By far, best MCDB professor I've had. Really hammered home on what was important, and 4 months removed still remember a lot. Great job of using concepts to drive memorization and making the subject matter unforgettable. Very accessible in office hours, and it is not a class where bs gets in the way of doing well. Highly recommend

Great professor! Really teaches the conceptual aspects of the class well, I still remember all of it weeks removed. Super kind and helpful in office hours. Hard class, partially due to large amount of material requried on own time but truthfully material in the class should be taught over 17 weeks not 10. Overall great prof and fun class.

Similar to others! Professor Lew is a great guy. That being said, his lectures are pretty disorganized. It was kinda hard to gage the big picture until I went through the practice finals. But, I feel like I learned the most from this class than any other class. The final is hard, but nothing crazy. Practice finals and midterms are your friend.

Mixed feelings... He's a really nice, approachable guy & lectures extremely well. He struggles to be succinct though, & piles on tons of work for you to do outside of class. I disliked watching all his prerecorded lectures on our own time. Shoutout to my amazing TA for getting me through this course!

It is v difficult to gage what Lew wants you to have memorized vs what he wants you to "understand". His finals are notoriously difficult, there is an excessive amount of work given that you must watch a video lecture before every lecture, on top of weekly quizzes, problem sets, and additional homework. He often gets lost in his own analogies.

John Lew is freaking angel. He cares so much about his students, and is truly concerned about the well being of his students. He tried to keep the material brief and interactive, and always owned up to the mistakes me made during them. I wish I could take this guy for every class at UCSB.

I wish I attended Lew's OH more because he's genuinely a great guy and professor. He teaches super intuitivley and is a very compassionate professor. I wish he taught more classes because I would take each class.

His problem sets are your best friend, very good at explaining concepts in a way that's easy to understand, his lectures are pretty all over the place which made it hard to keep track of how certain concepts connect, but overall he's a good and fair teacher, seems like a nice guy too.

The beginning of the class was super slow, with little lecture material, and the end of the class was hyper speed! There was so much material towards the end of the class; it was ridiculous. Found it pretty boring but he was an okay teacher

I had him for MCDB 108B as well and honestly love him. He's really good at explaining complex concepts in an easy to understand way and for the lab class (granted it was all online due to COVID) he did a great job at teaching us important lab techniques even though we were unable to be in the lab. Definitely one of the better upper div professors

Lew sets tough expectations for test answers so you have to be really precise and answer perfectly to get full credit for a question. Lectures are very long, slow and tedious and he mostly writes on the blackboard instead of posting slides so be ready to write. Do all the practice problems to study because the tests are similar to those.

The irony of John Lew telling his students to be brief when they explain their test answers and then spending an entire class discussing one simple concept that everyone already understands is not lost on students. Overall a pretty good professor and his tests are very predictable due to the problem sets.