I generally felt like this class was decent, but I wasn't a big fan of the grading distribution and structure of the class.

25% of your grade is participation, which involved attendance, a discussion section presentation, and answering questions in lecture. No attendance was taken after I think week 2, so basically everyone got all the points here if they did the presentation (which was easy, and while we never got grades for it, I'm pretty sure it was graded very easily).

20% of your grade is from two quizzes, which were of middling difficulty. These were on week 3 and week 5. Most people I talked to got decent grades on them, but not good ones. They are timed, multiple choice and short answer quizzes based off of lecture. Because the lectures cover so much information, the quizzes can be a little difficult. It is open note, but again you have a time limit that really prevents you from fully looking up questions. After week 5, there are no more exams, so you can basically check out and not pay attention to lectures anymore. The rest of the grading is on projects where you do your own research, so while lectures can help, they aren't particularly important going forwards.

20% of your grade is from two short assignments, which was a memo (3 page short essay) and a 2 minute speech/testimony. You worked with a partner. Both assignments were on the same topic. I thought the grading was mostly fair, but you had to work for an A on these assignments.

35% of your grade was the final project, where you worked with a group of 5-7 people. 25% was for the final paper and 10% was for the final presentation. The final paper was 20 pages max and was a super detailed research paper about a given topic. You have a good amount of time to work on it, and the large group made it manageable. He gave you feedback on your outline and then your draft. He really wants citations and numbers, so you have to do a large amount of research. I think our paper had almost 10 pages of double spaced citations by the time we finished. The final presentation was 10 min long, and it was difficult to condense all of the info in the 20 page paper into a 10 min presentation. Time limits were strictly enforced. I never got my grade back for the paper and the presentation, but given my final grade and my grades on the other assignments, I think I did decently well. I think that the grading is probably strict but generally fair given how much time and feedback you receive before the final draft is due.

I found lectures to be somewhat dense and not helpful at all after week 5, and discussion sections didn't even meet half of the time. There were also a lot of weekly readings, but I didn't think they were important and didn't do them. I thought the class was interesting enough, but the second part of the class was stressful due to all of the projects. I think it's a decent class to take if it fills a requirement for your major/minor.

I liked the "midterm" project where we prepared a debate on water use/rights with one other student. A very manageable "group" project. The final project was difficult to coordinate with 6 other students in the final 2-3 weeks of the quarter when we're all very busy. The lectures were super interesting and the prof, guest speakers, and TAs are obviously all very passionate about water rights and drought in California. Decent upper div that's not to complicated even if it's a bit of work and feels tedious at times