I would rather have my fingernails pulled out than take another class with this man. Don't get me wrong the class is easy, but it is tedious and in general this man is an uninspired professor. He loves to just pile on a bunch of useless busy work that makes you want to stick pencils into your eyes. But hey, like I said its a pretty easy A, as long as you don't mind the soul sucking BS.

This professor is already very poorly reviewed that there's really not much more to say. I'd only like to add that students should believe what's been said about his teaching style. It is all over the place. There's an enormous amount of reading. Group projects are worth huge chunks of your grade and force you to cooperate with people who may not pull their own weight. The exams are extremely difficult, but at least they are curved. Overall I would not recommend this class even if the title of it sounds interesting. It's not really about authoritarian politics. Rather it focuses on scholarly debates between several academics about the abstract concepts of democracy and dictatorship. A tiny fraction of the class is actually about looking at actual regimes in the real word. Most of it pertains to several authors and their minute differences in their definitions of specific terms. There is also statistics involved so if you don't like math I would also not recommend this class.

If white bread was a dude but also just no. Go for it if you hate yourself.

This class initially appeared to be decent, however, as time went on, the course became more and more confusing and I felt that the materials that we learned in his lectures were very rushed which did not give us enough time to fully understand. I also expected to learn a mixture of politics and economics and how they are shaped together, I felt as if the majority was economics and just a tip of politics. Although I believe that the professor himself is not a bad person and reasonable to talk with, he was not good/ a little too rushed when it comes to teaching. The only positive I could think of was that the workload was manageable, there were 19 quizzes, 4 problem sets and 3 papers requiring 2~3 pages. Grading will vary with some provided with feedback and reasons why points were deducted, however, there were also some where we are only told where we got our points deducted but without giving proper reason. Overall, my time in this class was not pleasant, and would only recommend this class if there are no alternatives or is a requirement for your major.

It's been two quarters since I've taken this class so it's a little fuzzy but I can remember most of the important details. I think I did get the top grade in the class but I'll be as objective as possible.

Professor Roberts is a FAST talker. If you are someone who feels intimidated by fast talkers this class is definitely not for you. If you know a lot of the stuff beforehand, it will definitely help you understand what he's saying.

Midterm: (Only took a midterm cuz CORONA)

TBH a lot of the concepts are rehashes of ECON 1. If you've never taken ECON 1 or you don't have a firm grasp of ECON concepts you are in for a rollercoaster of confusion. On the midterm people got some disastrous grades because they weren't 100% sure about some basic concepts. The midterm was curved up, though, because people got some awful grades. There is also extra credit on the midterm. (I think I got a 100, and then my grade was boosted to 111 from extra credit+the curve.) I just reviewed quiz problems + past midterm exams that the professor uploads.

Read the book. Go. To. Office. Hours.
I don't think anyone can say they deserved a 111 but I did come close because I intuitively knew that I would have to go to the Prof's office hours as much as I could for research exercises and problem sets because they are not well-explained SO GO.

Good luck. I felt dumb a lot of the time because I couldn't understand what the Prof was saying most of the time even when he was talking directly at me in office hours. Good guy though. He tries to be helpful. He tries.

I am a stats major so I knew everything before the course. Had I not been a stats major, I would not have been able to follow the course because the Professor has no idea what he is talking about. Plus, he doesn't understand some of the concepts he teach (standard error vs standard deviation and anova and such) so it is painstaking watching him crash and burn. If I met him outside of class, I wouldn't have noticed him.

The class was based on two midterms that were each worth 15%, a final worth 20%, Inquizitives worth 20%, a Current Event Analysis worth 10%, and participation in section worth 20%. The textbook was available online for about $45 which was good, but you could also purchase the physical version if you wanted to. If you did that though, you would still need to pay a small amount to have access to the Inquizitives. The textbook was absolutely necessary to have as the whole class was based on it. The professor did lectures but they often were really just a repetition of the textbook, so I did not think they were necessary or very helpful to be present for. However, I think there were some helpful bits but if you stick to reading the textbook and doing notes, you should be good. There were a total of 14 chapters we needed to get through for this class and in the end it felt kind of rushed, making me a bit overwhelmed at times. After each chapter we needed to complete an Inquizitive, which I found really helpful in retaining the information and the main points we needed to be aware of. The midterms and final were all open-note and were done on our own within a certain time window, making them easy to access and fairly easy to find information if you forgot something. We had three options for completing a Current Event Analysis which required us to apply information from certain topics in the textbook to real world situations. You could do all three or just one and the highest score was applied. I thought this was a fun and easy way to look further into World Politics so I personally really enjoyed it. Overall, the class wasn't too difficult so long as you stayed on top of the textbook work and utilized the notes you took for the exams. The only critique I really had was that the professor's lectures weren't that engaging in my opinion and that the textbook seemed like a better way to understand the subject.

I never went to lectures, I took this class pass/not pass, and I was taking four classes at the time, but this class was the bane of my existence. So much tedious work, and you have to teach yourself everything. The most useless class I ever took. But if I'm being honest, if you're looking for a quantitative reasoning class that has no math, this is the class for you. I don't think I ever used my calculator; it's just not the kind of class.

Professor Roberts is incredibly enthusiastic and a fun professor to take a class from. I had him for PS 30 and he would show us clips from movies and have us make a game from them. He is definitely a nice guy and the class was easy as long as you pay attention.

Took Stats 10 with him - it was his first time teaching it. His lectures were all ppt based, and though he seemed to be engaged with the class, ultimately it felt like he's just reading off the slides and not teaching the concepts. If I hadn't taken AP stats, I would not have understand most of what was presented in class.
Course had weekly hw, biweekly labs, two midterms, final - there is no curve! final grade is what it is based on score on all assignments.