Good, easy GE. Basically only have to go to discussion. Lectures are basically optional but I enjoyed going. Since you don't really have to pay attention, its kind of fun to just go and listen without worrying about taking notes. The material was interesting and teaches you some interesting things about world politics. You can learn as much or as little as you want, your grade will probably be the same.

TAKE THIS CLASS!!! For a GE or for political science! This was the easiest A+ that I have gotten. The 400 word essays are not hard at all and the TAs grade fairly easy. Lectures, as already stated on here, lose attendance very quickly, since Wilkinson just restates the slides that he posts on CCLE anyways. It made me sad to see less people show up because he's so old but I did find myself doing the lectures online after three weeks. The extra credit helps a lot also!

I don't normally post Bruinwalk reviews, but I felt obligated to dispel the notion that a lot of other reviewers put forward which is that this is a boring crappy class that is easy so you should take it. Although wilkenson's lectures are pretty mundane, the dude is clear and concise. If you can pay attention for 40 minutes, you can get through the content. And the content is actually interesting, especially if you're a poli sci major. The book that he assigns is actually a pretty great read and not boring at all. If you have a sound knowledge of modern world history (World War Two, Cold War and stuff) you can use it to your advantage and do well on the weekly assignments. Anyway, not an amazing class, but in my experience way more interesting than some other GEs that are offered. Strikes a really good balance between being easy and also getting something out of it.

Ended up being asynchronous lectures. Great class and easy to follow. Highly recommend with Wilkinson.

I have such mixed feeling about this class. The course content was very interesting but the in person lectures were sooooo hard to follow. He doesn't use any visual aids like a whiteboard or slides. he just sits and reads info from a yellow notepad. I personally cannot learn that way so I opted to watch the lecture vids (which he made and are not just a recording of the lecture). Those were much easier to follow but basically just told you exactly what you read or would read in the textbook and so they were largely unnecessary if you just read the weekly readings. This class is a large amount of reading and writing but at least the topic is very engaging.

This class was so manageable and we only wrote like a 500 word response to a weekly question based on the readings. The readings were fairly easy to understand but I will say they were quite repetitive. When I took this it was online, the final was a 5 page paper. I believe initially it was supposed to be like 10 pages long but our groupme got together and signed a petition with the majority of the students and the professor agreed on cutting the page count by half thank god.

Wilkinson is a chill professor. I honestly went about this class doing the weekly reading (which did get lengthy over time) and then later fell short and began doing less and less reading. I still got by. The class is based on weekly papers (500 words) and attendance wan't mandatory. All the answers you need for your papers are either in lecture or the reading. I believe it just revolved around Realism vs Liberalism and the final paper was a 4000 page paper on which school of thought you prefer. Though, Wilkinson did cut the final in half when students petitioned and asked him to. Again, chill professor and I found him to be quite funny during lectures. A little boring, yes. But definitely not terrible and tyrannical. Would recommend as easy pre req or ge.

This class is a joke. I never did any of the readings (except to *very* briefly skim through and pick out some quotes), never watched any of the lectures, and wrote complete BS for the essays. Ended up getting 95s and 100s on them because my TA was super lenient in his grading. Oh also, I'm a STEM major, taking this for an easy GE. I don't know shit about writing essays but somehow I did super well in the class.

I took this class during Winter 2022 when the class was asynchronous. The professor is very wholesome and is very knowledgeable in the field, but lectures aren't too interesting. All the lectures were uploaded beforehand so you can listen to them when you want. Sections were also optional and the TAs were very understanding. The class consisted of weekly papers from Week 2-10 which was honestly a lot of work and I often felt overwhelmed. These papers are worth 60% of your grade. The remaining 40% comes from your final paper which is due during finals week. There's a lot of prompts that you can choose from and some of them overlap with the weekly papers so I would recommend taking advantage of that. You don't necessarily have to interact with the professor/TAs if you don't need to/want to. Overall, this class was a nice GPA booster and had relatively interesting information.

60% of your grade is based on weekly papers that are 500 words long and every week there is a different prompt based on the readings. My TA Merabi was not a harsh grader and discussion is worth nothing. The other 40% of the grade is based on your final which is pretty manageable if you don't procastinate. over all a pretty easy class