POLS W3522

Midterm, 10 Page Paper, Take Home Final. Reading was about 120 pages per week, but you need to get a lot of books and a coursepack.

This was a good class in terms of the material covered. Lectures were interesting and the professor would use every moment of class. He is soft spoken, so sit near the front of the room. Attending lectures will benefit you more than reading, though doing both helps. There was section, but if you said you had a class conflict, you did not need to attend. He is a harder than average grader.

Easily handle-able. Midterm, take home final, book review. Go to class, and you should be fine.

I know many will probably whine and complain about Bernstein, but I found him to be a fine professor. He speaks quietly and without much inflection, which would be, for me, the only legitimate gripe of students. If you pay attention (I know, it's a tough task for us Columbia students) the class is interesting and not terribly difficult. I did not do much of the reading for the first half and got an A on the midterm, because I went to class and paid attention. Bernstein is cute and has a great wit that you just have to listen for. The class is straightforward. If you have to take a PoliSci course and don't have attention issues, I'd recommend this class.

Lots of reading--do it, as you will fail the midterm if you don't, I kid you not.

My biggest regret this semester is not dropping this class while I had the chance. The lectures are incomprehensible and impossible to hear if you don't sit in the first few rows. There is a lot of reading, on which the tests are mostly based. The most enthusiastic students in the class are the large number of continuuing-education students; many undergrads don't even bother coming to class.

As I said, you must do at least some of the readings. There's no way you will pass the midterm otherwise.

Think very, very hard before you take this class. This man cannot stay on a lecture topic to save his life. Once, after only covering half the material he had planned to in the lecture, he commented, "I guess circumstances prevented us from getting to the other material...but I'm not really sure what those circumstances were." He frequently refers to all subjects in his lectures as "they" or "you" so when he took a comparative approach, it wasn't always clear which country he was talking about. The midterm was entirely based on outside readings; I don't think I would have been able to write an adequate response to the questions about Leninism if I hadn't been enrolled in political theory at the same time. TAs were excellent but just as unenthusiastic about the class as all the students; furthermore, they never had any idea where we were supposed to be in the syllabus since it had no dates on it. Readings were interesting, but not worth the horror of sitting through these lecturers.

This was a fanastic class. A painless history lesson. A rigorous political-science analysis. Statistics and anecdotes. Humor. A professor who dresses well and acts friendly, always taking times to answer questions without veering off-topic. He mentions books and authors, and you'll be jotting down the names so you can look them up later. Go with that instinct! (I did, and I'm now reading Solzhenitsyn's _The First Circle_.)