Loved this class! Very interesting. Learned a lot. Baylor is an extremely smart, funny dude. Midterm and Final will both have study guides and very easy, and fair to prepare for.

He is an ok professor. His lectures are kinda all over the place like I never knew what I was suppose to be taking notes on. There are reading quizzes that are suppose to be easy, but they can be hard. I personally found that having three lecture quizzes worth 30% of your grade was brutal. So, pretty much, if you bomb one it can be difficult. That being said, his midterm is pretty easy and so is his final. He will give you feedback on outlines for the midterm and final essays. I found the subject kind of boring, but if you like stuff like public opinion then take it.

Overall, I enjoyed this class. The material is extremely interesting, and taking this class changed the way I think about politics. I feel much more informed about partisanship, polarization, voting behavior, and the relationship between identity and politics. If you want to become more politically literate in a more practical sense, this is the perfect class to help you understand why people vote the way they do.

As for Professor Baylor himself, I always found him to be extremely responsive and helpful. He gives great insight and is eager to help students better understand the material if they reach out. Although it is true that he was a bit disorganized at times with forum posts, I don't think it's fair to say that he doesn't care about his students. Like us, professors are also adjusting to virtual platforms.

This was an interesting class, and as long as you are willing to put in some work and reach out when you need help, you will do well and learn a lot.

I came into this class worried because of the Bruinwalk reviews. However it seems that things have changed with the class format given he said he changed it based on feedback. Professor Baylor is a very kind and funny individual, all the lectures were very engaging and fun, while also very informative. There are three tests throughout the quarter worth 30% of your grade. The last 10% was an in class discussion that I am pretty sure is just graded for showing up as I think pretty much everyone got a perfect grade on it. He gives a study guide for each of them. 10 points are multiple choice and the other 20 are short essays answering a question. If you do the study guide you should be well prepared to do well on the tests. The lectures were extremely engaging and fun. It was by far my favorite class that I took last quarter and would highly recommend it to anyone. Unfortunately Professor Baylor doesn’t teach every quarter but you should have a great time with him if you get the opportunity. His office hours are open and I went to them regularly finding them quite helpful and informative. I will say the readings for this class I would say are pretty important if you want to guarantee an A in the class but there wasn’t very much. Basically if you just show up to the lectures and fill out the study guide you should be good for an A. The class is very fun and was really stress free after I got the formula down for the first test. Also the short essays are graded quite fairly even my weakest one got a 10/10. If you are looking for a fun and easy class while learning a lot I would definitely recommend it. I couldn’t recommend this class enough if you are lucky enough to get it.

Professor Baylor did not care at all about the fact that a pandemic was occuring during this class. He was dismissive to our concerns and ignored our emails. He was very unorganized and would post assignments with only 4 hours before they were due and not give us any extra time for them. Imagine being an international student during that, he literally did not care about timezones. For instance since the midterm paper deadline was 11:59pm and 0 seconds, if you submit it at 11:59pm and 1 sec he counted it as late and docked you 15%. His midterm and final paper rubrics are also incredibly convoluted and so nit picky that people weren't even sure what he was really looking for us to write about. For instance there were points that said "paragraph shows nuance" but he never explained what nuance was. He also had readers grade our midterm paper who graded very slowly and inconsistently. He also didn't think it was his job to tell them a deadline to finish grading which left some students waiting for midterm scores for weeks. He really wasn't well suited for online teaching. He got upset when students were a minute late to zoom class and complained that he shouldn't have to let students in after class has started. Overall he was just very unaware of everything going on outside of his class and was very hard to reason with. I do not recommend him as a professor he made this class way harder than it needed to be.

I loved the content of this class, and I did well on the exams, which seemed fair to me. However, a large chunk of the grade was based on a group project. One of my group members went completely MIA and didn't do his part. I emailed Baylor to ask him to take this into consideration when grading, and he basically said that's too bad! And we got the lowest grade in the class. He thinks he's a hot shot so he doesn't care about helping his students. Shame because I loved this class. For content, I have NEVER gotten a B in a political science class here.