Every year, students at University of Illinois look for easy courses or bird courses to take as electives. Here are 10 of the easiest classes at UIUC.
1. GEOL 111 – Emergence of Life
Examines important theoretical and practical questions regarding the origin and evolution of life, as well as the search for life elsewhere in the universe.
2. MACS 101 – Intro to the Media
Introduces students to core issues in communication, ranging from the role of language in human history to political questions posed by electronic and digital technologies. Exploring key contemporary problems through timely readings, students learn and write about how the media affect everyday life.
3. JOUR 200 – Introduction to Journalism
Discussion of the history, freedom, technologies, ethics, and functions of the news media. Training in clear, descriptive writing techniques, using journalistic models.
4. RST 242 – Nature and American Culture
Appreciation and critique of cultural meanings associated with American natural landscapes. Traditional perspectives including colonial American, romantic, and science-based conservation are characterized, as well as revisionist themes aligned with gender, cultural pluralism, and societal meanings of parks and protected areas. Implications of diversity in cultural meanings toward nature are developed and provide the basis for assessing tenets of contemporary environmental policy and supporting concepts associated with community-based conservation.
5. KIN 100 – Development Activities
Skills and knowledge essential for leisure-time activities which are classified as developmental activities.
6. SOC 100 – Introduction to Sociology
Examination of how societies grow and change; reciprocal effects of economic, political, community, familial, and scientific institutions on each other and on individual life changes; and social conflict, problems of bureaucratic growth and planned and unplanned social change.
7. ART 105 – Visual Design for Non-Majors
This course utilizes lectures, exercises, and projects to help students heighten their visual literacy, improve their ability to communicate in an increasingly visually oriented world, and gain a better understanding of the processes and methodologies that designers use.
8. SOC 160 – Global Inequality and Social Change
Introduces sociological concepts of poverty, inequality, and social change within a global context. Themes explored include basic food security, poverty and hunger; population and resource distribution; foreign aid and development institutions; and social policies and movements for change. Course approach is historical and transnational, and typically includes case studies from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the United States.
9. MACS 100 – Intro to Popular TV & Movies
The goal of this course is for students to begin to develop a critical understanding of the role of popular movies and television in their own lives and in U.S. culture. The course looks at issues of the relationship of media to social violence, gender identities, sexual identities, adolescents, minority cultures, and the role of the U.S. media globally. It also considers some of the major media genres that characterize U.S. popular television and movies.
10. ECON 102: Microeconomic Principles
Introduction to the functions of individual decision-makers, both consumers and producers, within the larger economic system. Primary emphasis on the nature and functions of product markets, the theory of the firm under varying conditions of competition and monopoly, and the role of government in prompting efficiency in the economy.
