Known to be an easy class but your grade will largely be TA dependent (3 papers constitute most of your grade). Don't know how other TAs are, but mine (Alison) graded fairly and I never stressed about my grade in the class as I made A-/As on all the papers.

Participation is interesting—Dr. Wen randomly calls on students and asks them questions during lecture in front of the class. As such, I actually watched every movie or at least read summaries in case I would be called. Be prepared to speak for each lecture. I stopped looking at the course reader readings after Week 1, did not seem to impact my essay grades nor understanding of the films.

Being a Writing II class, this course is very paper heavy. The course reader isn't very useful for the papers, but the majority of the lecture is discussions about the readings so make sure to do them. I took this fall quarter of freshman year so it was sort of a challenge to adjust to academic writing but the T.A.'s are immensly helpful as is the Writing Center! It was incredibly fun to watch Nordic films! Just don't slack off because it's an easy course, the papers are almost your entire grade.