HISA 2003

Prof. Ghosh is very enthusiastic about the course. However, the lectures are a bit scattered. Concepts and information did not flow well from lecture to lecture (i.e. there was often no connection between tuesday & thursday). Reading was medium length.

Midterm: Take home, not difficult if you incorporate reading.
Response Papers: These are very short but require a lot of analysis. The expectations were unclear but once you figure it out, no worries.
Film Review: Self-explanatory.
Final: Take home, similar to the midterm.

Overall I felt the material was not very interesting (which is surprising, given the time period). It is pretty hard to do worse than a B/B+ in this class.

Ghosh is definitely very passionate about the course, but is not the best lecturer. The material is quite interesting, if you are willing to do the reading, but sometimes a bit biased; the midterm and final questions were very much geared towards regurgitating exactly what the lectures or readings said, but I think she gave extra points if your analysis was more thoughtful.
I got through most of this course without doing any of the readings (except for the 2 weeks I had to do response papers), until I hit the midterm or final wherein I did a bunch of the reading over the course of a couple days and pretty much only focused on the ones that were useful in answering the prompts.
The only homework for this class were readings (some textbook, some papers on collab, occasionally a movie or documentary that you're supposed to get from Clem but I usually just torrented) that are not enforced by any in class discussion. There are 2 responses papers, each I believe 500 words (two paragraphs), for whatever week/topic that you choose. I believe the midterm was a couple IDs and 2 long essays, and the final was a couple IDs, 2 short essays, and 2 long essays, about 15 pages total. Both midterm and final were take-home and we were given about a week to complete them.

Very easy class. Lectures can be interesting if you engage and have done the reading, but are often quite dry. Know how to do analysis, because grading is relatively strict and there aren't any buffer points through homework or extra assignments. There is also a book report/film review that was pretty easy.

Really enthusiastic teacher, you can feel the passion for the subject by how she teaches the course daily. Grade is based off primarily two writing assignments that are principally opinion based.