I took Soc 121 with Professor Sexton, and while he was nice and engaged in good conversations during office hours, the class structure and grading process were incredibly frustrating. There is no rubric or clear grading criteria—TAs grade based on how they feel rather than effort or completion. I lost random points on every assignment without any explanation, even after emailing both the professor and TA. I also met with the professor twice in office hours to clarify what I was missing, but I never received clear feedback or reassurance.

The biggest part of the class is an 8-week ethnographic project (40% of your grade), which can be a paper or a video and can be done with a partner. You're expected to do multiple visits to a congregation and submit two sets of field notes, but again, there's no grading rubric, so you have no idea how you’ll be graded. The final was also unpredictable—we were given six questions a week before and had to answer one at random in person, with only one minute to respond. No rubric, no expectations, just vibes.

The workload is manageable—you read three books and write 800-word summaries (again, with no grading criteria). Lectures are boring but not unbearable. Overall, the class isn’t the worst, but the lack of transparency in grading makes it really frustrating. I wouldn’t recommend this as a random sociology elective unless you’re okay with uncertainty and arbitrary grading.