POL SCI 149
Special Topics in American Government and Politics
Description: Lecture, three or four hours; discussion, one hour (when scheduled). Requisites: course 40, two courses in Field III. Designed for juniors/seniors. Intensive examination of one or more special problems appropriate to American politics. Sections offered on regular basis, with topics announced in preceding term. May be repeated for credit with topic change. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
3 of 4
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Most Helpful Review
Summer 2025 - Sherrer is not empathetic and honestly an unkind man. While his class is informative and simple, he is not supportive to his students and insists on enforcing his policy despite unforeseen circumstances possibly hindering in-class participation. I had technological issues and still made it to his two-hour class session despite working full-time and taking three other classes; he refused to accommodate me for my technological issues all because I "didn't let him know beforehand." I showed him proof that I was having these issues before class and was preoccupied with a multitude of heavy responsibilities and he was not empathetic and quite unsupportive about it. I politely tried to reason with him for a week and he was not cooperative. I am not looking forward to finishing the rest of this class with him and am disappointed at how "great" he seemed despite not being true to his character in class. I ended up not receiving points for a class I was present for and my grade will now struggle because Sherrer insists on being apathetic and indifferent. It is really very disappointing.
Summer 2025 - Sherrer is not empathetic and honestly an unkind man. While his class is informative and simple, he is not supportive to his students and insists on enforcing his policy despite unforeseen circumstances possibly hindering in-class participation. I had technological issues and still made it to his two-hour class session despite working full-time and taking three other classes; he refused to accommodate me for my technological issues all because I "didn't let him know beforehand." I showed him proof that I was having these issues before class and was preoccupied with a multitude of heavy responsibilities and he was not empathetic and quite unsupportive about it. I politely tried to reason with him for a week and he was not cooperative. I am not looking forward to finishing the rest of this class with him and am disappointed at how "great" he seemed despite not being true to his character in class. I ended up not receiving points for a class I was present for and my grade will now struggle because Sherrer insists on being apathetic and indifferent. It is really very disappointing.
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Most Helpful Review
Summer 2018 - This is for PS149: Trump's Predictable Win Deciphering 2018 Took this class over the summer. Overall it is not a hard class. Midterm 40%, Final 50%, Participation 10%. For the midterm and final, you have to submit questions potential questions on CCLE so that you're building a class study guide. Also submitting questions goes into your participation grade. If he picks your question for either the midterm or final, he gives you a bonus point. Most of the time he would pick questions straight from there-so if you just study off of that you're fine. For readings, there is no textbook. The first week there were long scholarly articles, and after that it was online articles from NYT, WSJ, and FiveThirtyEight. Truthfully you don't need to do these readings because if someone writes a question about the reading, you can just go and find it. He reads straight from the powerpoint slides. But you had to go to lecture because he had us get into groups and write our thoughts down and submit them for participation points. Shrode's lectures themselves were not that engaging. Midterm was super easy (all of the questions were from the online study guide) so everyone did well (not surprising it's summer). So he decided to make the final more "involved" (as he put it), and wrote questions that took the bad and vague questions from the study guide and put them onto the final. He grades hard. He admits that, so he puts the grades onto a really weird and confusing curve. Not a hard class, and required minimal effort.
Summer 2018 - This is for PS149: Trump's Predictable Win Deciphering 2018 Took this class over the summer. Overall it is not a hard class. Midterm 40%, Final 50%, Participation 10%. For the midterm and final, you have to submit questions potential questions on CCLE so that you're building a class study guide. Also submitting questions goes into your participation grade. If he picks your question for either the midterm or final, he gives you a bonus point. Most of the time he would pick questions straight from there-so if you just study off of that you're fine. For readings, there is no textbook. The first week there were long scholarly articles, and after that it was online articles from NYT, WSJ, and FiveThirtyEight. Truthfully you don't need to do these readings because if someone writes a question about the reading, you can just go and find it. He reads straight from the powerpoint slides. But you had to go to lecture because he had us get into groups and write our thoughts down and submit them for participation points. Shrode's lectures themselves were not that engaging. Midterm was super easy (all of the questions were from the online study guide) so everyone did well (not surprising it's summer). So he decided to make the final more "involved" (as he put it), and wrote questions that took the bad and vague questions from the study guide and put them onto the final. He grades hard. He admits that, so he puts the grades onto a really weird and confusing curve. Not a hard class, and required minimal effort.
3 of 4
