HIST BC2413

Midterm and final weighted at 33% and 67% respectively. Two optional projects, and if you do one (you can't do both) the weights are changed to 25/25/50.

I agree with all of the reviews about Professor Carnes being a great lecturer, and overall I would advise people to take this class, but I would caution that the grading is surprisingly difficult because he reverse curves. For the midterm, for instance, the cutoff for an A was a 96, even though the upper quartile score was a 95, and the median grade on it was an 88.

3 assignments over the whole semester: midterm, optional project, and final. people complain about the midterm and final being difficult but if you make a quizlet with the key terms/people/events and study it and the essay questions you're good. project took some time but it was actually kind of interesting. overall pretty light workload. he also reuses questions from past exams so just study them and a quizlet and you're good

this was my favorite class of the semester. carnes is a funny, engaging prof and all the other reviews glazing him are correct. take his class if you can. he tries to tell a story with each of his lectures rather than read from the slides, and he also records and uploads the lectures. loved the class

One midterm and one final and optional assignment to boost your grade. The exams are relatively easy, it is extremely straightforward and he has past exams that you can study from.

A must take class at Barnard. Professor Carnes is extremely engaging and kind, makes every lecture engaging. He does not just read off of the slideshow, he tells a story and I think that is the best way to teach a history class. He also does zoom review parties and features his dog lol.

Very fair grading. One optional group project about redlining. Midterm, relatively easy but can be a bit tricky. Optional essay paper. Final. There are a couple of readings and a reading to do after each lesson just to get additional background and context. To be honest, I really didn't do the readings, but still got a good grade.

Saying this as a STEM major who kinda sucks at history, this is one of my favorite classes. Carnes is absolutely such a nice professor and so far my favorite professor here. His lecture was very fun and feels like a story-time, which was perfect when remembering events chronologically. He cares about his students and there does not feel like there is a barrier between him and the students, with lots of student engagement fueling the lecture. Totally unrelated to academics, but the room was really hot and he saw me fanning myself with my phone, and he gave me his folder to fan myself with. I cannot recommend Professor Carnes enough my absolute goat.

Your grade consists of the midterm (40%) and the final (60%), and there is an additional optional project/essay (which you have two options for) that can factor in there if you don't want your grade to be just those two tests. There are readings twice a week (for each lecture) which usually consists of a speech, a government document, or a chapter from William Chafe's The Unfinished Journey. I would say it's definitely most important to go to lectures and read whichever speeches/documents he assigns. The Chafe chapters aren't crucial, but they can be helpful in getting a little more perspective on the lecture material (my advice is to read the first few assigned chapters and see if it helps you, and if they don't, don't worry about them). The midterm and final are structured the same way: 70% of the grade is based on short answer questions, the remaining 30% is based on an essay. For the short answer questions, there are 14 and you pick 10 of them to do. One of them is just regurgitating 10 dates that he expressly tells you to memorize, and you only have to know the year, not the day/month. So basically that's 7 free points. And then the other ones are a mixture of identifying a quote from a primary source (that's why it's so important to do the readings), explaining the context of a political cartoon, or putting events in chronological order. There's partial credit for everyt…

This is a really great class! The lectures are really engaging and the tests (1 midterm and 1 final) are doable if you dedicate plenty of time to studying. He gave us PDFs of past years' tests and made it really easy to form/join a study group (at the end of the first or second lecture he asked anyone who wanted a study group to write their email on a notecard, then one of the TAs divided everyone into study groups of around 10 people). If you go to lectures, do the reading, join a study group, and study past exams, you'll do fine. The class is very narrative-based; it's helpful to study overarching themes and how certain events led to others. Also, the two books he assigned (Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody, and The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien) were both really interesting and I thought they provided a lot of valuable context for the things we learned about.