. So many typos on the test and homework. Horrible professor but nice person.

It's literally 12 days after the grade deadline and I have no grade. It has literally been almost a month since the final and we have no grades. Mel is a piping hot mess. She is actively horrible at her job. She is a bad teacher. She does not respond to questions. She does not respond to emails. SAVE YOURSELF!!! DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS!!! IT SUCKS!!!

I don't know why some of the other reviews are so negative, I loved this class. Mel IS disorganized but she makes the material interesting and her lectures were always engaging.

Participation in lectures is important because she gives a couple of online poll questions out every lecture where you get 50% if you answer it wrong and 100% if you answer it right. If less than 75% of the class answered correctly, she would even drop that question or ask it again later after re-explaining the concept.

She also has weekly current event discussions where you have to read 2-3 articles she posts (from Wall Street Journal, etc.) and post a comment about it in the discussion forum on ccle. The articles were often tedious but it's one comment a week which takes a couple of minutes.

Homeworks can be tricky but they are good help for the final, which was tricky but not at all unreasonable. Additionally, there was a group project due after finals and it's a 7 page paper for 5 group members so it's not a lot of work.

There is a required textbook for this class but I didn't need to open it all quarter, I just relied on her lectures. She posts her slides + whiteboard notes + some extra content on ccle but as long as you pay attention in class and take good notes, you're pretty much set.

Single worst professor I've had at UCLA. I changed technical breadths because of her. "Finance and Marketing" was a disorganized 10 weeks in which I took away nothing.

The lectures are pretty hard to pay attention to. They can be very meandering and hard to follow. The good news is that the discussions cover all the content you need to know and she is *super* helpful in office hours.
-
The class itself isn't too bad, it's basically a ton of formulas and algebra problems. Had a sort of 8th grade vibe to it. The tests are fair. There's weekly current events that can get annoying but are easy and sometimes interesting.
-
The biggest complaint I have with the grading is the opacity. I ended up with a B+ in the class, which slightly surprised me since I thought I did well on the final, so I emailed her asking if I could see what I missed on the final. She responded two weeks later, and she was very nice about it and agreed to set up a zoom call to talk to me - which I felt was very generous. I knew I was ambitious in what I was asking, so I was a little surprised that she accepted. Unfortunately, she never showed. I sat and waited on the zoom call for 30 min at the time she choose. I don't care if you don't respond to emails but if you make a commitment to talk to someone at a certain time you either a) let the other person know you're not coming or b) honor it. I felt it was disrespectful.

Mel is so disorganized it's not even funny. It's Friday of week 2 of Summer Session A, and nobody in the class has a grade back yet. She even emailed us 10 days ago saying "letter grades will be posted in 48 hours", and 48 hours came and went and nobody got a grade. Every assignment, which consisted of just 5 homeworks, 1 final exam, and 1 final project, all were done in groups of 4 people (barring the exam), meaning that she had only a quarter of the amount of grading as other professors do, yet still we have no grades back. It's completely ridiculous at this point. On top of that, there was a Piazza forum for the course, but I honestly have no clue why she even went through the trouble of making the forum as she literally never goes on it, when she really should considering all of the typos that she has on the homeworks. Speaking of those typos, they're pretty bad. For example, on our final exam (which she didn't allow us to ask questions for the first hour so none of us would cheat, don't know how that works) she completely neglected to upload a table of numbers for a long question which involved performing calculations with those numbers. So you could imagine the distress of the entire class wondering "are we just supposed to say what we would do if we were given numbers?" Don't get me wrong, Mel seems like a very nice person, she just really shouldn't be teaching if she remains as disorganized as she is and has been according to the other reviews here. If you're reading this review and are considering taking this for your tech breadth, I really recommend waiting until another professor teaches this course or just taking MGMT courses as those seem to be way better (and organized).

As a previous reviewer mentioned, this class is a really strange one. Mel is a really smart and approachable person in person and in office hours, but she is extremely disorganized in lectures and structuring the class. Homework assignments are the most original problems, so don't put your hopes on finding solutions easily. The best way to tackle this class especially when you have no economics or finance background is to find a good TA and stick with them in office hours. You can brute force your way through the material and possibly find understanding, but Mel often has little details written into the problems (sometimes not written at all...) and she assumes everyone is on the same page.

She does do a Piazza board, but she is not very responsive/responsive in a timely manner. The TAs don't have access to the board, so Piazza was pretty unreliable. The group project isn't bad at all. It's a good grade booster if you do it well.

Midterm was alright, and final was challenging. She provides a few old exams for both the midterm and final, and she usually will tell you the structure and content of the exams.

This class is taken in person, and Mel gives pretty engaging lectures with lots of interactions. Homework has a very acceptable workload (4 or 5 questions per week), and lots of questions are from previous quarters. Both the midterm and final are fair to me, and there's nothing surprising if you understand all the homework problems. The median is unexpectedly low (around 75) for some reason, with a large standard deviation. She uses Piazza and addresses students' questions swiftly in most cases. However, I don't find the class topics very useful or intriguing. Everything is about economics and nothing about management (as opposed to the class title).

Mel is unbelievably lazy. We finally received our grades yesterday, more than a month after the final exam. Like the other reviews have said, she makes a lot of typos on the homeworks and exams, which are very annoying. If she actually took the time to respond to the Piazza posts, they would probably be less annoying.

Fairly straightforward class. There's a group project but the grading is easy. She tends to go on tangents but if you're confused just go to office hours and she will clear it right up. I'd give this class a 9.5/10 overall.