POL SCI 20
World Politics
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Required of all students concentrating in Field II. Introduction to problems of world politics. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 5.0
Units: 5.0
3 of 4
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2021 - Professor Min is easily the best professor I have taken at UCLA. He was extremely clear in his lectures, which were accompanied by a slideshow, which he gave to the class with some of the terms and definitions blanked out to help us follow along. Most weeks (8 of 10) we had to do a CCLE-based quiz of about 15 questions covering the topics that we covered in class, with the quiz comprising 30% of our grade. There was no final, rather we had to submit a six-page essay on an important foreign policy issue, in Fall 2021 the essay examined where the US went wrong in Afghanistan. This essay was broken into a proposal due week 3 (5% of grade), a draft due week 8, and the actual essay (45% of grade) due on the Monday of week 9, which meant that there we had nothing to do during Finals week for this class. Participation in discussion sections counted for 20% of the grade. I had Merabi as my TA and he was very knowledgable on all of the subjects and very open to helping out if I had any questions or problems. Overall, if I could take this course again, I would not hesitate to and I would recommend taking it as a GE credit as you do not need to understand any complexities of political science that Professor Min does not cover.
Fall 2021 - Professor Min is easily the best professor I have taken at UCLA. He was extremely clear in his lectures, which were accompanied by a slideshow, which he gave to the class with some of the terms and definitions blanked out to help us follow along. Most weeks (8 of 10) we had to do a CCLE-based quiz of about 15 questions covering the topics that we covered in class, with the quiz comprising 30% of our grade. There was no final, rather we had to submit a six-page essay on an important foreign policy issue, in Fall 2021 the essay examined where the US went wrong in Afghanistan. This essay was broken into a proposal due week 3 (5% of grade), a draft due week 8, and the actual essay (45% of grade) due on the Monday of week 9, which meant that there we had nothing to do during Finals week for this class. Participation in discussion sections counted for 20% of the grade. I had Merabi as my TA and he was very knowledgable on all of the subjects and very open to helping out if I had any questions or problems. Overall, if I could take this course again, I would not hesitate to and I would recommend taking it as a GE credit as you do not need to understand any complexities of political science that Professor Min does not cover.
AD
AD
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2022 - The class was based on two midterms that were each worth 15%, a final worth 20%, Inquizitives worth 20%, a Current Event Analysis worth 10%, and participation in section worth 20%. The textbook was available online for about $45 which was good, but you could also purchase the physical version if you wanted to. If you did that though, you would still need to pay a small amount to have access to the Inquizitives. The textbook was absolutely necessary to have as the whole class was based on it. The professor did lectures but they often were really just a repetition of the textbook, so I did not think they were necessary or very helpful to be present for. However, I think there were some helpful bits but if you stick to reading the textbook and doing notes, you should be good. There were a total of 14 chapters we needed to get through for this class and in the end it felt kind of rushed, making me a bit overwhelmed at times. After each chapter we needed to complete an Inquizitive, which I found really helpful in retaining the information and the main points we needed to be aware of. The midterms and final were all open-note and were done on our own within a certain time window, making them easy to access and fairly easy to find information if you forgot something. We had three options for completing a Current Event Analysis which required us to apply information from certain topics in the textbook to real world situations. You could do all three or just one and the highest score was applied. I thought this was a fun and easy way to look further into World Politics so I personally really enjoyed it. Overall, the class wasn't too difficult so long as you stayed on top of the textbook work and utilized the notes you took for the exams. The only critique I really had was that the professor's lectures weren't that engaging in my opinion and that the textbook seemed like a better way to understand the subject.
Spring 2022 - The class was based on two midterms that were each worth 15%, a final worth 20%, Inquizitives worth 20%, a Current Event Analysis worth 10%, and participation in section worth 20%. The textbook was available online for about $45 which was good, but you could also purchase the physical version if you wanted to. If you did that though, you would still need to pay a small amount to have access to the Inquizitives. The textbook was absolutely necessary to have as the whole class was based on it. The professor did lectures but they often were really just a repetition of the textbook, so I did not think they were necessary or very helpful to be present for. However, I think there were some helpful bits but if you stick to reading the textbook and doing notes, you should be good. There were a total of 14 chapters we needed to get through for this class and in the end it felt kind of rushed, making me a bit overwhelmed at times. After each chapter we needed to complete an Inquizitive, which I found really helpful in retaining the information and the main points we needed to be aware of. The midterms and final were all open-note and were done on our own within a certain time window, making them easy to access and fairly easy to find information if you forgot something. We had three options for completing a Current Event Analysis which required us to apply information from certain topics in the textbook to real world situations. You could do all three or just one and the highest score was applied. I thought this was a fun and easy way to look further into World Politics so I personally really enjoyed it. Overall, the class wasn't too difficult so long as you stayed on top of the textbook work and utilized the notes you took for the exams. The only critique I really had was that the professor's lectures weren't that engaging in my opinion and that the textbook seemed like a better way to understand the subject.
3 of 4
