Professor
Margaret Peters
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2019 - this class was a complete disaster and i didn't really learn anything other than the power of divide and conquer. there was a ridiculous amount of reading, easily double the average UCLA class, and we had weekly reading quizzes that had the same four questions each time. to tackle this with sanity relatively intact we had made a study group and used a google doc to divvy up and stockpile the answers for each quiz. i think in a different life peters wanted to be a good professor but gave up bc she refuses to acknowledge that the way she understands info as an "expert" is not the same way undergrads process information. my ta, i think his name was cesear, he was really nice, there was a female ta who was also nice, and then there was a nasty german guy, julian. each ta was responsible for grading one paper for everyone instead of each ta grading their own students' papers. so for one of my papers, nasty guy took off 18 points bc he didn't like my intro or conclusion but then offered no feedback as to how they could have been improved. at the end of the quarter after evals were turned in julian sent out a horrible email to his sections where he threw the other TAs under the bus by saying something like he was doing them a favor by grading harshly or whatever bs he used to justify his power trip. my advice is don't take this class, but if you were like me and a gs major and had to take this, do everything in your power to score high on assignments where you can either memorize answers like the reading quizzes, or be able to reference open book material like with the papers, bc the final was a gd nightmare that i know i flunked, but bc i did really well on the other components my final grade wasn't too bad. funny part was i took a different political econ class later on that had some of the same material and the prof wasn't even tenured like peters and she was able to teach it in a way more concise and easy to understand manner.
Spring 2019 - this class was a complete disaster and i didn't really learn anything other than the power of divide and conquer. there was a ridiculous amount of reading, easily double the average UCLA class, and we had weekly reading quizzes that had the same four questions each time. to tackle this with sanity relatively intact we had made a study group and used a google doc to divvy up and stockpile the answers for each quiz. i think in a different life peters wanted to be a good professor but gave up bc she refuses to acknowledge that the way she understands info as an "expert" is not the same way undergrads process information. my ta, i think his name was cesear, he was really nice, there was a female ta who was also nice, and then there was a nasty german guy, julian. each ta was responsible for grading one paper for everyone instead of each ta grading their own students' papers. so for one of my papers, nasty guy took off 18 points bc he didn't like my intro or conclusion but then offered no feedback as to how they could have been improved. at the end of the quarter after evals were turned in julian sent out a horrible email to his sections where he threw the other TAs under the bus by saying something like he was doing them a favor by grading harshly or whatever bs he used to justify his power trip. my advice is don't take this class, but if you were like me and a gs major and had to take this, do everything in your power to score high on assignments where you can either memorize answers like the reading quizzes, or be able to reference open book material like with the papers, bc the final was a gd nightmare that i know i flunked, but bc i did really well on the other components my final grade wasn't too bad. funny part was i took a different political econ class later on that had some of the same material and the prof wasn't even tenured like peters and she was able to teach it in a way more concise and easy to understand manner.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2025 - Prof. Peters is organized but assigns too many readings that would counter act what was said during lecture. She also always finds a way to talk about how much she hates Trump every lectures which kind of gets annoying after it happening all the time. Professor Peters does know the material very well but I feel that she only talks about surface level things and could go into more detail for other topics. There are no assignments in the course other than unit tests (3) and one white paper. I think that it get difficult when the professor never mentions an assignment or test is due until a couple of days. Even though as student, we should be keeping track of our assignments, I think that it is very important for the professor to speak about them. If you are not very interested in migration then do not take this class. Majority of the people took this course because with was one of the last ones open during enrollment.
Winter 2025 - Prof. Peters is organized but assigns too many readings that would counter act what was said during lecture. She also always finds a way to talk about how much she hates Trump every lectures which kind of gets annoying after it happening all the time. Professor Peters does know the material very well but I feel that she only talks about surface level things and could go into more detail for other topics. There are no assignments in the course other than unit tests (3) and one white paper. I think that it get difficult when the professor never mentions an assignment or test is due until a couple of days. Even though as student, we should be keeping track of our assignments, I think that it is very important for the professor to speak about them. If you are not very interested in migration then do not take this class. Majority of the people took this course because with was one of the last ones open during enrollment.
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