To put it succinctly: Professor Roy is very friendly and genuinely wants to engage his students, but his class can be very disorganized and dull.

The class essentially consisted of readings, papers, discussions, and a final. Roy covers a very broad range of sociology topics. It’s a good idea to keep up with the readings, but truthfully, the final covers only a limited number of them, and you only really need to do in-depth reading for the ones you choose for your papers.

The papers themselves are simple, just 2 pages double-spaced based on a single question that draws from the readings. Having a good TA is important here, because my TA was a wealth of knowledge and he was really helpful in preparing my papers (although he was an extremely tough grader).

Participation in discussion varies by TA and how they want to structure their discussions. I found that participating was a good way to understand the ideas.

Final was entirely multiple-choice (100 questions), and as I said before, only covers a limited number of readings and tests mostly on his lecture information. Get the key points in his lectures, review them, and you’ll be fine.

With all of that said, be warned that Roy’s lectures are very disorganized and inconsistent. It could sometimes be tortuous to sit through his lecture (and looking around, everyone seemed to agree), and if he was running out of time, he’d flip through the last few slides super quick and barely talk about them. Not so great.

Final grade: A (with papers around A-, moderate participation, and probably a good score on the final).

I've never written an evaluation for a professor; however, when I decided to take Introduction to Sociology with Professor Roy, there were no reviews for his class, so I figure that I'll be the first.

The class itself isn't very demanding with 60% percent of your grade being from problem sets, 20% from discussion participation, and 20% from the final. That being said, there's no midterm.

The Winter 2013 quarter originally had 5 problem sets, but the TAs talked the professor down to 4 problem sets. Each problem set is 2 pages double spaced, and you have a choice of maybe ten questions. From that, you only have to answer 1. It's doable, but remember to cite evidence from lecture and the readings. It really depends on your TA's grading, but they all seemed to be nice, at least for us.

Some readings were more interesting than others, and aside from problem sets, discussion, and the final, you don't hear about them in lecture. And even then, it's only about 1 question on the final per reading and some of them don't even get addressed on the final. So whether you choose to do the reading or not, that's on you.

The final itself is 100 questions with each TA contributing 10 questions each and Professor Roy coming up with the rest. That being said, even after attending lecture, you don't really know what to study. Even the professor himself said that he's testing on broad concepts rather than details. Look over the lecture slides, your notes, know the big idea about each reading, and that's about all you can do.

What makes me so inclined to write a review for Professor Roy's class has more to do with the professor himself. His class was disorganized in the sense that a lot of the time he would just read over the PowerPoint, as if he were reading it for the first time and makes the rest up on the fly. His sense of time management is horrible, and lecture can end as early as a half hour or it can run over time by a couple of minutes. If lecture ends early, he probably read over a slide too fast, and if class runs overtime, he'll often skip over several consecutive slides and deem it not important. If it's not important, why is it in the lecture slides in the first place?

I ended up with a B+ in his class, which I'm okay with. It justifies my time and effort in the class. Overall, it's not a demanding class, and he's a nice guy not without his flaws, but hey, he's human.