This wasn't the worst class I've taken by any means but I would tell anyone thinking about this class to drop it and find another poli sci or ge class. This professor is condescending and seems to not understand that students have lives outside of class. I took this during Covid and he still made active participation mandatory. The final exam is ridiculously difficult with the class averaging an F, and his essays are extremely time consuming, detailed, and tedious. He and the TAs are harsh graders. He does curve the final grade but not by much, my grade went from a C to a C+ which I thought was not nearly enough considering how difficult the class was, especially during a pandemic. I promise you you're better off without this class.

This class is a strange combination of very approachable, easy small weekly quizzes and extraordinarily difficult papers. The lectures are broken up into digestible pieces, however the readings are challenging and long after week 4, when the course material no longer uses the original textbook and instead uses pdfs uploaded to ccle. I do not recommend this to anyone just trying to fulfill a GE requirement unless you are extremely passionate about comparative politics. Class material is interesting but high participation grades are hard to come by, instructions for papers are purposefully vague, standards for papers are very high, and it is challenging to receive constructive feedback on assignments, because different TAs grades separate parts of the same assignment. To succeed in this class, read every reading closely and exhaust all resources (office hours, active participation in discussions, etc).

I found the content of this class super interesting and engaging and Professor Thies seems like a super nice guy but the workload was very overwhelming at times. The readings are fairly lengthy but are important to understanding the concepts explained in lecture and discussion. I thought the video responses were engaging and fairly straightforward but the essays were graded very harshly and took a lot more time than was estimated. Additionally, this class is graded on a curve which should end up helping everyone cause the essays and final (which are a large portion of your grade) had pretty low averages. Overall, I thought the class was interesting, it was just hard to keep up with the work at times, especially during my first-ever quarter at UCLA.

A lot of people struggled in this class/ did not like the professor. I can certainly understand why people might not find Thies very likeable, however I have come to the conclusion that he is tough for our benefit and is often misunderstood. The class itself was not very hard, there was just a lot of reading. In order to do well, you have to stay on pace with the readings. But overall the material wasn't hard, it was just a matter of doing the work to know it. I did not find this class so ridiculous that I would not ever take it again. In fact, I probably would take it again. I learned a lot and challenged myself. For poli sci majors, this class reinforced my belief that poli sci is the field for me. Also, participation in discussion sections was very important for participation grades. My TA gave plenty of opportunity to earn my grade, so this specifically was not a huge issue for me. However, with the Zoom format, you do have to put in some extra effort.

Okay, if you're a first year undergrad polsci major I would not recommend this class. This class isn't IMPOSSIBLE it's just unreasonable. The readings were so long I did more readings in that class than I did in my other two classes combined. Easy questions are really vague. You have to answer EVERY QUESTION exactly and then some. Papers require a lot of research. DO NOT start a paper on the last day. Do a few problems each day until your done. WORK ON THE PAPERS WITH SOMEONE! The first paper I did I got a 69 and worked really hard on it. After that I did every other paper with a friend so if I missed something they'd catch it and vice versa. My grades went up by 10% alone. The quizzes are definitely doable if you read but you have to read! The readings were just so unnecessarily long. I had to watch multiple 2 hour documentaries which was just too long for me personally.

The reviews that this class is hard are definitely true. If you’ve never taken a poli sci course before, don’t start with this one. That being said, if you have take a few poli sci courses and are interested in comparative politics I would recommend taking this class. The required text is by far the easiest read I have ever had in a poli sci course, and the information provided in lecture and section was great. The grading can be very annoying and arbitrary, but if you consistently attend TA office hours and work hard, you can pass.

