The grading criteria is ridiculous and you'll never know how he will punish you for what unny reasons.

Professor Alexander is nice, relative engaging lecture but does not post slides. Attendance slips throughout the semester because of class format which is 2 papers (easy to do without a full grasp of class concepts) and one final. This class REALLY depends on your TA, I had Shane (Hsuan Lin) who was amazing (fair grader, awesome review, and easy discussion participation) but I've heard of other people who weren't as lucky. Relatively easy to get a B+ but anything higher is up in the air.

Being in Professor Alexander's class was fun and entertaining. Although he is a fast talker and sometimes goes off on tangents, his lectures, given freely without the help of presentations, are highly interesting and engaging (if you choose to engage yourself; otherwise, you might doze off from the inability to keep up). The workload wasn't a struggle to keep up with and grading was not too harsh, but I will warn that workloads come in waves-- every few weeks, there will be a large essay assignment that requires a lot of reading, analyzing notes, and researching. But, if you're interested in the topic, these argumentive essay assignments can be fun (he lets you take your own standpoint on issues which for me was both challenging and fun). My TA, Hsuan Lin, was extremely helpful and broke things down for us to understand, while also providing helpful study materials. I learned a lot from this class and would definitely recommend it!

I really enjoyed this class and I think anyone interested in European politics/history should take it. Professor Alexander doesn't post the lectures online so you HAVE to go to class or at least get the notes from a friend. At first I thought the amount of reading for this class was insane because the syllabus would have about 3 hours of reading after every lecture. However, in my discussion we were each required to sign up to summarize one night of reading and the summaries would be posted on the discussion collab for us to read. This made writing the papers so much easier since you needed 6 sources for a 4 page paper to get full points for the work cited part. Overall I thought this class was very manageable and a B+/A- is attainable as long as you put a lot of time into the papers. Hsuan-Yu Lin was an incredible TA who made us summary charts from the lectures and spent a long time going over the essay prompts so that we didn't write the completely wrong thing since (this was super helpful because Professor Alexander's prompts were basically essays in themselves). Professor Alexander is an incredible lecturer and I am really glad I took this class!

Whilst this is not an easy course for any extent of the imagination, the Politics of Western Europe is a worthwhile course to take for any prospective politics major. I took this course in the second semester of my first year, and thoroughly enjoyed the way the content was presented in lecture and how the course was structured in order for students that wanted to succeed to succeed. This is not a course for people that want to slack off for a semester, since Professor Alexander doesn't post the lecture slides on Collab and a lot of the material is gathered from what he speaks about during lecture. This makes going to lecture obligatory if you want to succeed in this course. Also, whilst it may seem like a lot of reading, only a few of them are truly essential. Also it is important to note that there isn't any homework, so therefore, your grade is highly dependent on the 2 papers and the final exam.

TA Hsyuan-Yu was the best and always made discussion exciting. The class itself was very informative and relatively easy in terms of workload. Yet the essays and final were graded harshly and the readings were easily over 100 pages a night. The professor had even curved all the discussion grades downward at the end of semester. Don't take this class if you want to save your GPA.

This class was a mixed bag. The lectures themselves are very interesting, as Alexander doesn't just read from slides, and makes the lectures story-based. His focus is causal homogeneity and "ideas, interests, and institutions", which are often frustrating to categorize into (but make essays a breeze). The course is pretty easy; 2 essays, a final, and discussion. Alexis Yang was a phenomenal TA, always making study packets for us, and providing good feedback on essays. I recommend slogging through the readings; it can be boring and difficult, but my study guide for the end of the year was gold for the final because of it. Overall, a pretty reasonable and interesting politics course.

This was definitely a worthwhile class. The reading was absolutely insane at times, but reading the material it its entirety wasn't necessary to do well in the course. There were two four-page papers required for the course, as well as a final. The papers were not as bad as people have made them out to be. The prompts typically gave you some freedom in your response, which was nice. You could really manipulate the class readings and lectures to suit your argument, which I enjoyed. My TA, Olyvia, was always very accommodating and willing to meet with me about my paper as well. Expectations for the class were clear, and I did find the lectures rather interesting. However, he would really fly through the powerpoints at lightning speed, so don't even think about copying down a graph from there - you won't make it. The discussion sections were laid back, which was nice because participation in discussion was easy if you had any background on the material and listened in class. I ended up not being able to complete a fair amount of the readings, but still ended up with an A in the course. Definitely would recommend.

Two 4-page papers, a final exam, and participation. The essays are graded VERY harshly, no matter how much you discuss the prompt or an outline with the professor/TA. Lectures are pretty interesting, although too much time is devoted to certain topics (GB, France) and not enough to others (Spain and Franco). Alexander is an engaging lecturer but the class would be so much better if it was more structured and straightforward. If you are really interested and invested in the topic I would recommend, otherwise I would not recommend it.

This was a really great course. Professor Alexander made the material really interesting to learn, and our grade was 2 papers, a final, and discussion. I had Daniel as my TA, and he's really knowledgeable. I wouldn't say he's a harsh grader, but he's definitely picky about making sure you write the right things. His discussion sections were quite helpful actually, and complemented lecture. He gave a lot of great advice on the outlines of the paper, and overall was just a great TA. I went to Alexander's OH a couple times, and you can tell he's definitely passionate about the topic. He's a little intimidating, sure, but a fabulous resource if you're ever confused about anything. A lot of reading (which can all be found on Collab) but otherwise a pretty manageable course. One of my favorite classes at UVA so far, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone interested in learning about Europe.