PLCP 2500

This course was bad.
4 professors from 4 different departments attempting to teach one course, while also seeming to not have a good idea of the course direction. Lectures never went very in-depth, almost always examining basic concepts and ideas. In-class "discussions" were with your neighbor and then with the entire class of 173 people, sometimes with cold-calling. This led to many discussions that simply repeated the same ideas, or with ideas that were simply incorrect or not what the professors wanted. Grading was unnecessarily hard, with the assignments, midterm, and final all being graded on a rubric. Thus, if your answer did not specifically reference the exact ideas they had in mind, you would receive a poor grade. Additionally, overall grading was done on a curve. This was very poorly explained, with the professors telling us that only a set number of people would receive As regardless of overall scores, yet insisting this would help us in the end.

This is the only review I have ever written in my 3 years as a UVA student. I strongly urge you not to take this class (Democracy & Inequality) because it is a massive waste of time. Lectures are pretty useless since they spend a lot of time asking you to share/discuss with the person next to you (in a 170+ person lecture) and the professors generally go over pretty basic topics. Assignments and grading is done pretty arbitrarily because they want you to give pretty specific answers to questions that are really broad so it's confusing knowing what they're looking for. They're also grading based off class rank so there are a very limited number of A+, A, and A- available which is annoying considering this is and was advertised as an intro-level class. In a course load of two 4000 and 3000 levels each, this class is by far my most annoying and stressful so I suggest you don't take it unless you want your main takeaway to be being poor is bad.