worst professor at my entire 4 years at UCLA. avoid at all costs. literally take any other class than this one. the professor is probably one of the meanest, most unforgiving, and sad people on the planet. he does not deserve to be employed at UCLA with the way he treats his students. assigns an insane amount of reading for a lower div polisci course, and aside from the MANDATORY LECTURES, he uploads lovely videos that you are required to watch! there was a in person participation grading system to make sure you attended lectures, but if you got one of the questions wrong, you'd get 1/2 credit, even if you attended! exams are very long but were take home. only chance of survival is attending every lecture, slaving away to this class, and working in groups for the exams. professor is horrible. TAs were understanding though. AVOID AT ALL COSTS

Oh, Micheal Theis. As an incoming freshman, I didn’t know what to expect. Do not take this as your first poli sci class. Don’t take it at all if you wish to have sanity.

Although the course content was engaging, his lectures, teaching style, and approach to his profession were not. He cares more about making his class difficult than he does educating and teaching his students. This was evident through his little chat GPT tangents that took unnecessary amounts of lecture time.

He was often unprepared and was not ashamed of it. No rubrics are provided for assignments or essays, he just writes the prompts and exams as the course goes along and usually finishes writing it a day or two before it’s released to students. Our second paper was supposed to be worth 18% of the course grade and upon grading them he accused students of using chat GPT and gave everyone 100/100 so when he would curve our grade it canceled out the assignment. His grading is based on your class rank, so it’s how you do in comparison to your classmates. By giving everyone perfect scores, it essentially canceled the assignment. This was so annoying considering how long and tedious the essays were. The time he put on exams was also very annoying and stressful. He gave us an hour for the midterm and almost 7 pages of short response questions. The majority of students didn’t finish and the average was in the low 50s for both the midterm and final.

He is also condescending and rude. He put on this tough character in lectures that is meant to intimidate students and even some of the TAs. Theis used anytime a student asked a question or answered a question as a time to assert his knowledge over them and make them feel shame. It was a horrible and unethical tactic, it contributed to the low morale of his students.

I had the luxury of getting a very helpful and understanding TA who made the class a little less stressful and honestly, his discussion section felt more like lecture than the professor’s longer allotted time. If you can take this course with Merabi Chkhenkeli, it will make the class way better. Merabi’s discussion sections were the lecture whereas Theis’ lecture was the discussion (no one dared to talk).

In summary, I don't think anyone in the class enjoyed being there including the TAs. It felt like no one could be right except him, and he made that very clear. Just avoid him at all costs, even if it’s the last class available.

AVOID THIS CLASS AT ALL COST. Even if you have no choice, even if this is the only class you can take. DO NOT DO IT. This man feels like he has the obligation to prove to you that college is hard. He acknowledges that almost all of the people that take his class are first years. He also knows that this is also most peoples first ever college class. Nonetheless, he makes this class extraordinarily hard almost to punish first years for thinking of attending college. Long story short, his attitude needs some work, he's extremely rude, and the lectures are absolutely useless. Unless you want to hear this man talk about everything but the material, don't even think about going to lecture. He has slides prepared that he doesn't even reference. One time he had a whole lecture where he didn't use a single slide. Not. a. single one. I went to every lecture and the final did not mention a single thing said in lecture was on the final. He literally went one lecture where he asked "why do Japanese people live so long" and went the entire time going over peoples guesses. It had absolutely nothing to do with anything. He tried to prove something about statistics since the class is mainly statistical but he did not achieve the point he was trying to make. He refuses to give deadlines, he doesn't give anyone any extra time at all. Even if you were paralyzed he would have the attitude of "too bad" and would expect the assignment done by his deadline. I was in the hospital the day before the final and he basically told me that if I didn't make it to the final, he would give me an incomplete for the class. I had to walk from the hospital to the location of the final with a 101 degree fever and he showed no sympathy. Not to mention the discussions, you could talk every since discussion but if you don't talk every 2 seconds, you're not getting participation credit. They want you to be annoying. If you're a first-year who took this class, this is not a reflection of the quality of education at UCLA. I've had many professors who teach because they truly care about not only the subject of the class but the students. This man just wants to prove he knows a lot about comparative politics when he should care about teaching the students. I truly believe that the only reason this man still works at UCLA is because he's a white man with tenure. Long story short, this man is absolutely the worst teacher I've every had. Middle school and high school combined, he takes the cake.

Do not take this class if you care at all about your sanity or your GPA. This professor is neither effective nor helpful. Take any other political science prerequisite that you can. Every week, there are two lectures, of which there are two sets of readings and two sets of quizzes. The readings are excessive, consisting of 100-150 pages for an undergraduate lower- division class. Only the textbook readings are remotely useful. Don’t bother with the articles. One of the weekly lectures is recorded, but mind-numbingly slow to the point of inducing sleep. This is made even worse by his refusal to include a transcript, closed captioning, or slides. You are forced to watch his lectures on double speed, but don’t expect to glean any useful information because he has a propensity for rambling and providing extraneous cases. The reading quizzes are easy, but the lecture quizzes sometimes test on never mentioned concepts or edge cases. Due dates are inconvenient. The sets of quizzes are due two days apart. Quizzes are due at eight am, and assignments are due four pm. The assignments are poorly designed because they rely on students to find inaccessible information. Even with maximum cognitive exertion, expect a poor grade on these assignments, as well as the exams, due to Meghan’s grading. Try your absolute best to get a section with Daniel, who is always accessible for help, grades fairly, and provides the most relevant and succinct exam reviews. Still, avoid this class.

