Very easy class. He tries to make it interesting too. It really isnt but you do get to see some live music which is cool.

Grade depends on two four page papers, a playlist project, and the final. Easy workload and easy to manage, I did the two papers and the playlist the night before they were due and recieved A's on all of them. Deonte is the sickest TA, super cool guy and actually helps you know what to expect on the final.
With a 9 am two hour lecture, I usually didn't make it to class. Downside to not going to lecture is that Jesse doesn't post the power points or notes online, so you need to mooch off a friend. Jesse is a really nice guy, but not a very great professor to be honest. If you do go to class, expect his monotonous lecturing. He has a way of making global pop music not very interesting.
The final was super easy. As long as you answer the review questions they provide you and if you know the major songs off of the required listenings, you'll be fine. Altogether easy class with not a huge workload!

Ah was waiting to evaluate this guy soooo badly. Ok. to cut my long and persuasive "statement of complaint short" I would only say that he is picks his favorites. Even if the favorite is the dumbest person in the class, he will give him/her the highest grade. This dude ruined my summer experience at UCLA.

Paper # 1. A summery of 60-100 pages of reading. (good luck with that. No comments, no remarks = a low grade on the back of your page. Why? go and figure.

Paper #2. you chose one artist and write about it. Nice, seems easy ha? Well if he thinks its not interesting, he will simply give you a C. Why, cause he didn't like it. DONE DEAL.

Assignment # 3.
A stupid playlist. the insurrections that he couldn't even detail. OMG what pain in the ass.

Final. No preparation, no study guide, NOTHING AT ALL. From his dumb and disorganized power points you have to remember all of the points. The funny thing is, you won't be able to find any in it. Don't even do the readings, cause they won't help at all. He even said that we should not focus on them cause they contradict what he says.

(just because he went to Africa and studies some music there he thinks he knows everything)guess what he doesn't. Never like taking classes of former TA, cause TA's are not professor, they finally have to understand it.

Lastly, if you are paying few thousands of dollars to learn only about (Africa's and few Asian countries Pop culture, then I i would say go ahead) No Europe, No Slavic countries, No Americas were covered.
Having 4.0 GPA AHHHHHHH. I am not gonna stress over this anymore.

FYI, in his syllabus there is no participation, hahha, though at the end of the final somehow participation went up to 20 %. Go and Figure.

No knowledge in basic music at all, only what he had his odd Thesis on.

Hope I detailed everything you needed to know about proff Ruskin.

Class: Global Pop

Course structure: 2 four page papers, 1 playlist project, 1 final. (No midterm yayyyyy)

Difficulty: If you go to lecture and do all your work, it shouldn't be difficult to pull off a good grade.

About the professor: The lecture material is highly interesting and it's great that he goes over music from different parts of the world. I feel like I really learned from this class. The only downside about taking a class with him is that his voice is a little monotonous, so sometimes it can be hard to stay awake (especially with the 2 hour lectures). But overall, if you are looking for a fun, interesting GE that does not have a crazy workload, I would recommend this class. I really enjoyed this class.

The final is all multiple choice and is about lecture material and required listening. We have required reading and listening every week. So during the final, they play samples of songs and you have to answer questions about them.

*Class: Global Pop

*Grading Structure:
-Essay #1 (20%)
-Essay #2 (20%)
-Playlist (20%)
-Class Participation (10%)
-Final (30%)

Waking up for class was always a drag, but lectures really helped understand the course material. Not going to lie, lectures can get prettyyyy boring, but it is helpful and can be fun sometimes. (Professor Ruskin brought musicians a couple of times.)

There isn't a lot of work and the work assigned is pretty simple. (Can do them the night before and get an A.) Ruskin is also very helpful in office hours and is really nice.

There is no midterm so that is awesome, and the final is only 50 multiple choice questions. (20 are based on the required listening.) Start studying 2 days before and you'll be good for the final. (It was so easy.) Be sure to study the study guides as well.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting and easy course. I would recommend it, :)

Oh, and there are no required books or materials so that's also a plus! ;)

Global Pop:

This class is a very easy GE, but only if you find a good TA. I had Deonte and he was very lax with grading. Both essays were rather easy and relatively short. Participation was 100% if you just show up. The playlist assignment was also an easy A. The final was 50 multiple choice questions, very easy.

