The class is much easier than what I expected going in, having friends who took the more difficult 103 instead. There are only 6–7 weeks worth of actual material, and the rest were guest lectures. (The guest lectures still get tested on the final, but they are unsurprisingly quite easy.)

The more difficult aspects of the class are memorizing IPA symbols (useful even though you get cheat-sheets on exams) and reading spectrograms. Transcription of unfamiliar sounds could be difficult but the professor makes it easy by offering binary choices as the question format (choose the right one out of two). Overall, it's possible to make the class much harder while teaching the same material, and it's easy to get scared the night before an exam when you look at the amount of information covered. But trust me when I say that it won't be as hard as you fear.

The professor is okay, not too remarkable in either good or bad things. She's clear and helpful in lectures in the usual good ways, but not exceptionally/memorably so.

There are no papers, two homeworks (20%), six open-book online quizzes (40%), a midterm 45-minute in-class quiz for which you get two hours (10%), and a final (25%). Attendance in sections counts for 5%.