IF YOU WANT A GE AND ARE NOT A POLITICAL SCIENCE MAJOR, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. If you are a political science major, I'd recommend waiting until spring quarter of freshman year or second quarter of sophomore year to take this course.

I hope this list is helpful in separating out the elements of this class.

Professor: Professor Thies is very knowledgable about the topic of comparative politics. However, he used this knowledge to correct and belittle his students, many of which had never taken a political science class before. I don't think he ever told anyone that their answer was right once during the course. To me, he came off as arrogant and someone who believed his class was the most important on our schedule.

Quizzes: There are four quizzes a week. Two lecture and two reading. Thies really wants to make sure that you are doing what he asks because testing us is not enough. These are short (no more than 7 questions) and he drops one of each kind before and after the midterm.

Lecture: Thies used a flipped classroom model, but also held a mandatory in person lecture on Wednesdays. His online lectures usually went over the actual time he was allotted and could total 3+ hours of content at times. The content was him elaborating for no reason on a slide for 5-10 minutes until he did it again on the next slide. Thies' in person lectures were useful in the sense that students can ask questions but not useful in the sense that he would never post the slides from those lectures but would ask test questions based on their content.

Readings: They were super long. I didn't do them. You can get away with this if you know someone in the class who did the readings or you watch the lectures first and skim the reading as you take the quiz. I don't think they were that necessary.

Essays: I don't know if Thies knows what a paper is, but the essay assignments we had were just us answering 30+ questions about a topic. The first paper was just interpreting graphs. You'll be fine if you've taken a stats class before. The second paper was about obscure government structure in Bulgaria and Malaysia. The key to that one is taking the information from Wikipedia and then pretending you got it from another source because there literally are none. Both are doable and it's easy to get an A on them, but you just have to start a couple days before the deadline as they get tedious.

Tests: This is the reason why I wouldn't suggest a freshman takes this course. If you are not used to longform essay finals, you will not do well on the midterm and final for this class. Most of the class did not finish the midterm and many used the entire time block for the final (final was the same length as the midterm). You can get good grades on these exams if you study rigorously, but my other classes suffered because there is just so much content you have to look over in this course. The midterm average was a 60 and the final was a 59. Thies does curve grades.

TA's: I had Daniel as a TA and he was great. All you have to do is talk a couple times in discussion and your participation grade will be fine. He made a lot of the concepts more understandable. Go Daniel.

Overall: Even though the material was really interesting, I would not recommend this course to anyone, honestly. If you need one more course to declare, take it. If you can do literally anything else, save yourself.

This class was so hard for no reason. 70+ pages of reading per week, an async model that meant we had to attend three lectures a week instead of the scheduled two, and exams that had a failing average are not a reasonable expectation of a lower division course. Prof. Thies was unsupportive of wrong answers in the discussion sections, exacting about tardiness, and insisted on giving ridiculously hard exams and not curving anything.
As a sophomore, I did fine, but many of the freshmen I took the class with did not. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS AS A FIRST YEAR. The other reviews are right. It's possible to do well in this class, but so hard that taking this class is not worth it unless you truly have no other option.

I took this class because it was the only political science course I could fit into my fall schedule. I was discouraged by the other reviews made for Mr. Thies, he sounded like he was one of the worst professors at UCLA, but it turned out to be absolutely false. I don't know if the other reviews lied or if he hit his head and got amnesia or something and changed, but he was a pretty good professor.

Mr. Thies is a very clear and often funny professor, engaging with students in a respectful and very helpful manner. He tends to start each lecture with a quick welcome and then answering student questions before going on with the lecture. He is very knowledgable and great at explaining the subject material that, unless you are sleep deprived like I was one week, class seems to go by very quickly, you learn a lot, and I would dare to even say it was pretty fun.

The only reason why I did not obtain a higher grade in this class was because I was genuinely lazy and procrastinated on two assignments which do take a while to complete. But even then, Mr. Thies was very lenient as he only took off 5% of the grade for those assignments for every six hours late. Whilst Mr. Thies does grade on a curve according to himself, he gives students plenty of chances to learn and do well on quizzes, midterms, and on the final, he even allows students to make up every point they missed on quizzes with an extra optional midterm which is really just a longer quiz.

He did not give us any essay homework assignments due to not knowing how to adequately counter the use of AI, so I do not know how these essays would have affected my view of his class, but I doubt they would have made me dislike him as a professor or the course and I would be sure he would be very helpful to students as well.

