My feelings are kinda split on this class, but I don't regret taking it at all.

On the one hand, I loved Prof. Mitchell's presentations, which were always hilarious and very interesting. Gov. Dukakis is a real gem, and it's always fun to hear him talk about his career in politics.

On the other hand, most of the classes are actually taken up by guest speakers who vary in quality. Some - like the FBI Special Agent in Charge in Los Angeles - were incredible. Others - like a budget representative from a school district who sedated us with 50-row tables on each slide - were pretty bad.

Grading is also iffy here. There's no rubric or official grade distribution - Dukakis and Mitchell assign you a subjective grade based on your overall participation and effort at the end. As a result, the best possible strategy is to schmooze as much with Dukakis before class, during breaks, and afterwards to try and get him to remember you. For the individual report, it's very important to follow all the professors' recommendations on your first draft, and I also recommend a bit of back-and-forth correspondence on your topic, your thoughts, and their recommendations both because it'll help your final product and because it'll demonstrate that you're putting in the effort.

So be aware that half of the lectures are exceptional, half are dull. The professors are great, but it kinda takes a display of your interest in the subject material to get a good grade.

This class is interesting because most of the “lectures” are by various special guests from different industries who present to the class about their careers. For weeks 1-8, each week there is a different theme and different guests related to that theme come. I really enjoyed this class during this time period because Iearned a lot about public policy and the variety of careers one can have within this work branch. For this part of the class, I would give it a 5/5.
However, the last two weeks of the class are based on group projects where you and a group of about 6 other students have to work together to give a presentation on a public policy field. This part of the class I did not like-the group projects are set up so that essentially 1-2 students have to do all the work among the 6 group members because of the way that the professors organize the project. Maybe I just got a lazy group, but the majority of the workload fell on me and another student because my team members did hardly anything and this was especially stressful because it was the end of the quarter (i.e. I did not like this class the last few weeks, 3/5).
The good thing about this class is that there are no tests but the bad thing is that this means the professors base their grade for you on their opinions of you (based on attendance, whether you go to office hours, etc.) and two essays you do (one individual and one group project). Honestly I thought that I would like this concept of grading, but now I kind of wish we had had tests.
Overall, the material for this class is great and I loved it the first few weeks but if you hate group projects and classes without a rigid grading structure, I would not take this class.

Great class and great professor. Dukakis is about students first; not research, grades, ego, etc. If you are interested in CA public policy, politics, and/or public service, this is a great class to take. If you want an interesting class, this is also a good choice.