PLPT 3010

Professor Klosko expects you to get through a LOT of reading each week (which you can get away without doing), and a lot of the time lecture topics are way ahead of what we went over in discussion. His lectures are sort of all over the place which makes it hard to take notes, and the outlines he posts of his lectures make no sense whatsoever. One take-home midterm (2 short essays) one larger paper and a final.

Klosko knows his stuff, especially about Plato & Augustine. Pretty boring lectures but he covers everything in the reading material. Assigns way too much reading, you probably don't need to do any of it to succeed in the course, as long as you have a bunch of quotes marked down for the mid term or final paper. Our TA only asked for references to which book arguments were made in, not direct quotes. Mid term is two 3 page papers, two days, not bad. Final paper is 12 pages and then final is 3 blue book essays. Grading is pretty fair. I'd recommend if you are interested in political theory, otherwise you might fall asleep.

Simple way to describe this class and this professor. This class is the most boring political subject taught by the most boring lecturer in the department. I advise all students to stay away as Klosko is dry, boring, and all over the place.

This class is definitely doable. I took this the spring semester of my first year and got an A without doing literally any of the readings. Klosko is not the most interesting lecturer, in fact, his lectures are pretty much all over the place. Though his lectures are fairly disorganized, (especially the unhelpful bullet points he puts on the projector), the material he spews out during lecture is all you need to know in order to get an A in the class. The key to getting a good grade is writing down all of the comparisons he makes between the different philosophers, as both the midterm and the final are comprised of different questions that ask you to compare different philosophers/schools of thought. The midterm is open note and open internet. For the final exam he gives you about 8 questions ahead of time that you can use your notes and the internet to study for. He will choose three at random for the test that you take in class without notes. There's also a paper that's about as equally weighted as the exams. Overall this class is not impossible; the I actually found the material quite interesting as you study not only classical philosophy but also Christian political theory. Daniel Henry is a great TA; very kind, knowledgable and willing to help!

This class is not easy, but it is manageable. I did the readings on and off and got an A- on both the midterm and paper. Klosko knows a lot so his lectures often feel like being fire hosed with information, but discussion served as a sort of filter to help clarify what was really important. Write down as much as you can! Answers to the midterm and final can be found in the lecture and discussion but they don't post anything on collab so you must take a lot of notes - I filled up an entire notebook for this class. The one down side to Klosko is he appears to exist in his own world and therefore cannot fathom the requirements of the world that the rest of us live in. For example, he gave our entire class incompletes because he and the TA were unable to finish the grades in time. Also the TA was still grading final papers during the final exam so some people still didn't know how they did on an assignment worth more than 30% of their grade. The class wasn't so bad but the horrible organization and apparent lack of concern for timeliness was frustrating and unprofessional.

Really fun course if you are interested in political theory. Klosko is a pretty solid lecturer and the class format is very straightforward. A lot of the enjoyability of the class comes from the TAs, and Janet Lawler was an awesome TA. She is very knowledgable about the topic and wants to help you understand the curriculum. It is hard to get an A in the class, but I received an A even though I didn't do great on the midterm mainly because I had help from Janet on making my paper pretty solid. This isn't a class you'll be able to skip and still do well, but if you want to learn more about political theory it's well worth it.

PLPT 3010 was honestly a really fun class with Professor Klosko. Instead of basically just regurgitating what's in the texts, he provides a lot of historical context and gives you a more systematic means of examining what's in the text (he will try to draw a lot of diagrams, with the key word here being try). It really helps with understanding where, exactly, the writers are coming from, especially because the texts are sometimes almost a thousand years apart from one another, and as you might expect, a lot had happened in the world between the writings of those texts. He subscribes very hard to the Cambridge School of trying to understand texts, so it makes a lot of sense that he's interested in the historical contexts. In terms of grading, I think the exams and whatnot are not exceedingly hard; you just need to know what he said in lecture about various thinkers. He's also a big fan of asking people to compare thinkers or texts from the same thinker, so you should know what each thinker thinks on common topics of debate and understand where their differences come from. Janet was a really great TA, too, and I'm really sad to see her go because apparently this was her last TAing semester. The grading buckets are 37.5% final paper, 37.5% final exam, and 25% midterm exam. He does some weird stuff with letter grades on a four point scale, but participation will give you a pretty sizable bump, so I wouldn't worry too much because as with most political theory classes, the grades get fudged a little bit. I know everyone reads at different rates, but most weeks I would estimate we had a little bit less than 100 pages of reading.