I would say that the previous review of this course is pretty spot on when it comes to the way that Apter structures his lectures. I still enjoyed the course though and I do feel like I learned from him. As for the criticisms, Apter seems like a really cool guy but I think it would just be more helpful for students if he was a bit more organized when it comes to his slides and not going off on tangents, especially because it is such a theory-heavy course where it's rather easy to get confused by the material. It can be hard to follow along at times and it's kind of frustrating when you have to decipher what's important to the course, and what's just a personal story of his. A study guide for the exams would've been nice too, but I would say that each week has a specific theme, and the theme as a whole (if quite a bit of time was spent on it) has major potential to appear as an essay question on the exams.

For a core IDS class, I was heavily disappointed. Professor Apter covers key concepts necessary for development studies, such as dependency theory and modernization theory, however his delivery and lectures are in desperate need of clarity and structure. At the beginning of the course, he has powerpoint slides for each lecture, however, midway throughout the quarter he stops presenting from slides and provides no slides, notes, bullets, etc. These lectures were very confusing and essentially just consisted of tangents over tangents that left the class very confused as to what the objectives of the lecture were. There were many times where I had only a few sentences of notes because the majority of the lecture were filled with him rambling about who knows what. He is a nice person, however, as a professor he really needs some sort of structure to his class so students know what they are expected to learn. There was no study guide for the midterm or final so essentially you had to find anything that seemed important enough from the readings or lectures and regurgitate that. Midterm and final were of similar format, with you having to define a few terms out of a small word bank and then 1 essay for the midterm, 2 for the final. Discussions talked about the readings, some of which were important, others not so much. This was a theory-focused course and the readings were quite dense at times. I am highly disappointed with this course and it was my least favorite of the IDS core classes. I have had courses without slides before and they have been excellently structured so it is possible to teach a class this way, however, this was not it.