I wished the lectures weren't prerecorded and soo lengthy. I basically did not end up watching any lectures beyond those in week 1. Grading was slow and many people were frustrated because by week 9 there was still no clear idea of what the grades for the class would look like. Content was fairly interesting, but perhaps too much was attempted in too little time. And the textbooks which were mandatory to purchase were not particularly helpful (sometimes even confusing).

Overall, this class was enjoyable and provided a great introduction to public affairs. Professor Stoll was very passionate about the subject matter and tried his very best to make the class interesting and engaging.

Grading Breakdown: The class is broken down into 2 policy memos (45% of grade), 2 midterms (40% of grade), one op-ed assignment (10% of grade), and discussion section attendance/participation (5%). This is a pretty fair breakdown and offers pretty good distribution across assignments.
Lectures: This class was very lecture based with lectures focusing on public policy basics and sub-topic breakdowns (i.e. lectures on heath policy, economic policy, crime policy, etc). This provided a great introduction to future studies in public affairs. I will say, however, Prof. Stoll did get sidetracked often and sometimes only got through 3 slides in one lecture period, focusing instead on a class discussion or going over class logistics. We would try to play catch up but never fully covered all lectures. He also sometimes failed to show up for lecture and his slides were not the easiest to follow.
Exams: The class consists of two midterms (no dedicated final exam although midterm #2 is week 10) that include true/false, m/c, short- and long-answer sections. In my opinion, the exams were fair and covered key concepts and gave case studies/scenarios that needed to be resolved. Exam grading was on the slower side but fair. Prof. Stoll was clear on what would be covered and the TA's held review sessions in discussion.
Essays: The class consists of three total essays of relatively short length (500 words (op ed), 4 pages (each memo)) that were interesting to write in my opinion. He does change up the essay prompts so ymmv, but the first two essays we got to choose our topics while the last one was on Social Security. We had a long time to write each one and the deadlines were spaced out, but this is one of the main weaknesses of the class. Prof. Stoll failed to release assignment specifics (i.e. rubrics) until like 3-4 days before the due date and communication between the TAs and professor was weak. They often didn't know the specifics and failed to provide examples or even specifics on formatting. Also, your specific TA does not grade your papers, making it hard to know what is expected of the assignment. I definitely recommend working with classmates for peer review as the TAs are not helpful in that regard.
Discussion Sections: Personally, I found the discussion sections to be the worst part of the entire course. Instead of focusing on diving deeper into the subject matter explained in lecture, we would review writing tips for the writing assignments, repeating the same key points each week. Even though my TA was very helpful and knowledgeable, he (and others) seemed to not communicate well with the professor, unaware of class logistics (i.e. due dates, assignment specifics, etc). Use caution with this and make sure to listen to everything the professor has to say.

Conclusion: Despite these negative marks, this class still was wonderful. I enjoyed learning about the subject material and finding the policy areas I am most interested in. A good grade is doable if you take the time on the essays and review the lectures before the exams. If you are on the fence about pub aff, take this class! You will learn a lot about the field.

This class is a necessary introduction to Public Affairs. I highly recommend taking this before other PA classes as it sets you up with basic concepts. However, Prof Stoll was INCREDIBLY disorganized. Did not relay anything to the TA's, although they tried to be helpful with reviews and stuff. The lectures are extremely boring and he rambles a lot but overall easy to follow and the class has basically no work.

This class was relatively easy, but the lectures that were provided were unnecessarily long and the prof tends to go off on a tangent. The textbook is not necessary because the exams are based on the lectures. The concepts were not too difficult but there was a lack of communication between the TAs and the prof. Overall I would not recommend as a GE because it is a decent amount of work, but it is not too bad for an intro to public affairs class.

The content for this class is extremely engaging. There were pre-recorded lecture videos from previous years, and they covered a variety of super interesting topics that I loved learning about. My love for the class pretty much ends there. Grading was painfully slow which was extremely unhelpful because oftentimes you needed to see grades/feedback for previous assignments to know how to proceed on the next assignment. Also, there was a clear lack of communication between the professor and TAs that made everything really confusing. A lot of times it felt like everyone was saying different things and that the TA was just as confused as we were. The work is not impossible though, and my TA graded very easy (likely because of all of the confusion). Overall, interesting course but there's a lot of room for improvement.

Dr. Stoll relied on in-lecture hall recorded videos from 3 years ago, thus this class was an unenjoyable experience (It would have been much better in person since the lectures went on tangents and were very long). His expectations/rubrics for the writing assignments were unclear and sometimes given to us less than a week before the essay was due. Also, the grading was very late. We did not get our midterms, taken in week 4 or 5, back until the end of week 8 I believe. The material covered on the midterms was not entirely reflective of the lecture material. The two books were interesting to just read, but unhelpful for the course.

Professor Stoll is very passionate and entertaining, but his lectures were long and included a lot of unnecessary information. He rambles a ton and his lecture slides were not very useful. It was unclear what information was important and what was not. The content was really interesting, but I think this class with Stoll would have been MUCH better in-person.

This class requires you to consume a lot of information regarding public policy. In my case, Professor Stoll uploaded recorded lectures from what I believe to be previous years, so there were no live lectures. Curriculum topics range from economics to law enforcement, and a lot of specific information showed up on the midterms. Besides the tests, however, this class had a relatively small workload. I wrote a few papers the entire quarter (memos, opinion editorials, etc), but I enjoyed them because students are given a lot of creative freedom regarding what policies or issues they are interested in/want to write about. My TA was exceptional (Aditya Voleti- you are great!!) so discussion was super useful in this class.

The actual content that Professor Stoll goes over in lecture is extremely interesting if you are into public policy and our current political climate. However , it is not presented in an organized manner mostly because his lectures are recordings from past live classes. Section is very helpful and if you pay attention, every assignment should be straight forward. I never felt overwhelmed by work in this class. The midterm is also very hard compared to the final so be sure to study for that.

This is actually the only undergraduate class Prof. Stoll is teaching, so his standards are pretty high. But I loved taking his course. He is friendly and somewhat humorous. Though it was a recorded class, he changed the class to asynchronous and added another class discussion weekly. He used his lecture last year and adjusted his PowerPoint slightly. Sometimes he might not be able to answer emails, and you kinda need to ask him a couple of times. But he is very friendly and willing to chat with you during office hours. PA 10 is hard, much harder than PA 30, in terms of workload and contents. We have two midterms, one Op-Ed, and two memos. The two midterms are not cumulative, and the second midterm is on the week before finals, so that we can finish our memo 2 during finals week. Because we are taking online courses, Prof. Stoll said that we can write our essays on the same topic, and extend the topic for the next essay, which makes our workload much smaller.