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 - I think Peter’s really cares about her students, and I often found her engaging and funny. She is incredibly educated on the issue of migration and it shows through in her lectures. The content is genuinley engaging and I’m happy I took the class. That being said, the amount of content we were expected to know and the amount of assigned readings was quite a lot. You absolutely will fall behind if you’re not sticking to the reading schedule and attending every lecture and studying (which is what happened to me- I had to evacuate cause of the palisades fires and fell behind the start of class). That being said, this class isn’t impossible and Peter’s nor her TA’s want to see you fail. It will just take a lot of discipline and interest in the class topic in order to succeed because you will be consuming so much information weekly and you have to be prepared for that. My one issue I had with the class, and where I saw a lot of people struggle was the lack of guidance in how to study for our quizzes. In this class our grades were based off a series of papers, quizzes, and one final collaborative paper. Everyone including myself did excellent on the papers because we had such thorough guidance and expectations on what was expected of us (and that’s what ultimately saved my grade). As for the quizzes, most people struggled because nobody knew how to study for them. One quiz would be test based, another would be lecture based, and another would be based on very specific details of one reading. There was no way to strategically study because the focus of each quiz was wildly different, and with the range of content we were expected to consume over several weeks it was impossible to memorize and prepare to do well on a quiz that felt like a series of trivia questions. In all, if you have to, or want to take this class do so when you feel like you can take on the challenge and/or don’t need to take a very heavy course load for the quarter. It’s a genuinely intriguing class and I enjoyed Peter’s as a person, there was just so much content to engage with and memorize in order to do well with the class for better and worse. I would suggest taking this class if you’re ready.
Winter 2025 - I think Peter’s really cares about her students, and I often found her engaging and funny. She is incredibly educated on the issue of migration and it shows through in her lectures. The content is genuinley engaging and I’m happy I took the class. That being said, the amount of content we were expected to know and the amount of assigned readings was quite a lot. You absolutely will fall behind if you’re not sticking to the reading schedule and attending every lecture and studying (which is what happened to me- I had to evacuate cause of the palisades fires and fell behind the start of class). That being said, this class isn’t impossible and Peter’s nor her TA’s want to see you fail. It will just take a lot of discipline and interest in the class topic in order to succeed because you will be consuming so much information weekly and you have to be prepared for that. My one issue I had with the class, and where I saw a lot of people struggle was the lack of guidance in how to study for our quizzes. In this class our grades were based off a series of papers, quizzes, and one final collaborative paper. Everyone including myself did excellent on the papers because we had such thorough guidance and expectations on what was expected of us (and that’s what ultimately saved my grade). As for the quizzes, most people struggled because nobody knew how to study for them. One quiz would be test based, another would be lecture based, and another would be based on very specific details of one reading. There was no way to strategically study because the focus of each quiz was wildly different, and with the range of content we were expected to consume over several weeks it was impossible to memorize and prepare to do well on a quiz that felt like a series of trivia questions. In all, if you have to, or want to take this class do so when you feel like you can take on the challenge and/or don’t need to take a very heavy course load for the quarter. It’s a genuinely intriguing class and I enjoyed Peter’s as a person, there was just so much content to engage with and memorize in order to do well with the class for better and worse. I would suggest taking this class if you’re ready.
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