As PoliSci major, I enjoyed the class. The professor's an engaging lecturer, and he brings a lot of clarity to the readings, which can be tough to understand at times, especially what their relevance is to political science. The assignments consist of four papers, which have fairly challenging prompts, so it helps to go to lecture to really get the material. There are also some other small grades, like him randomly taking attendance once, a participation grade in discussion, and small pop quizzes in discussion which are easy to ace if you've done the reading. Anyway, I'd recommend taking the class if you have an interest the subject, as Panagia is a very capable professor, and the class has definitely increased my interest in political theory.

This class consists of 4 essays and participation in discussion. Don't be fooled it's a challenging class and Is more of a philosophy class than political science. I would definitely not take it if it is your first class in poly sci. With the grade only being 4 essays it's challenging to get a good grade if you don't do well on one, but having the right TA can make all the difference. I had Aerick and he was great so if you do take the class try to get him

JUST DON'T TAKE IT

As one of the reviewers stated below, it's 4 essays over the entire quarter, each one 3 pages long.
Lectures are generally boring, just with the professor babbling on about philosophical stuff, so you can skip those to save you the boredom.
The textbooks are mostly just classical novels you can get for a couple of bucks, and are really only needed for citing in your essays.
For my TA, I chose Jared, who was pretty laid back and was okay with you using electronics during section.
As for my essays, I started/finished each one within a day of the dates they were due and got 17/19/19/19 out of 20, with just a simple quote from each of the books needed for each essay.
Take this class if you want yourself an easy A provided you have a good TA to grade the essays.

Overall, it was an interesting class and Panagia is an engaging lecturer. His lectures do not explicitly link back to the papers, so you need to do some research and thinking on your own to answer the prompts. This should've been an easy A, but my TA had ridiculous expectations for the papers compared to other TAs and the questions on his pop quizzes are unreasonable. I still cannot fathom why he thinks we need to memorize quotes or minor details from the texts in order to show that we understand the main contentions of the authors (which is all we really need to get out of the texts in order to write the papers). Do NOT get Naveed as your TA. He is not only unreasonable, but also unprofessional. I went to his office hours and he was so distraught from the presidential election results that he did not even attempt to properly address my questions. Complete waste of my time.

Professor Panagia was an extremely helpful and interesting professor, who had a variety of ideas to contribute to the class. Your grade is based off of only four essay assignments and participation, so you have to be good at writing papers (max word count was 1000 though, so nothing bad). I went to office hours the first week, and my TA's office hours once, and got an A- in the course, however I know people who went more often who did better, so I would take advantage of the opportunity. My TA wasn't the most helpful, but overall I didn't find the course too challenging. A couple of warnings-
The professor absolutely truly does NOT lecture on the essay assignments. That is 100% true. You have to go to lectures because you want to learn more about the philosophers and are genuinely interested in the subject, because ultimately it will not help you write your paper.
I did not find this course particularly challenging, but that is because I have studied philosophy over four times in the past two years. If you have never taken philosophy before, it might be much harder for you to be able to interpret the works correctly AND apply it to politics without stumbling on one of the essays. Possibly dangerous, since each essay is 20% of your grade.
Overall, if you genuinely like the subject, the professor is humorous and brilliant when it comes to subject material, and I enjoyed the course immensely.

The lectures and professor were fine, easy to understand, and slightly interesting. I took it as a GE and it seemed pretty easy until I got my essays back. If you decide to take this class DO NOT GET NAVEED. If you show up to discussion and you have Naveed switch as soon as possible or find another poli sci elective to take because the highest grade he gives on essays is a B (if he's in a good mood, max, A-). Completely unfair class if you have him, everyone else gets A- A-'s and Panagia does not normalize or curve.

I'm a senior and this class was hands-down my worst experience at UCLA. My TA Naveed was absolutely the most unreasonable grader and the most useless TA. Panagia DOES NOT normalize grades which is so unfair because every other TA was so much easier than Naveed. It's only fair to normalize grades in a class where 80% of the grade is super arbitrarily graded essays. Ignore the good reviews from quarters prior to Fall 2016 because he completely changed his grading scheme. Do yourself a huge favor and don't take this class

Absolutely a great class and great professor. Highly recommend going to class and paying attention. Get to know your TA and find out what he/she expects.

Summary: take it if you're a political science, english, or philosophy major; don't bother if you aren't. It's pretty much a philosophy class about truth and power with lots of reading and interpretation.

This was a very interesting class. Let me begin that, unlike most, I enjoyed the majority of Panagia's lectures. He has a very deep and interdisciplinary way of teaching the material, and I really liked how he would give us a wider view on the overarching importance of the works we were analyzing.
The grading for this class consisted of eight essays, one a week after the second week, and a participation grade for discussing the readings each week in section. There were no tests, quizzes, or other papers/projects. The readings would take a significant amount of time, and we would sometimes cover two authors in one week. However, the papers were only 300-400 words each, and where meant to be concise and well thought out analyses of the texts on specific questions. I had Kye as TA, and he was awesome whenever I needed help with the readings. He had outlines and discussion questions that he would email out the night before discussion if we asked.
The issue that most people had with this class was that the lectures had nothing to do with the assignments. Yes, Panagia would lecture on the significance of the readings and provide general explanations, but the majority of interpreting the text was left to us. As a political science major I enjoyed the assignments and figuring out how the readings applied to the prompts, but everyone taking the class to fulfill a GE was dissapointed with how much you actually had to read and think.
A final note: Panagia is straight outta some liberal arts school in Canada, so our class was kind of an experiment for him and the department. I don't think most other POL SCI 10 classes go through so many readings so quickly, or have the same grading structure and assignment list.