This class depends a lot on how comfortable you are with econ and econ policy. This class is the study of migration but mostly this class goes into how econ motivates people and states to accept or not accept immigrants.
You have to attend guest lectures which are boring.

There is a fair amount of reading which is pretty dense and some of the hardest I have read for a Poli-Sci.

During section, the TA cleared up a lot of the complex reading which made the class easier.

Class is graded on a curve and via the GroupMe, it seemed that most people Got B+ A- on the midterm and final.

Didn't go to the lectures after week 5, got an A in this class. The good thing about this class (but could be bad as well) is that it contains a quiz regarding that week's readings in every week's discussion. This forces me to study all the content for the week before the discussion so I don't need to go through all the things right before the final. The textbook and powerpoint contain all the knowledge you need for finals, and the professor was just reading through the slides in class so no need to go to class if you don't want to. Your grades for paper totally depend on the TA so it is good to talk to them before start your paper to get their specific expectations.

The class was pretty straightforward but Peters' political bias shows itself during lectures and I found the subject material to be quite boring until the last couple of weeks of class. We were graded on attending guest lectures via Zoom, participating in the discussion sections, weekly quizzes, and two midterm/final take-home papers. The papers were graded fairly. It is virtually impossible to get less than an A in this class.

based on the reviews i saw, i avoided going to peters' office hours or talking to her directly and honestly this strategy was much more effective. i found the class material interesting, and though her lectures often jumped around, i was still able to follow necessary concepts bc she pretty much just outlined each chapter of the textbook. seriously just focus all your efforts onto the textbook and readings and you'll be fine-- but definitely still attend the lectures lol. also a lot of the quiz questions i struggled with were super specific on the readings and usually specific examples of countries who illustrate reading concepts.

AVOID MARGARET PETERS AT ALL COSTS! I am a global studies minor and had to take this class, and ignored her bad reviews on BruinWalk, hoping for the best. She is the most disorganised professor in the world -- she changed essay prompts the day the essays were due (MULTIPLE TIMES). In lecture, she goes off on tangents and somehow manages to insult every possible demographic (example: she said all white people are racist, latin american countries have nothing but cows and cities, she said she loves Kim Jong Un, college admissions of Asians should be restricted, and bashed anyone who does not agree with her politically). Listening to her class Makenna

Not only was she completely unorganized, she injected her personal political opinion into everything. One of our essay prompts was literally arguing whether or not we should restrict immigration in the southern border -- what does this have to do with the global economy?

If you can, avoid this class at all costs!

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.

This class just sucked. Professor Peters' syllabus said that grades would be curved, but they weren't. When many students emailed her about this once grades came out, she ignored them. Her TAs were also harsh graders and rude to students. Don't take this class

I really enjoyed the content of this class, in terms of take aways, but the structure was really poorly done. Professor Peters has great energy and has put together awesome, thorough presentations, but her style goes too fast (esp for a non-computer class) to truly grasp material. The readings were too dense and didn't really align always with the course. The midterm exam was extremely unfair in terms of time frame allotted (9 questions, must answer 8, in 75m) but she fixed that through offering extra credit and a much better assessment plan for the final. Overall, glad I took the course (was a requirement for major) because of what I learned overall, but it was a very stressful experience.