This course is a LOT for an intro course, with dense and long readings this class will take up a lot of your time. The exams are open-note, which is a plus, but I would say that the TAs and Professor grade harshly which balance out the open-note-ness of the exams. The first half of the semester goes up to the "Age of Revolutions" (American, French, and Haitian), and the second half of the semester covers ~1800s. For lectures, Professor Duong lectures exactly from his notes---but it's more like he's giving a speech or telling a story. The class is also completely electronic-free, as in, all the textbooks must be physical and all your notes as well. I would recommend taking your discussion section on the same day as lecture, so you're not carrying around pounds and pounds of materials every day. On the note of discussion, I don't think it was THAT productive. We go through a summary of the thinkers and what they believe, and then have discussion about it. Even though it's another 50 minutes, I don't think I ever came out of discussion with a better understanding of the content than when I came in. Overall, unless you're incredibly interested in political theory, you're probably taking this to fulfill the Politics major requirement and for that it's probably your best bet on the PLIR track---but it won't be fun (in my opinion).

Really liked this course and especially the professor! He made it really engaging and tried to make sure we had readings from diverse sources, but there were a lot of readings and they did take up a fair amount of time. Tests were open note so it wasn't too bad. I think it was fairly good as an intro course.