DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. He assigns crazy amounts of reading for 2 point quizzes. He will not work with you if you have extenuating circumstances and he is not nice. The final project is horrible too; he expects you to find everything online, yet several of the questions do not have findable answers. Take this class if you like busy work and do not ever need to contact your professors.

This class was very engaging and a lot of material is definitely covered/analyzed. That being said, the world load is very heavy (lots of reading, approximately 3 pretty long paper assignments). Professor Thies is a great professor, but it is a pretty difficult course that requires much time and effort.

I’m satisfied with what I learned in this class; I love political science and the material covered in this class is engaging and relevant. However. Professor Thies seems to derive pleasure from being difficult in his grading methods, assigning very heavy and not easily understood paper assignments, and overall keeping students on their toes. So… despite getting an A and learning a lot, I would recommend any of the other excellent polisci classes at UCLA over this one, classes that won’t give you as big of a stress ulcer and deprive you of so much sleep/time.

This wasn't the worst class I've taken by any means but I would tell anyone thinking about this class to drop it and find another poli sci or ge class. This professor is condescending and seems to not understand that students have lives outside of class. I took this during Covid and he still made active participation mandatory. The final exam is ridiculously difficult with the class averaging an F, and his essays are extremely time consuming, detailed, and tedious. He and the TAs are harsh graders. He does curve the final grade but not by much, my grade went from a C to a C+ which I thought was not nearly enough considering how difficult the class was, especially during a pandemic. I promise you you're better off without this class.

This class is a strange combination of very approachable, easy small weekly quizzes and extraordinarily difficult papers. The lectures are broken up into digestible pieces, however the readings are challenging and long after week 4, when the course material no longer uses the original textbook and instead uses pdfs uploaded to ccle. I do not recommend this to anyone just trying to fulfill a GE requirement unless you are extremely passionate about comparative politics. Class material is interesting but high participation grades are hard to come by, instructions for papers are purposefully vague, standards for papers are very high, and it is challenging to receive constructive feedback on assignments, because different TAs grades separate parts of the same assignment. To succeed in this class, read every reading closely and exhaust all resources (office hours, active participation in discussions, etc).

I found the content of this class super interesting and engaging and Professor Thies seems like a super nice guy but the workload was very overwhelming at times. The readings are fairly lengthy but are important to understanding the concepts explained in lecture and discussion. I thought the video responses were engaging and fairly straightforward but the essays were graded very harshly and took a lot more time than was estimated. Additionally, this class is graded on a curve which should end up helping everyone cause the essays and final (which are a large portion of your grade) had pretty low averages. Overall, I thought the class was interesting, it was just hard to keep up with the work at times, especially during my first-ever quarter at UCLA.

A lot of people struggled in this class/ did not like the professor. I can certainly understand why people might not find Thies very likeable, however I have come to the conclusion that he is tough for our benefit and is often misunderstood. The class itself was not very hard, there was just a lot of reading. In order to do well, you have to stay on pace with the readings. But overall the material wasn't hard, it was just a matter of doing the work to know it. I did not find this class so ridiculous that I would not ever take it again. In fact, I probably would take it again. I learned a lot and challenged myself. For poli sci majors, this class reinforced my belief that poli sci is the field for me. Also, participation in discussion sections was very important for participation grades. My TA gave plenty of opportunity to earn my grade, so this specifically was not a huge issue for me. However, with the Zoom format, you do have to put in some extra effort.

Okay, if you're a first year undergrad polsci major I would not recommend this class. This class isn't IMPOSSIBLE it's just unreasonable. The readings were so long I did more readings in that class than I did in my other two classes combined. Easy questions are really vague. You have to answer EVERY QUESTION exactly and then some. Papers require a lot of research. DO NOT start a paper on the last day. Do a few problems each day until your done. WORK ON THE PAPERS WITH SOMEONE! The first paper I did I got a 69 and worked really hard on it. After that I did every other paper with a friend so if I missed something they'd catch it and vice versa. My grades went up by 10% alone. The quizzes are definitely doable if you read but you have to read! The readings were just so unnecessarily long. I had to watch multiple 2 hour documentaries which was just too long for me personally.

The reviews that this class is hard are definitely true. If you’ve never taken a poli sci course before, don’t start with this one. That being said, if you have take a few poli sci courses and are interested in comparative politics I would recommend taking this class. The required text is by far the easiest read I have ever had in a poli sci course, and the information provided in lecture and section was great. The grading can be very annoying and arbitrary, but if you consistently attend TA office hours and work hard, you can pass.

I feel like Thies gets a bad wrap. OK for a GE this was way too much work, and for an undergraduate intro course, this was way too much work. I spent more time on this class than I did for my major classes and I'm an engineering student which I must admit felt very annoying. I thought lectures were engaging enough and Thies's dry humor made me chuckle quite a bit in class, he's like a sad comedian who accidentally became a professor and is now one straw away from having a midlife crisis. I even went to his office hours once to ask about what kind of graphs he wanted on a paper and he explained how back when he was in college the only thing that was on the internet, was porn and the news, which I must admit seemed like not only a strange thing to admit to watching on school computers but also probably not true. I think a lot of people felt that the midterm papers were unfair, I will admit that they took an eternity to do and Thies's prediction of 4 hours was a pretty grotesque understatement, but if you put thought into them and answered the whole question you would usually get pretty good grades. If you started the night before it was due however you would be SCREWED. Discussion participation was annoying until you realize that even a fart could pass as a well-crafted argument that you can earn points for... after which it becomes pretty easy. Overall, I think this class isn't as bad as everyone says, and if political science interests you and you have a good work ethic you'll manage.