POLS V3250

Two papers (one of which is a very dry poll analysis) and a midterm and final. Also reading quizzes but these are literally two sentences and very surface level. The format for the exams are pretty interesting and honestly quite nice for an in class essay. He will give you the prompts beforehand and then choose two randomly. Basically, come up with an outline and memorize it and you will be fine.

The workload was fair. Each week, we were assigned 2-3 studies to read which typically ranged from around 25-40 pages, but honestly you could get away with just reading the abstract, first & last couple pages, figures/graphs, and conclusion. Some lectures were spent going in depth about a study, so you kind of don't really need to read it that much since it would be covered in lecture anyways. Throughout the semester we had 3 writing assignments, ranging from 3-5 pages in length. They were graded pretty easily - if you hit all the requirements, you would get a 100%. The midterm was as expected with some multiple choices and then a couple short essay questions, mostly about the studies we read in class. The one downside to this class was the final debate. There is no final exam, and instead, we had two class debates. Since a lot of the papers that we read contradicted one another, we were supposed to argue the case of opposing scholars with a team of other students in the class. However, the issue was that the lecture had about 90-100 people and each team had about 20-30 people. Organizing anything with that many people is a mess, and it's impossible to have a debate with that many people. Part of the assignment is to write a team brief, which was chaotic. During the actual debate, two people from each team were randomly selected to represent their teams in a debate in front of…

Sometimes the course content could be a bit common sense-ish but also sometimes was super interesting. All in all, really liked this class. Miller is super passionate and knowledgable about the subject. Definitely rec. He's quite a character and some people didn't seem to really get it, but honestly, he's the best so take it. He does have some weird idiosyncrasies (esp. when it comes to appealing your grade), but other than that, he's great.

This was my favorite class that I took this semester. Professor Velez is a fantastic lecturer, and it is clear that he is passionate about the subject. During his lectures, he speaks loudly, clearly, and quickly (but not too fast) so it is easy to follow along (which is more than I can say for some other professors). He also makes an effort to make the lectures entertaining and interesting, sometimes having in-class simulations or activities to engage the students. There is no cold-calling either, as these activities are all volunteer based (often for extra credit!) He is also funny when he makes references to memes and has a youthful sense of humor (for example, referring to a study about social media usage and cognitive abilities as the "brain rot study" and then telling students to "go outside and touch some grass.") Also for context, he does stand-up comedy on the side for fun. Aside from Professor Velez, I found the course content to be very interesting. Each week was a new topic related to voting and political behavior and we read various studies/papers on the topic, often with conflicting viewpoints. As I heard one student say, after taking the class, he felt like he learned nothing at all because the findings of each paper would be refuted in another, making many of the questions raised in the class about how voters behave left without definitive answers. The open ende…

Readings for every class and a quiz testing your understanding of the reading before the start of almost every class (20% of the final grade), two papers, a midterm and a final.

Many small assingments and one midterm, very chill.

I took this class after taking his Intro to American Politics, which he said would be a great continuation of the intro class, and I genuinely thought the class would be interesting since it was about voting patterns. The class indeed was interesting, with material covering a range of topics, and workload wasn't much. Prof Miller was also a fun and relatable lecturer, which made me want to take his classes in the foreseeable future. Although the Prof was willing to help, the lack of clarity in assignments did make it really challenging to do them accordingly. Most instructions were clear, but the tiniest mistakes would reduce your grade considerably, and it was the students would suffer, as a result. I was told "Prof Miller will take that into account" when I asked why the assignment criteria wasn't as detailed as it could be, and yet I and my classmates would be the ones whose grades would be affected. It also did get a bit disorganised at the middle of the term. Suppose, if certain reading was supposed to be done by Tuesday's class, we would be tested on it either Thursday or the Tuesday of next week. This made it a bit tedious because it would take a considerable amount of time for me to recall what the reading was about (and the readings have a different topic every class). TAs were willing to help as well, but the TA I got didn't know the material well and didn't provide…

Perhaps one of the best and easiest poli sci courses I've taken here. I also genuinely feel like I retained the content from the class. Velez is a very good teacher and his assignments / midterm was all very fair and graded generously. He also made us merch for our debate which was super sweet!