As the other commenters are saying, his class is pretty straight forward. He has a 5 page paper, a 10 page paper which acts as your final, and a midterm. I honestly thought the midterm was the hardest part because we had to write 3 essays in 75 minutes. However, the grading was not hard and despite the fact that I did not read a single page the whole year, I still managed to get an A as a 1st year pre-med student.

I would advise all of you to take the class because the material is not difficult and it's actually interesting. The only difficult part is staying awake during the long lectures.

Dr. McCumber was a great professor!

Great class and easy GE. Professor McCumber is an incredible professor and I walked out of the class incredibly interested in German philosophy. The class breakdown is a midterm,a five page paper and a ten page paper which is not too bad and your grade depends on your TA. Overall, the class was great, learned a lot and McCumber was an amazing professor.
Also, selling the course reader for the class message me **********

Great professor. McCumber knows his stuff, and it is truly fascinating to go to lecture and listen to him. The philosophy readings can get a bit dense, but all you need is the clarification in lecture to keep up.

Grades consist of an in-class midterm, one 5-Paged Paper, one 10-Paged Paper. Nothing too stressful, but writing ten pages on philosophical ideas WILL make your head hurt. TA's do all the final grading, which unfortunately can make or break this course.

McCumber is fantastic in lecture, but I wouldn't advise going to office hours unless you really, really know philosophy... otherwise you will feel a bit overwhelmed and he will just ask you "Well, what do YOU think?". But overall, this class was great! A really interesting GE with an incredible professor. One of the reasons UCLA has the academic reputation that it does.

I would highly recommend German 56! Professor McCumber is very helpful and he actually captures numerous subtle points in the books. He will also tell you the page that you can refer to if you are going to write a paper. Mid-term paper is about a five pages comparison and final paper is a topic that you can choose on your own. He is tolerant also that you can argue as much as you want even if some parts are not 100% accurate

Coming from an Engineering major with no philosophy background or interest prior to this class, I would highly recommend German 56! McCumber does a great job at explaining some really difficult concepts and in general you don't need to remember every detail, just the main ideas of each philosopher. While the lectures can sometimes get a bit boring if the topic doesn't interest you (he doesn't use any slides and will only write down 2 or 3 words on the board per lecture), the workload isn't too difficult. The final is a 10-page paper but you get to choose the topic and it doesn't even need to be all philosophy; as long as there is an idea relating to one of the philosophers covered in the course, the paper could be about politics, art, history, etc. I think the best part about the course is the wide range of ideas we go over.

The discussion sections are really helpful for clarifying some of the difficult ideas presented in lectures. I highly recommend Barry as a TA, he's a really caring guy and answers questions well.

The readings assigned are the philosophical writings of the current philosopher himself, meaning it's usually very tough to read. However, if you attend all the lectures and discussions, you probably won't even need to read any of the materials. The books are really only useful in papers when you need to pull quotes.

Again, if you're looking for a GE that isn't too difficult but teaches you a lot about the very essence of history, politics, religion, and more, take German 56!

The material for this class is very difficult. As in, it might take you 10 minutes per page to understand, if at all. But Dr. McCumber is very helpful. He goes over all the major ideas in lecture. The discussion section basically was a clarification seminar. You could probably pass this class w/o reading the material. Dr. McCumber grades essays very strictly, so hope you get a TA to grade your papers. Overall, nice class. Hard, but gives you a different outlook.

I really enjoyed this class! Not only does it incorporate history as well as philosophy but Mccumber is a really great teacher. He is great at lecturing and without doing any of the readings I was able to get an A-. Overall very good.

The work load for this class consists of 5 paragraph responses to various questions that the professor poses, an essay style midterm exam, one 5 page paper, and a 10 page paper. There is no percentage breakdown of your grade, so you won't know how you're doing until you get your final grade.

The course gives you a pretty good overview of about 10 different philosophers and their views. I wouldn't call this an easy GE. It's true that you don't need to do the reading in order to do well on the papers. One tricky thing about the grading is that you don't know who will be grading your paper. For example, the professor chooses to grade some papers from each assignment, and his grading is noticeably harsher. He graded my midterm and 2 of my paragraph responses.

This course didn't help me become a better writer, but it did help me learn much more about a topic that I previously had no interest or knowledge in.

I highly recommend this class to anyone looking for an easy GE. I wrote every paper last minute and got an A in the class. In fact, I turned in my 10 page final paper two days late (I wrote the paper in 14 hours), and still got an A in the class. If you go to lecture and take good notes, you won't have to do any reading. Never went to office hours and never had to. The man knows his stuff and lecture is all you need.

MY LAST GE, EVER, AT UCLA. I had been putting this off until to the very last possible quarter, and I definitely did not look forward to taking this class.

However, it turned out ALOT better than I expected.

Professor McCumber is an extremely intelligent man-he sure knows his German philosophy! I have no interest, whatsoever in philosophy, but I actually grew more intersted in this subject after taking German 56. His lectures are very well-organized.. he goes through philosopher by philosopher, laying out their main arguments and ideas. I think lecture attendance is the most crucial aspect in getting a good grade- readings are important for pulling out quotes when writing papers, but GO TO LECTURE because the material is so dense, that some explanation is needed. and Professor McCumber provides great explanation and detail.

Overall, great GE. I would definitately recommend it since alot of the GE's I have taken at UCLA sucked!!