As someone who had never taken a political science class prior to this one, I found this class to be moderately challenging in terms of paying attention during the lectures and preparing for the exams. Lofchie is a decent professor, but he does digress during his lectures and it appears as if he's simply rambling about nonsense. It's actually important to listen carefully to him as much of what he discusses that isn't on the slides appears on the exams. The midterm was entirely focused on Britain while the final mainly focused on France with a little bit of Britain in there. I wouldn't say the readings are important since there's maybe 1-2 questions on both exams about them. This class definitely isn't as easy as it might seem, so if you really want an A then be willing to put in the effort.

Professor Lofchie is an okay professor even though his lectures are extremely boring. Even though this is a comparative politics class, Lofchie spends most lectures talking about the histories of Britain and France. If you are interested and are familiar with European history, and the current politcal situations in UK, and France this class will be a breeze. If not, this class may be a little tough for you. It is important to take good notes, because even though lofchie has slides, some of the information that is important isn’t on the slides. Note that Lofchie may ramble on topics like the shape of the House of Commons, and French schooling, which may seem like random unimportant topics. However these ideas will show up on the exams. The two exam themselves are the only graded assignments that compose your grade. They are both 50 question multiple choice exams with the Midterm being worth 33% and the final being worth 66%. Most of the questions are basic, however some of the questions involve obscure information that was briefly talked about in class. Unlike other poli sci classes, PS 50 is light on required readings, and Lofchie provides them on CCLE anyways. You can just skim through the readings because very few questions were pulled from them. Overall this class was easy for me because I had a solid background in the politcal histories of the UK, and France. However for those who don’t and want a easy GE, this class will tougher than it looks at first glance.

Professor Lofchie was super boring although the good thing about his class was that even though it was an 8 am he always ended the class by 9:20 am. Basically, the class consisted of boring lecture (might I add you have to show up and take notes because a lot of slides are photos which are useless when it comes to studying for the midterm/final. The breakdown of this class was 50 multiple choice questions (all same version) and the midterm was 33% of your grade. The final also consisted of 50 multiple choice questions (all same version) and it was 67% of your grade.
I did pretty well on both. Midterm 44/50 and Final 47/50. And ended the class with an A, but majority of the students ended up with a B as their overall grade for this class. The class is pretty easy if you show up, take notes, study. But you HAVE to take notes cuz the readings he provides do not come up on the tests a lot. I would take him again but if you're not willing to be in class by 8am and start taking notes, I wouldn't suggest this class for you. Also there is no book you have to buy, he provides readings on CCLE as a PDF so that's another good thing about this class.
Anyway, goodluck!

I loved this class! Professor Lofchie was such an engaging lecturer, and his material was really interesting and easy to follow. There was one midterm and one final, but all were multiple choice and easy to do well in as long as you listened in class and took notes judiciously. However, paying attention in class is really important especially for this class because Professor Lofchie will mention a lot of things that do not come up in his slides, and will definitely help you grasp the material better. This class made me much more interested in British and French politics and would highly recommend to anyone looking to understand more about foreign governments without facing too much of a workload!

The only two graded assignments are the midterm (33%) and final (67%). Both of the exams were 50 multiple choice questions. I got a 82% on the midterm which was the average grade for the class and a 96% on the final. My final grade was an A. If you go to lecture and take notes, you'll be fine. Also, Lofchie spent a class talking about how to make wine so you will gain a variety of knowledge from the course.

The biggest piece of advice I can offer is go to class. The midterm was pretty easy; there was a lot less memorization and a lot fewer concepts to cover. 30+ percent of the final, however, was information that could not be found on the lecture slides or in the readings (believe me, I checked afterward), so it really makes a difference to attend lecture. Lofchie tends to ramble, but those ramblings often make it onto the exams so you do actually have to listen. The readings aren't terribly important, but they do help you understand the concepts better, and reinforce what you've been learning in class. Also, fortunately it's only 200 or so pages for the whole quarter, and the readings are only 10 percent or less of each exam.

Overall, Lofchie is nice, and the class was pretty interesting. I would take it again.

Lofchie is a very considerate professor. I can see that he spends a lot of time on his slideshows because it does contain important information for the tests. However, he does go off topic most of the time and it's difficult to catch on the main points needed to know for the tests.

My midterm score (33% of your grade): B+
I can't remember the grade exactly but that is the range

My final grade: B
so I assume I did not do as well on the final, which is 67% of your grade.

Some of the information is interesting, but the second course of the class is solely based on memorizations. It's either you know it or you don't. And also, it does require some outside research on the internet because he does not mention everything in lecture or readings. Personally, I never did the readings because the tests did not ask questions on the readings.

Professor Lofchie's a pretty cool guy and I enjoyed the class. Only graded assignments were the midterm (33%) and the final (67%); 45 multiple choice and 1 short answer for both. Assigned readings about every other week. Some were relatively easy, but some (esp. on France) were rather complicated. Lofchie does a good job of going over what's important about each reading.

Lectures weren't too bad. He has a tendency to ramble or go off topic, but I thought that they were interesting overall. You'll have to take detailed notes, because most of the information he lectures on isn't on the slides and he tests on factoids covered briefly in lecture.

Bottom line, if you test well and don't mind a disorganized lecturer, you should be fine. But if you try to get by with just the readings and don't go to lecture, you might have a harder time, since a lot of the tests comes from lecture.

