STS 2500

Prof. Berne is an amazing instructor. This class is going to mostly consist of groupwork, some writing assignments, but mostly discussion and a few projects. It's a class that you decide how much you get out of. If you do all of the readings, watch the films, and contribute to discussions, you will learn tons of interesting things and concepts that will follow you for a while. If you don't feel like doing all that, you'll still probably get a B, but I think it's worth it to put in the effort. It's a really awesome class.

I took the STS 2500 course in Engineering Ethics. I'll start out by saying I thought the assignments and content of the course were really enjoyable. Having class led discussions made it much easier to want to interact with other students and talk about the ethics that we have read about.
However the grading scheme of this class was probably the most idiotic thing I have ever heard of, and it was obvious as soon as I looked at the syllabus (but alas I was naiive and did not drop the course). First of all, the way the class is setup (from simply a game theory perspective), makes you not want to put in maximum effort to do the assignments and learn the material. All you need to do is pass all of the assignments, and because you get unlimited submissions, I never really put in much effort, and I passed them first try anyway so its not like it mattered. Second of all, because you only needed to "pass" assignments, this course was always on the back burner behind my other classes with actual graded assignments, so putting in maximum effort to learn all of the content was never worth it. Third, if you pass all of the assignments you get a B in the course, sounds cool right, until you realize that if you want to get higher than a B you need to get a 87 or above (B+), 90 or above (A-), 94 or above (A), or 97 and above (A+), on the final exam. Keep in mind, we have never had to do any individual tests or quizzes in this course the entire time (assignments are very group/discussion focused), so if you want to get an A in the course 100% of your grade is determined by the final exam which is nothing like the rest of the course. The final then consisted of the most useless memorization questions from the readings and movies we watched over the course of the semester (literally fill in the blank word for word from the textbook type questions), and an essay (that honestly was fine and made sense in the context of the course). Also, for some reason unlike every other engineering course, the cutoff for an A was a 94 instead of a 93, which is insane considering 100% of your grade is determined by your score on the final. There was also no obvious way to study for the final rather than just know all of the readings and movies from the course.
Either make the class participation more rigorous or have more graded essays and individual assignments in the course that will determine the grade, because right now, the grade being based all or nothing on a final exam is insane for a humanities course.
This was by far my most stressful final out of any class I have taken (which is ironic because the grading scheme was supposed to make us less stressed than traditional classes), and I really hope the grading scheme for this course goes through some major redesigns before it is made to be required by all engineering students. Thank you for coming to my TED TALK.

Maybe she has changed the course but when I took it in the fall of 2019 it was the most thrown together, ill prepared class I have ever taken. You know when you don't really do the work for an assignment but you have to just bs your way through the presentation in front of the class? That was how professor Berne was the whole year. I would have thought that this would make it really easy but it ended up making the class way harder

Highly recommend taking STS 2500 with Berne if Reproductive Technologies is offered over Jterm.