Overall suggestion: don't, unless you must.

Content: in-class midterm and in-class final, both with a mix of multiple choice, short answer, and essay prompts. Moderate difficulty.

Lecture: good lord I hated this class. Going into it I enjoyed US history, especially colonial-era. Very unique, very intriguing, very eventful. The course, however, managed to dampen that love for a whole quarter, leaving me a sad, broken man. Lectures are ridiculously fast-paced...I took around 10 pages of notes a lecture, recorded lectures on top of that to fill in what I missed (because typing at 90+ wpm is NOT fast enough to cover more than 2/3 of the GENERAL stuff he brings up), and STILL had tons of gaps in what was covered. Plus, readings involve primary documents, which are pretty rough by themselves, plus a few history texts on top of that, so come crunch time to go over the study guide, you're basically trying to pour a gallon of milk into a shot glass. Too much information to be invested in any one thing, so it just becomes a matter of retaining what you think the prof thinks is important, and regurgitating what he says.

I ended up with a B- in that class, and that's after contesting a grade I got from one of the readers over some comments that, in hindsight, surprisingly makes me more irritated now then I was back then. There was a dispute over me wording a short answer question "properly"...I was given credence that what I said was indeed true and correct, but because I didn't *word* it in the terms that he and the readers agreed upon, he didn't change the grade. It was a situation where it would have boosted a grade from a B- to a B, and in the big picture, am I going to survive? Yes. Still, it's really annoying to have, and this is still the lowest grade I've gotten at UCLA. Second instance, however, of a prof telling me "yes, you are correct, buuuuut I'm still going to side with the readers' grade"