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
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - This class was so so chill. Most lectures are guest speakers who are actually really interesting. This class balances both being chill and being useful at the same time. Sherrer is funny and helpful. Only thing is that you do have to show up to lectures. He has a code each lecture + simple & open questions about the guest speaker's speech or his own lecture that you have to submit to prove you were there. There are some assignments too but those are really chill and never take too long (ex: editing your resume, writing a sample cover letter, editing LinkedIn). Overall, TAKE THIS CLASS you will not regret it.
Fall 2023 - This class was so so chill. Most lectures are guest speakers who are actually really interesting. This class balances both being chill and being useful at the same time. Sherrer is funny and helpful. Only thing is that you do have to show up to lectures. He has a code each lecture + simple & open questions about the guest speaker's speech or his own lecture that you have to submit to prove you were there. There are some assignments too but those are really chill and never take too long (ex: editing your resume, writing a sample cover letter, editing LinkedIn). Overall, TAKE THIS CLASS you will not regret it.
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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.