Overall, I do not recommend taking this class unless it is required for your major and/or your grad school. The content is interesting and manageable. My main issue is the grading since 90% of your grade is based on exams. The questions on the exams are specific and you'll feel good about answering them yet Soroosh's very particular rubric is a GPA killer. Fail to mention one thing on his rubric? Well you'll get marked half off. The TAs are ruthless with grading. As someone else mentioned, most people thought they did well on the exams and felt blind-sighted with the rubric. You can write the same thing as someone else just worded differently and the TAs will grade very very different. Super subjective grading. Not worth your time.

This course was very interesting. It made me affirm my choice in my major (MIMG). However, there is one gripe I had with the course: the exam grading. Before every exam, I thought that I had mastered each of the lectures covered. For example, for the first exam covering lectures 1-10 (each exam covers different lectures, final is also not cumulative), I thought I was pretty prepared to handle the exam. Lo and behold, I got the average score, which was a 72 out of 100. It doesn't help that your grade is totally dependent on the exams: the grading is based on three exams, all worth 100 points, and 40 points for the homework (which was super easy). Same is true of the second midterm (79 average). So, although the course was incredibly interesting, the exams were just so harshly graded, and your grade essentially depends on how well you do the exams.

I thought that this course was successful in almost every area. It was paced very well, the content was presented in an interesting way, the homework assignments were approachable, and there were several opportunities for help. The course did lack in one specific way: the exams were graded extremely harshly. I have talked to many people, and most of us felt that we performed very well on the exams, but our grades did not reflect this. This was incredibly frustrating because there was only 1 hour allotted to looking at and discussing exams, and if you could not make this time frame, then there was no way to see what your mistakes were. This was a very unfortunate part of the course that was discouraging and took away a lot of its merit in my opinion.