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

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.

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).

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.

I seriously do not understand how Mel still has a job here. She is one of the most unclear lecturers I've ever had that emphasize knowledge that will most likely not be useful were you ever to have a management position in a company. I actually don't even know why the word "management" is included as part of this course label, as I don't think we talked about management once - we spent almost all of our time talking about pretty relatively useless things such as the time value of money and the optimal levels of production and such. If you're doing the technology management tech breadth to get an idea for how to handle a business, avoid this class at all costs and stick to the MGMT courses, as those cover topics which might actually be useful.

This class is super easy - group homework and weekly current event forum posts on CCLE - but the lectures are extremely boring, and you have to attend lectures because she has mandatory online polls that count for 10% of your grade. I don't think I learned very much but it's an easy A, I recommend this if you want to boost your GPA without much work

Mel herself might be a nice person, but she is extremely unorganized for teaching. She didn't post assignments/lectures on time and suddenly asked students to do those works after the end of the course.

While I liked this class overall, like many of the other reviews say, Mel is an extremely disorganized teacher. Her notes are posted online, but are quite unreadable. This class is also extremely scattered with Mel jumping around between many topics. This was one of the things that disappointed me about the class, with everything seeming to just be glossed over, making the class feel like a watered-down econ class that only gives you a surface level understanding of topics. It is also extremely focussed on microeconomics with macroeconomics only coming up in the last week of class.

Mel does have an extremely lenient grading scale with anything over 85% being an A. She is also very generous with partial credit on exams. This is definitely not a difficult class and will give you an intro to economics if you have never taken it, but is a bit disappointing in the lack of depth in the topics taught.

We simply have no choice but to stan Mel. She truly cares about your learning, and it shows, even if she can be disorganized. This class used to be much harder, as evidenced by the practice midterms/finals she releases from previous years. She's restructured it to focus on key topics that might some day be useful/relevant to your personal finances. You get a cheatsheet for exams and there's only a few homeworks throughout the quarter. The group project at the end is simple enough and boosts your grade with free points as long as you do it properly. One of my fave professors!

This class is quite an enigma to me. On the one hand, Mel is a very engaging and intelligent lecturer who clearly wants to teach better and help students understand the material. On the other hand, she struggles with this vision, rushing through concepts and not explaining them well at a pace that students like me (who don't have much of a background in economics) can understand. What made this even more difficult is the fact that those in-class quizzes other people mention in prior reviews are no longer optional; they are now part of your participation grade. So when she asks these questions right after explaining a concept, if you don't understand all of it well enough on the spot, it'll be pretty hard to get it right. The way she organizes the quizzes is kind of problematic too: she uses the UCLA online poll site, which no one could seem to log into 30% of the time. I just feel like there's a much better way to implement all this.

On the one hand, Mel is a very generous grader, with an average of 80 on all assignments being curved up to an A- (85% or above = A, 80 or above = A-, 75 or above = B+, etc.). I'm still quite confused how I got away with the grade I did, given my abysmal midterm score. On the other hand, I still felt like I was falling behind all quarter because the homeworks, practice quizzes, and some exam questions were very convoluted and confusing (sometimes completely wrong), and Mel seemed disinterested in helping resolve this. She also said she would answer questions on Piazza but then practically disappeared for days on end, which was a bit frustrating around midterm and final exams.

I can't really fault Mel for trying harder at making the course better, and I can't really complain about the generous grading either. But I feel like the concepts are being taught too fast and not being explained well enough. There are just so many wrinkles that should've been ironed out years ago.