PLCP 3012

The class material, particularly the articles were very interested. However, we did not cover Africa at all and I was not very satisfied with Professor Schwartz. He is not very good at organizing his lectures and explaining stuff. Grading mostly done by the TAs. Would not recommend this class with this professor if you TRULY WANT to learn about developing countries.

After taking this class, I am still not really sure what the aim of the course was or what I learned. There was no focus on countries that are actually developing now nor was there a lot of focus on "politics", so the title of this course was kind of deceiving. It ended up being more of a political economy course with a focus on how countries developed (not currently developing countries), in my opinion. The asynchronous lectures (3 lectures, 30-45 minutes each) were not organized, and the readings were dense. There were no exams. Instead, there was a 2-draft paper on any development topic we wanted; I didn't end up using a lot of knowledge I learned in class for that paper. There was also an easy section presentation. Prof. Schwartz seemed nice, but it was very difficult to follow his lectures. I had Hayley as my TA. She was very nice and a fair grader, but I didn't really get anything from her sections. We hardly discussed content, and they were very disorganized.