Professor Trager often will go off on a tangent about subjects that are not important to the class at whole, leaving the lecture hall looking at the same slide for 20 minutes. After the midterm, he began congratulating the class just for showing up because probably less than 50% of the class was coming! The textbook readings are the most important thing you can do to succeed in this class, I wish I had realized that sooner. Also, the supplemental readings are often long and not fun to read but Trager will put obscure reading material in his tests making them a necessity if you want to know all the material for the exams, again something I wish I knew earlier. The class material is very interesting, and the TAs all are very knowledgeable but Trager struggles to expand on the textbook readings, making the lectures bland and slow.

Professor Trager is clearly a very intelligent and qualified scholar, but as a professor he is awful. His lectures consist of incomplete slides and unanswered questions. He is vague and inconclusive when presenting information and spends the majority of lecture focusing on one subject that he finds interesting but which isn't particularly important to the class and which most likely won't even appear on the exams. A lot of students stoped going to lectures because of this, and by the end of the course it seemed as if he purposely structured the final exam to focus on obscure information. My TA really saved me in this course and was incredibly helpful. Without him I would have been completely lost. If you can, take this class with another professor. I am genuinely interested in international politics, but this course was such an unpleasant experience that I couldn't become invested in anything we were learning. Prof. Trager is no doubt an intelligent man, but as an educator he leaves much to be desired. The course felt more like a struggle against him than a pursuit of knowledge.

The information taught in this class is super interesting and I learned a lot from the readings and weekly current event assignments. Professor Trager isn't a very engaging lecturer, though, and I found that I could understand the material better by reading the textbook rather than going to lecture. The final was pretty hard so make sure you study in advance.

I loved this class and I'm honestly a lil sad it's over. It was more about how the world works and less about actual politics, which was cool. I thought the way Trager lectured was very engaging and just fine to follow. He asks students to participate and throw their ideas into the lecture, and I loved getting to hear what my peers thought. Other reviews said he was not the best lecturer, but I think it comes down to personal preference.

Vivien is the best TA I've ever had. In section we went over the main points of the lecture in depth and it was fun and entertaining. I walked out of every section laughing because I had fun (ew right like what discussion is actually fun) and with a better understanding of the material.

The only things I didn't like about this class was that the slides were not available to reference, and that laptops aren't allowed for note taking.

There's a fair amount to critique about this class, but I enjoyed it overall. It is a LOT of work and you'll need to devote a lot of time to doing the textbook readings, PDF articles, and essays. (You can mostly skim the PDFs, but make sure to do a thorough job on the textbook readings and essays.) But as long as you do the work, this class is not that difficult. At least during winter quarter 2019, Trager was an engaging lecturer and clearly very knowledgeable about world politics. He gives a midterm and a final that consist of 6-10 short answer questions and 1 essay question, so as long as you practice with the review material he posts on CCLE, you should be fine. There's a lot of information to know, but he often reuses questions from both past and practice exams. The TA you have definitely matters, both in terms of the value of sections and the grading of your essays. (I had Ethan C., who was very personable and an easy grader, and I've heard that Valerie W. is good as well.) I would highly recommend making friends in this class to get together with for study sessions; it definitely helps to talk through the material and know that you're not the only one struggling to keep up with the workload! Overall, this class was an enriching introduction to world politics; as a political science major with little experience with anything other than American politics, I definitely found the course worthwhile. If you're up for the challenge, take this class!

I am a computer science major who took this class as a GE. Many south campus majors like to disparage north campus majors for having easier workloads. While this class is admittedly easier than my major classes, I still did need to put in the effort to receive an A-, as it's writing-intensive and requires you to think differently than in your STEM classes. Also this class is straight-scaled (i.e. no curve), meaning that there is little forgiveness for doing poorly on one of your assignments or exams.

The workload of this class consists of 5 policy briefs (2-3 pages each), a midterm and a final. I found it facile to do well on the policy briefs (received 10/10 on all except the first one, which I received 9/10 on). However, I did find the midterm and final to be a little challenging to do well on (I received 89 on the midterm; I never received my results for the final) - the questions were objectively easy but you really need to know the material well and be precise with your answers in order to get full credit on each of those questions.

Of course, who you have as your TA can impact your grade. My TA, Jessica Lee, gave engaging discussions and was, in my opinion, a reasonable grader. However, I found the review materials provided by a few of the other TAs to be a little more useful.

As for the material, I genuinely enjoyed what I learned and I found Professor Trager to be an outstanding lecturer. However, what he covers in lecture is the same as what is covered in the textbook. Also lecture attendance isn't compulsory (though discussion attendance is). Therefore many people (including myself, admittedly, during the last two weeks of the quarter) will not attend to lecture, as there isn't much incentive to do so.

Textbook is the most useful part of this course. Vivien is the best TA-follow her review guides and you will be prepared for the exams. Selling the textbook for the class text at **********.

I took this class with Professor Trager and my TA was Valerie. It's a lot of reading (textbook: anywhere from 40-80 pages per week, pdf articles: dense, length varies (usually 10-30 pages per week), and other random readings he assigns), but I ended up loving the class. I'm a south campus premed and I'd say this was my favorite class I've taken so far. I think I went to class maybe three times the entire quarter (during week 1 and for the midterm). I got an A in the class, grades are based on discussion participation, weekly writing assignments, the midterm, and the final. I got a 10/10 on 4/5 of the writing assignments and a 9/10 on one of them. The essays are really interesting to do -- the prompts are fairly open-ended in that you can choose whatever current event in the news and relate it to the course material. I got a 90/100 on the midterm and a 92/100 on the final. The exams are mainly content from the textbook readings (I never did the pdf readings), if I had done the pdf readings, I probably would've done better, but overall if you're okay with an overall 94-96% in the class, it's not necessary. READ THE TEXTBOOK!! It's so easy to digest and very interesting (in my opinion) and all the test questions are taken from the basic concepts of the textbook. Overall, if you do the textbook readings, there's no need to go to class. If you can, take it with Valerie, she's the best TA I've ever had. Discussion is mandatory attendance, but you'll want to go because the TA's go over the concepts discussed that week. I took it as a GE and I would 100% take it again. I thought the material was so interesting and loved how the class focused on current events.

I honestly really liked this class. I found the material and lectures to be pretty interesting. Trager really isn’t as boring as the reviews say. He tries his best to engage the class in lectures and does a good job of explaining the material. The class closely follows the textbook so definitely do the textbook readings for the midterm and final. I honestly didn’t do any of the other assigned readings but I guess they’re helpful for participation in discussion. There was definitely quite a bit of a workload for this class because of the policy briefs but as long as you space it out through the week, it’s really not bad at all. He tends to reuse some questions as well for the midterm and final so visit the testbank (can’t stress this enough!)

Professor Trager always deviates from the lecture content to tell stories that he thinks are interesting. I think he thinks that he is entertaining the class when he does this, but honestly, everyone is just waiting for him to switch to the next slide. But even with his slides, he is super unclear regarding everything. I had a really hard time in this class and for some of the days I went to lecture, I sat there for like 5 minutes, decided this wasn't worth my time, and just left to go take a nap.