I generally felt like this class was decent, but I wasn't a big fan of the grading distribution and structure of the class.

25% of your grade is participation, which involved attendance, a discussion section presentation, and answering questions in lecture. No attendance was taken after I think week 2, so basically everyone got all the points here if they did the presentation (which was easy, and while we never got grades for it, I'm pretty sure it was graded very easily).

20% of your grade is from two quizzes, which were of middling difficulty. These were on week 3 and week 5. Most people I talked to got decent grades on them, but not good ones. They are timed, multiple choice and short answer quizzes based off of lecture. Because the lectures cover so much information, the quizzes can be a little difficult. It is open note, but again you have a time limit that really prevents you from fully looking up questions. After week 5, there are no more exams, so you can basically check out and not pay attention to lectures anymore. The rest of the grading is on projects where you do your own research, so while lectures can help, they aren't particularly important going forwards.

20% of your grade is from two short assignments, which was a memo (3 page short essay) and a 2 minute speech/testimony. You worked with a partner. Both assignments were on the same topic. I thought the grading was mostly fair, but you had to work for an A on these assignments.

35% of your grade was the final project, where you worked with a group of 5-7 people. 25% was for the final paper and 10% was for the final presentation. The final paper was 20 pages max and was a super detailed research paper about a given topic. You have a good amount of time to work on it, and the large group made it manageable. He gave you feedback on your outline and then your draft. He really wants citations and numbers, so you have to do a large amount of research. I think our paper had almost 10 pages of double spaced citations by the time we finished. The final presentation was 10 min long, and it was difficult to condense all of the info in the 20 page paper into a 10 min presentation. Time limits were strictly enforced. I never got my grade back for the paper and the presentation, but given my final grade and my grades on the other assignments, I think I did decently well. I think that the grading is probably strict but generally fair given how much time and feedback you receive before the final draft is due.

I found lectures to be somewhat dense and not helpful at all after week 5, and discussion sections didn't even meet half of the time. There were also a lot of weekly readings, but I didn't think they were important and didn't do them. I thought the class was interesting enough, but the second part of the class was stressful due to all of the projects. I think it's a decent class to take if it fills a requirement for your major/minor.

Environ M10 is great with him and Prof. D'Auria. He's really funny and knowledgeable. Overall he's not so helpful but the merits should suffice.
His part of the course is slightly too fast-paced. He did cover two CHAPTERS in one class and the reading was overwhelming. However as he said, the class shouldn't be so easy. Therefore I really learned much and was genuinely interested, as a math major student.
His final is kind of hard but doable. Plus there's Rafaella's easy questions.
This is not a GE but I never regret it.

Professor Garrison and Professor McKinnon taught this class this quarter, and it was pretty organized for the most part. Sometimes lecture slides were posted late but it was manageable because the lecture recordings were posted pretty quick. Professor Garrison is friendly and engaging and was a great lecturer. I didn't really like learning about the rock stuff so much like tectonic plates and volcanoes but it was still somewhat interesting. In many lectures the professors made a connection to climate change or environmental issues though so that was cool. There's 2 instances in which you have to collaborate with a group so be ready for that. The pre lecture quizzes were nice and informational and you had unlimited tries. I'd take this class again! I only got a B+ because I didn't turn in a discussion 1 pager that was 5% of my grade but if you do all the work you'll be fine.