I don't care what anyone else says, this class is super challenging, tedious, and designed to make you suffer and on the verge of failing. The professor and TAs (especially the TAs) are extremely unprofessional and unempathetic If you want to keep your mental health intact, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS, you're for sure going to suffer over this "elective class".

First of all, each week you have to watch over 10 lecture videos and over 3 readings. There's 3-5 quizzes every week for the lectures, one final policy brief research paper, and 1 timed exam every two weeks for everything you learned. Each quizzes only have 1 super complicating question and 1-2 attempts, so if you fail, you lose 100% on that quiz. The quiz and exam questions are also written in a way that confuses you, making you unable to decide between two choices.

Here's what also happened in the class:
- The TAs are completely useless, students have been expressing how challenging this class is as an elective and how the timed exam is given with too short of a time to complete, and the TAs did nothing until the students start emailing the professors directly. And even then she took two weeks to make the adjustments when all her classes are prerecorded already.
- The TAs are also just absolutely crazy over the syllabus and rubric. You ask them a question even when it's not on the syllabus, they refer you to the syllabus still and said nothing else. They graded the quizzes and exams so harshly that even when it's open note, you still get a 30% grade.
- Best of all, when I attend my TA's office hours, she wasn't even there! I scheduled an appointment with her, and she wasn't even there neither! I had to wait over 40 minutes for her to come in after she saw my text, just for her to say "well did you read the syllabus?".
- What's laughable is that when I contact them about my concerns for the low grades they're giving me, they DISABLED the visibility of the grades and took days! This is really all just some sick game to them.
- Every week or once a week, other students and I will received multiple automated emails about "missing" assignments when we never knew that it existed before.
- At one point, I would also receive automated emails about the professor changing the due dates MULTIPLE times last minute.
- I submitted my assignment ON TIME, and the TAs and professor completely changed the assignment submission box which deleted my submission and they NEVER TOLD ME ABOUT IT. I had to reach out to them and say that my submission disappeared, and the only thing my TA responded to me was: “oh sorry it got deleted”.
- ^not only this happened one time, but it happened a second time on the same week. Where I submitted my comments and rubric for the peer reviews assignment and EVEN COPY AND PASTED AS A PDF TO SUBMIT IT AGAIN. Everything is gone the next day and the professor and TA has no idea what they’re doing. The entire class had to guess and figure out what happened in the slack channel.

This is only an elective and I tried my very hardest in this class, even re-watching lectures, reading the transcripts as I watch them, doing research on the class materials to better understand, etc. And I still get a 30% on my quiz. I have to emphasize again, I’ve never tried THIS HARD in any other classes. I’ve passed psychobiology, astronomy (physics), history, musicology, etc as GEs and I passed them all without being driven insane two weeks into the quarter. This “elective” class, is on a whole new level.

In short, the TAs and professor for this class is just heartless, useless, and unprofessional, they won't help you, they'll just increase the length of lectures, increase the amount of quizzes, and make the entire class more challenging as weeks go by, like they're torturing you on purpose. I stressed and panicked at least five times a week since week 1.