Honestly, it's not as worthless as people say. Its role is to show how engineering isn't purely a technical profession while also putting students in a (simplified) design team scenario. I assume a lot of the haters are those who expected engineering to be an escape from writing, presentations and working with people (which is the bulk of this course). However, the 6ish profs running the course did make some boneheaded decisions, like putting time limits on recorded lectures (for "security" reasons) and they handled student backlash to proctorio very poorly. Overall, its negative reputation is overblown in my opinion, but this course was by no means good, just decent.

They will test literally everything on the midterms and final, so your only real shot at doing well at those is to memorize like crazy, since this isn't like math where many practice questions are available (just one practice test).