I took this class thinking it would be a breeze and that it would hopefully be interesting because I am a poli sci major but its been the worst poli sci class I've taken at UCLA so far. Professor Lofchie is an extremely nice person and always willing to help with office hours, he is just super approachable. Yet, he is also a very horrible lecturer. He is incredibly disorganized and rambles on and on about topics that are very irrelevant to the subject and of course topics that will never appear on the tests. The class grading system goes like this, 33% midterm and 66% final, nothing else just weekly readings that at are times very much out of date and hard to understand, Lofchie even says this. Overall, do not recommend the class, save yourself the boredom and disorganization.

Honestly, I'm 100% positive the only reason Lofchie has good reviews is because, before Winter 2015 all of his tests were test-banked and he was too lazy to create new tests so students just memorized the answers.

Lofchie is an incredibly nice guy. Super funny, personable. However, his lectures are horrible and consist mainly of an unstructured, stream-of-consciousness-style regurgitation of a bunch of poorly linked together stories about the British and French governments. His lecture slides are anything but useful and seem to be no more than a decorative backdrop to his highly unorganized lectures. The worst part about this class is how much of it is so arbitrary and just meant as busy work.

Readings:

In the first half of the class you read a chapter by Hauss on the British government and its more recent history (mostly since Churchill/Thatcher) and a chapter by Harry Eckstein. The Hauss reading is just a plain old textbook. Very simple to parse through. The Eckstein reading is also very easy and is actually very interesting and eloquently written. However, the midterm exam will include almost NO questions about Eckstein’s chapter (even though it is by far much more interesting and relevant) and will, instead, prefer to pick the most useless, arbitrary facts out of the Hauss reading. Things like: “What is the population of Britain?” or “What percentage of the population is ___” which are mentioned only in passing (or even in the margins!) of the Hauss text are asked rather than meaningful questions about the conclusions Eckstein makes about where the British government derives its credibility (which we actually spent a significant time talking about, unlike the inane facts that made it onto the exam).

The second half is worse. You are tasked with reading two chapters by Barrington Moore. These are absolutely incomprehensible. In no way did anyone in the class understand them in any sense. Lofchie himself admits he can’t understand them at times. If you ask him about anything from the chapters in his office hours as I did you will quickly learn that this is true and that he does not intend of you to understand them in any way. On top of this, we never directly discuss the conclusion Moore makes in class and, often, it seems that a close reading of Moore actually reveals conclusions that are in CONTRAST to those presented in class! This is a very common theme in the class: you are assigned readings that very often contradict exactly what he says in class. You are then tasked with figuring out which source to believe. The content of the exams varies between facts stated in lecture and those found in the readings. What’s worse, I personally spent many, many hours trying to understand, annotating, and asking Lofchie about the Moore readings. It took an intense amount of work but I eventually was able to come up with a reliable outline I thought covered his main conclusions. Questions about Moore on the exam? Zero. Times Moore reading was mentioned in class, emphasizing its importance by the Professor? Countless. The contradiction between these two facts? Priceless.

Then there’s the second chapter of Hauss. It’s exactly the same as the first, involves mostly a history of contemporary French regimes and French political culture. The final exam (at least for me) drew *heavily* from this chapter. And I don’t mean in any meaningful way. Lofchie asked questions like “What percentage of the French population is muslim?”, “What is the rate of interracial marriage in France?”, and other questions that were (1) never discussed in class and (2) were chosen completely arbitrarily, often from the margins of the textbook itself. This may not seem difficult, but as you read Hauss, as with any textbook chapter, you will quickly see it is FULL of these types of small facts. There is no way to predict which he will pick to be on the exam as they bare no significant correlation to the content covered in lecture, so you are tasked with trying to memorize them all, however ridiculous it may seem.

Exams:

Exams are multiple choice, usually between 40-45 questions with a short “essay” question at the end that is worth between 5 and 10 points. You may be thinking, “Multiple choice! That’s great!” No. These are incredibly poorly written exams that, honestly, wouldn’t even belong in a high school class, but that is the closest comparison I can make. Your performance on the exam likely bares no relation to your actual understanding of the content which, in itself, is presented so poorly and with so many contradictions in between, you need to go ahead and let go of any predisposition to critical thinking or fact-checking of the content presented prior to preparing for this class.

I’ve already covered the part of the exams that have to do with the readings. The part having to do with the lectures are admittedly more predictable and straightforward, however they still suffer from the fact that this is a multiple choice exam created by a man who obviously equates intelligence with how many random factoids you could drop in a bar-type scenario, so most questions will tend to be oddly specific or seemingly insignificant. However, if you just make sure to take very thorough notes of the lectures, keeping in mind that he prefers to test on facts, you should be fine on this point. You’ll still have to relegate yourself to rote-memorization for this but it is more manageable.

Overall: Seriously, this class was ridiculous. Contradictions between the Professor’s lectures and his own readings as well as other sources are everywhere. The exams are a joke. The readings are arbitrary and often completely ignored in class. His lectures are so unstructured and contain so many tangents that it’ll make your head spin. I think this class could be great. I think Lofchie is an incredibly personable, great guy that could teach it well. But as long as he keeps it as unorganized as this and as long as his exams are so sloppily constructed, I would avoid it.