LPPS 3280

This class is a breeze, somewhat of a joke, but overall interesting. If you're looking for an excuse to get to know more about American politics during the time of JFK and his own life, this is an easy way to do it. The work is very lax overall. Lecture kind of becomes pointless as Sabato likes to go on tangents and just rehash information that was already part of the assigned reading. Discussion is also just review and more or less super easy. The midterm is super easy as long as you just do the readings. The final project is just a policy memo essentially. Overall, recommend for an easy course.

Overall, I really enjoyed this class. The subject seems very niche, but learning about Kennedy’s life and legacy proved to be really interesting. Sabato was a fantastic professor, and he truly lives up to the hype surrounding him. This class was very low-effort, and I found getting an A in the class to prove relatively easy.
The course consisted of two 50 minute lectures and a 50 minute discussion. Discussion is mandatory as participation accounts for 20% of your grade. However, I always found discussion to supplement the lecture well, and most of the time we did not use all of the 50 minutes. I had Molly as my TA and she was great. Lecture basically consists of Sabato talking his way through his book, The Kennedy Half Century. The first half of the semester was focused on Kennedy’s life, and the second half on his legacy on other Presidents. The course essentially became a US Presidents crash course which was cool. Sabato is fascinating to listen to due to his sheer amount of experience in politics. Although he would often get off-topic in class, I did not find that this detracted from my learning. He also brought in several guest-speakers for us, including Secret Service agent Clint Hill. Additionally, he is an overall super nice and friendly guy. He would often offer to buy us lunch after class and invite us to sit and talk with him about politics. Couldn’t recommend him enough. As far as homework goes, there is almost none. I never found myself spending much time outside of class working on this course. Although there is assigned reading every week for discussion, I found that you could get by with either skimming the reading or not doing it at all. However, Sabato’s book is very helpful in being prepared for the exams so I would recommend you read it.
Now onto the tests/policy memo. The grade distribution is as follows: discussion 20%, midterm 20%, policy memo 30%, final exam 30%. Although the small number of grades seems daunting, I found doing well in this class to not be too difficult. Discussion points are made pretty easy to get by your TA, especially if you are doing the readings. As for the policy memo, I was able to do well on this despite this being my first public policy class and never having written a memo before. The instructions for the assignment are very well-outlined so you essentially just have to make sure you are doing everything that is being asked of you and you’ll do well. I wrote it over the course of three days and I don’t think it took me longer than 3-4 hours in total. As far as the tests go, they can be tricky. The midterm and final were structured essentially the same way with a few multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, true/false, and short answer questions and then one long-essay question. I found the multiple choice/fill-in-the-blank/true false questions to at times be very specific. They either came from the readings or in lecture, so be sure to do the readings/pay attention in lecture. However, I did not do all of the readings and managed to get A’s on both exams. The free-response and long essay portion I found to be much easier. These questions covered more thematic topics regarding Kennedy, and the long essay in particular was a great way to show knowledge. Any points missed in the first portion from specific questions I was able to make up with free-response. I will say, you are not provided with a real framework of what’s going to be covered on the exams. My TA gave us a list of pretty broad topics that were to be covered. Pretty much anything in the book/lecture is fair game, so there’s no way to study other than going over your lecture notes/studying the readings. The course ends up covering about 60 years of content so it’s a lot. However, if you are pretty familiar with the overall themes of the course and have a general knowledge of Kennedy and the presidents that came after him, you should be fine. I personally just spent a few hours going over lecture notes the day before the exam and did just fine.
Overall, I was very glad I took this course. It was relatively low-effort, albeit still challenging, and I walked away from it genuinely feeling as if I learned something new and interesting. Sabato is great, and if you have an opportunity to take a class with him I would suggest taking it. In summary: lectures are great, reading isn’t too bad, tests are tricky but manageable, and the policy memo is straightforward.