I feel like Thies gets a bad wrap. OK for a GE this was way too much work, and for an undergraduate intro course, this was way too much work. I spent more time on this class than I did for my major classes and I'm an engineering student which I must admit felt very annoying. I thought lectures were engaging enough and Thies's dry humor made me chuckle quite a bit in class, he's like a sad comedian who accidentally became a professor and is now one straw away from having a midlife crisis. I even went to his office hours once to ask about what kind of graphs he wanted on a paper and he explained how back when he was in college the only thing that was on the internet, was porn and the news, which I must admit seemed like not only a strange thing to admit to watching on school computers but also probably not true. I think a lot of people felt that the midterm papers were unfair, I will admit that they took an eternity to do and Thies's prediction of 4 hours was a pretty grotesque understatement, but if you put thought into them and answered the whole question you would usually get pretty good grades. If you started the night before it was due however you would be SCREWED. Discussion participation was annoying until you realize that even a fart could pass as a well-crafted argument that you can earn points for... after which it becomes pretty easy. Overall, I think this class isn't as bad as everyone says, and if political science interests you and you have a good work ethic you'll manage.

I really loved this class! Professor Thies is a super great lecturer and he has a dry sense of humor that I vibe with. It is possible to skip this class and just go based on the textbook, but I would not advise that just because the lectures are really good and help clarify things. Even if you do understand a topic from the reading, you come out with a new understanding afterward. There is no midterm or final; they are replaced by a couple of papers. They are like problem sets and I honestly enjoyed writing them! Admittedly, I pulled an all-nighter on the second paper and did not do super well on it and I still got an A. I would not recommend that because I did not think it was going to be like an 11-page paper. At the same time, I did not complete any of my papers more than 12 hours before the deadline. My TA Kevin Gatter Espinosa was the best! His slides during discussion were peppered with tasteful and relevant memes. He was also very approachable during office hours and helpful both in person and over email. Kevin always responded within an hour of me sending him an email with a couple of questions. I also like how he connected his own research to our lessons. I would highly recommend taking this class!

I saw that this class had bad reviews, but my logic was hey, how bad can it possibly be if I put in the work?
If you can push through a class that demands high effort for low learning value, you might be ok, but for me after the first two lectures I wasn't motivated to put in any effort.

I copy-pasted my course eval if you're looking for specifics. (Disclaimer: some of these things may have been solved/modified by the next time this course is offered.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This course + instructor was not effective for my learning. Here are 4 ways this course could be improved:

1. I think the low stakes reading quizzes were a good idea, however, I achieved the 60%+ mark on every quiz without reading. I liked gaining the points that way, but I thought I would let you know, since obviously the point was to get us to do the readings.

2. The two papers felt like busywork – taking screenshots and tracking down obscure, difficult to find details about certain governments is not learning. I spent more time doing this busywork than engaging with and writing about the material. Writing about the implications/effects of information/data is what learning is, not the busywork, so if you continue to instruct this course in the future I encourage you focus more on what students will get out of these writing activities, and significantly reduce the busywork portion.

3. After a near failing score on the first writing assignment, I discussed with my TA how I could do better next time. I found that in order to receive all the feedback I wanted, I would have to talk to every single TA in this course. By making it difficult to receive feedback on work, this directly inhibits learning from mistakes, which is necessary in perhaps the strictest graded class I have ever taken at UCLA. (I am in my second year and have taken three upper division courses.)

4. Generally, I was very confused by the grading in this class, but especially the participation grading. In any other class, I would have gotten an A in participation. I follow the participation instructions on the syllabus, yet I am not satisfied with my grade. If this class follows a curve system, why wasn't that information on the syllabus?

In conclusion, this course can be improved by fixing the reading quizzes, not having paper prompts that require hours of finding small details, making it so every TA has access to their students' entire grades on papers (so they can provide feedback on more than only the questions they graded), and putting what is expected of students, a grading rubric, and whether or not a curve is employed on the syllabus.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS FOR A GE. Readings are heavy week to week and the papers are even longer. If you do take this class, be sure to go above and beyond what is asked in the prompts for the three papers. These papers rely heavily on data analysis skills and require heavy attention to detail. Grading will be rough as Thies likes to rank everyone on a curve. Definitely will not take again.