I only went to class 2 times and still got an A. Ruskin is incredibly boring and nothing he says in class is really necessary for your grade, except for the final. The papers are all independent of lecture, as is the playlist. For the final, all I did was memorize all of the assigned listening, which applied to most of the exam.

I loved this class. It was honestly one of my favorite classes at UCLA. I took it as a GE my senior year over the summer, hoping that it would be interesting and not too difficult. I found both to be true.

Reading through the previous comments, it states that Professor Ruskin has a monotonous voice, but I did not find this to be true in class. I felt that he was both passionate and knowledgeable about the subject matter. He even played live music for some of the sections! He opened up the floor to many debates and discussions that were very interesting. It was cool to see the other students' perspective on the same material that you had just heard and read about, especially when it was drastically different than what you had interpreted.

I often went to office hours, which I felt were very helpful in clarifying the direction of my essays and how to structure them. At first it was a bit overwhelming as a South Campus major to get back into writing, however Professor Ruskin helped make that transition easy. He is a great mentor and very easy to talk to about any questions or concerns that you have. He is the type of professor that you can have an open dialogue with, without being intimidated or making it seem as though you are wasting his time.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this class to anybody. If you put in the work, it is very simple to receive an A+. You also might just find that you now listen to music from around the world that you never would have known existed! :)

This class was really fun! Professor Ruskin always brought in guest speakers/artists to perform and discuss the music of the region we are studying. He uses powerpoint slides during the lecture and does not post them online, so I recommend going to every lecture. Ruskin seems like a genuinely nice person, and his passion for music really shows during lecture. For this class, we need to write 3 essays (which were relatively easy with the help of my TA) and finish the final worth 30% of our grade. We also get points for going to discussion, so make sure you attend!

The final had some confusing questions that he did not thoroughly review, but most of the questions were easy to answer. It was a 100 question final, and 40 of them had to do with the required listening. To do well on the final, review the listening notes Ruskin provides you with and focus on the study guide!

Overall, I recommend this class to any student! It was interesting and pretty easy.

After reading previous reviews of this class, i thought it would be fun class. Boy i was wrong, probably one of the most boring classes i have taken at ucla. grades depend on your TA as they are the ones reading your papers. Overall, i would say that i would not take it again

I found this course, a purportedly easy GE, to be more difficult than expected. Professor Ruskin is undoubtedly an expert in ethnomusicology, but his lectures do not quite display his expertise. The lectures were often extremely boring, and I frequently observed that the fraction of students who actually showed up to the 9 am often fell asleep within the first thirty minutes. He uses slides, but he uses them to mostly display photos and video clips, so there was not much to take notes on, and he does not post the slides as some other professors do. Ruskin did often have guest lecturers and performers come in place of his lectures, and these were actually interesting and exciting and became my favorite part of the course. If you're bold enough you could volunteer to go up on stage and learn to play instruments or how to do certain dances. I did so, and that's what made this class feel more fun and worthwhile instead of agonizing and unnecessary.

As far as the workload goes, there were three papers, evenly spaced throughout the quarter, and two quizzes held in discussion. As long as you put in some effort, and depending on your TA, the papers were not all that bad. However, the directions and expectations for them usually required clarification from a TA or from Ruskin himself. The quizzes were simple and based off of the listening examples required as homework. Those were simply memorization. Ruskin also posted readings each week, but these were wholly unnecessary and students do not need to complete them in order to pass the class. There is no midterm, just a final. It is 100 points of multiple choice, which I expected to be easy, but was actually rather frustrating and harder than warranted. The listening section was easy, but the other multiple choice questions were formatted in a way that were difficult to answer with confidence. As one of the most engaged students in the class, I expected it to be a cake walk, but I left feeling irritated and unsure of myself.

Overall, this was an easy course that does not even require the student to attend lectures. However, the lectures were extremely boring, and if I did not have friends in the class with me, I would have hated it. I can't decide whether or not I would recommend that others take it, so if you do, good luck.