Moreover, although Mr. Thies had asked students to not be late for class, he would never get outright mad at students who were late, only ever making a joke about locking the doors when several students entered late one time because he was being interrupted by the opening and closing door noise.

Overall, the only critiques I would have for Mr. Thies would be the use of a curve as I am against the use of curves in general, but even so I do not believe he uses it to harm but rather help students as he mentioned when answering the question of another student.

This man must have some dirt on UCLA for them to still be letting him teach. This was the worst class I have ever taken. Not only was the class made unnecessarily difficult by Theis, Theis was just an awful and rude person in general. I don't think anyone in the class enjoyed being there including the TAs, as they seemed to hate Theis as much as we did. The workload is somewhat manageable but significantly uninteresting and awful, as he would assign around 60-100 pages of reading a week. And the essays- don't even get me started on those- they were so confusing and random. They look easy but then once you start working on it you realize why everyone hates this class. Our second paper had literally ZERO online sources except Wikapedia, I had to start translating articles from Bulgarian into English just to have sources and information for the paper. The mid-term had a 60% average as it was entirely too long for the hour class and when people complained Theis had no remorse- the TAs apologized to US about it. Theis has quite an ego as well, and uses anytime a student asks a question or answers a question as a time to assert his knowledge over them and make them feel shame. No one can be right except him, and he makes that very clear. He also thinks his class is so important and sophisticated, telling us studying for his class is way above 'notecards'- but the midterm begged to differ when it was all definition questions. How does that line up... I never once spoke to this man but I think that was a positive thing, as I would've cried or committed a crime. I had multiple upper classmen warn me about the class and him, I brushed it off cause how bad could it really be, but they were RIGHT. Do yourself a favor and don't take this class- as you'll either want to drop out or jump off a bridge. The only thing I thank Theis for is making me realize how much I dislike Poli Sci, so now I'm not a Poli Sci major anymore. All being said if you have to take the class you WILL make it through and just know everyone is equally as irritated by the class and Theis as you are- even UCLA advisors know the reputation of the class and will pity you for having to take it.

I never give reviews on Bruinwalk, but this class gave me enough motivation to do it. For context, I've taken many other Pol Sci classes, taken upper divs, even taken CS classes, and aced them, but I found this class so horrifically unmanageable (taking this class with a normal course-load was 10x more stressful than the time I took 24 units or 5 classes). It's not because of the subject - I loved learning about comparative politics and to some extent doing the readings - it was literally everything else about the class. I have never had a class with more redundant readings, weekly writings, lecture density, and unclear paper prompts. Frankly I'm used to boring lectures, but the live lectures in this class were not only boring, but dense, unrecorded, and required to submit the weekly writings. The professor actively called you out if you used electronic devices to take notes in the lectures, ironically, considering the amount of material and the fact that it was not available to re-watch. It is practically impossible to get above a C or B on the papers (context: I've never gotten below an A for any of my papers in college, even in Pol Sci, and I don't mean the as bragging but I mean to say that writing and research is my forte) even after starting early and spending days writing them and doing thorough research, because they are so abnormally hard to answer (some information that it required to answer the questions were extremely hard to find). I have never gotten below an A for my participation in class, but for some reason I got a B - because I wasn't one of the two students who dominated each discussion and actually contributed a normal, balanced amount (not the professor's fault, but according to my TA it was because that's what the professor expected the TAs to do, I think there was some type of curve). Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back: Once, I wrote 14 words over the 250 word limit for some weekly writing. The professor gave be a big ol ZERO because I was 14 words over and when I asked if I could be given the chance to cut it a little, he said "The grade is what it is." On the final, I got what I expected (a C) and at that point, this class ruined so much of my mental wellbeing because I had absolutely no faith or hope in myself as a Pol Sci major and had no free time, but I honestly didn't care because I was done with the class - and I'm the weird kind of person who misses my professors and TAs after my classes finish (but I didn't feel that way this time at all). I spent countless hours on this class because I was interested in the subject, but the workload and harshness made me dread learning the material. And after I took more classes, I realized that the problem was not me, because I've never performed worse before or after I took this class (again, even taking after CS classes as a Pol Sci major). You should always take a class because you're interested in the subject, but never to the point that every lecture, assignment, and test gives you absolute anxiety to complete it. Moral of the story: if you can, do not take this class. If you do: please don't take this class too seriously and do what you can, because it's made to be hard rather than build your knowledge.

This was the first class I took at UCLA and I absolutely loved it. It is a lot of work, but it’s been very helpful for every PoliSci class I've taken since. He has taken feedback from previous years and the current version of the class uses the best of online and in-person classes. All of the lectures are pre-recorded to minimize rambling, while the lecture time is used for class discussions (not necessarily mandatory - you will discuss the topic that you have to write 300 words on that week). The papers can take some time, but it's 90% look stuff up.

Overall, if you just want a degree on your way to law school, don't take this class, but if you have any interest in actual political science or government, I CAN NOT RECOMMEND THIS CLASS HIGHLY ENOUGH!

Also if you do well enough he invites you to take a special seminar re-writing a country’s constitution in the spring