PLCP 4220

Honestly the best politics class I have taken at UVA!! The class heavily deals with budgeting and economic policies, which I personally found really interesting. The workload is not bad at all. There are two take home exams (both are 10 pages-essay format), 2 vocabulary quizzes (memorize the definitions and give an example), two weekly budget diaries (find an article related to budgeting and you basically have to write about a page summary on the articles). Readings are about 100+ pages each week; but you can honestly skim the readings for the most part. Overall the class is really good as it ties into macroeconomics, international relations, and budgeting. I got an A in the class, which I didn't expect at all to get.

Do not take this class. Prof. Savage is a nice guy, but he should no longer be teaching. At times he would slur his words/become hard to understand, and he was a little unsteady on his feet. He often missed when people had their hands up to ask questions, and when he did recognize it he often offered an unhelpful answer. His lecturing style (lecture for 2 hours straight without giving any opportunity to participate) is not conducive to learning and I honestly dreaded coming to this class because I knew I would need a coffee to get through it. I don't feel that I learned much at all because I wasn't given any chances to internalize the things that he would monologue about. Slides were heavy with text and moved quickly, and I was too busy copying down info to pick anything up. The "comparative" aspect was almost entirely missing because our foreign case studies were hardly tied back to the U.S. at all. Was honestly very, very disappointed by this class and I can attest to the fact that most of the students in my section would use the 5 min breaks to sigh and note how they were ready for class to be done/didn't know how they'd make it through another hour.

He gave almost no opportunities for participation, and quite literally none for group discussion. In general, class consisted of 1.5-2 hours of lecture, with MAYBE a 5 minute break (often shorter). In the rest of class we would read out our "budget diaries" (which covered budgeting news locally and globally) without getting to ask questions of one another. Incredibly unstimulating to the point that I almost fell asleep several times. With no opportunities to actually test my knowledge, I come away not knowing much more in-depth about any of the subjects. I had no incentive to do any of the readings because I knew they wouldn't be used in the class.

The class isn't hard (2 papers that are "tests" plus budget term quizzes and the "budget diary" weekly) but imo not worth the genuine torture of the lecture.