Robert Shapiro

A phenomenal class. As other reviews have said, Professor Shapiro is ultra accessible and would even respond to your hopeless emails on weekends, evenings, and holidays. He truly cares about each student and want to help them succeed. I cannot comment more highly on Professor Shapiro's teaching skills, as many have pointed out. The only downside is he does not use slides and handwriting could be ineligible at times. That being said, he totally deserves a gold nugget and the course teach some extremely useful skills to apply quantitative research in social sciences.

I am a political science major who decided to take 3704 and 4911 because I was frustrated at being unable to understand SO many political science articles I read in my other courses. I asked one TA, what were these stupid charts and why was I supposed to believe what they were saying? He encouraged me to take one of these course and I haven't regretted it since. If you are interested in learning this voodoo magic--which is really linear regression or as economists call it econometrics--read this review. I have taken three of these courses and am writing this detailed review because I would have benefitted from something like it a year and a half ago when this adventure started. I've taken POLS W3704y Data Analysis & Statistics for Political Science Research with Professor Shapiro, POLS W4911y Analysis of Political Data also with Shapiro, and POLS W4912x Multivariate Political Analysis with Shigeo Hirano. All of these are applied econometrics courses in the Political Science department and it can be tough to tell them apart and decide which to take. REVIEW OF PROFESSOR SHAPIRO Professor Shapiro is a fantastic teacher. Applied econometric analysis of political and economic data isn't really something that is easy to get excited about, but by God if anyone can get students excited about the subject, it is Robert Shapiro. The quintessential problem most teachers of math/statistics…

I'm a Polisci-Econ major and I had the choice of either taking POLS 4910 or the STAT class. TAKE THIS ONE! I've heard many horror stories about the stat class (to be fair, horror stories often accompany math classes.) This class was GREAT! It's not all that interesting - but if you're a polisci-econ major, it's VERY useful. You learn how to apply statistics to political science - you learn how to use STATA which is a great program for those who want to quickly find out if particular political hypotheses can be supported empirically. Professor Shapiro is a really nice guy, he lectures well.

I would recommend this course to anyone who wants to get a better sense of AP or a general survey of political behaviour and opinion. As a non-American, I found this course to be very beneficial to understanding the complexities or nuances of AP as opposed to the very surface level understandings or media driven perceptions of AP I previously had. 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2021 Course: POLSGR8210_001_2021_3-COLLOQONPOLITICALBEHAVIOR : POLSGR8210_001_2021_3 - COLLOQ ON POLITICAL BEHAVIOR Instructor: Donald Green

Heavy. No reading; he says the paper is 5pp but usually we have a lot more to discuss. But I learnt so much from this class and never regret it.

A phenomenal class, as I knew it would be. Professor Shapiro's teaching style is ultra-accessible. He comes off as comfortable with the material and, crucially, projects that feeling onto the students (whereas some professors speak very informally about quantitative subjects but all it does is wall them off from students who struggle to grasp the quantitative intuition). It's tough to explain, but I just genuinely enjoy being in the room when he's teaching. Favorite class ever (and I'm not otherwise quantitatively inclined). The real strength of this course is in its structure. The material is tested with five 5-page papers. There's no midterm or final or obnoxious busywork problem sets. For the people who are terrified of papers: Relax. It's not open-ended. He gives a handout that walks you through the STATA procedures for each of the techniques required for the paper. You get to come up with your own theory of interest, find the variables, he basically tells you how to crunch the data, and then you interpret it. For the people who will then say that one doesn't learn anything when one is told how to do it: You are wrong. I will bet you eighteen trillion dollars that I: 1. Have a better mastery of statistics from Quantitative Political Research and Analysis of Political Data than you do from studying for your final exam. 2. Can better translate that mastery into the correspon…

Not bad at all. No reading. SERIOUSLY. But make sure you keep up with the paper assignments (there are five) and he says you can hand them all in at the end of the semester. They take a lot of time - they're not hard, just time consuming. So don't be stupid and procrastinate until you're writing all five the night before. It's not fun, trust me.

Assigned readings that you don't have to do but would benefit from doing. 5 pretty grueling reports where you report your statistical tests and then analyze them. They each take a good bit of work and time, so get a start on them early!

Five 5-page papers. A healthy reading list that you can safely ignore for the papers as long as you find yourself understanding everything that's covered in lecture.