Good: Lectures were relatively interesting since Prof. Brubaker highlights the main ideas in the readings. During lectures, I thought it was pretty entertaining to see Brubaker be so passionate and wrapped up about Sociology. He's so passionate to the point where he would stroll up and down the aisles or make a whole bunch of random hand gestures. You don't see that in everyday lectures since most professors would stay in one area... but for him, he was up and about.

Bad: Do not expect an easy A even though it's an "intro" course. I worked my butt off for this class and it still wasn't good enough. The TAs and Brubaker expect you to really really really KNOW the material. Some might say they were fair graders... But from my point of view, I thought they were pretty harsh graders. There was an awful amount of readings to do and a good portion of them were in-depth. (Homework in this class = READING PACKETS! The average amount of readings per week was about 40-50 pages.) Here's a word of advice: after you do the readings, make sure you answer all the reading questions he posts online, it will definitely be of great help come quizzes, midterm, or the final itself. In this class, your grade will be depend on and broken down into: attendance/participation is 10% (so go to discussion!), midterm is 25%, pop quizzes is 10%, term paper is 15%, and the final is 40%.

PROS: Brubaker is a nice guy, and his lectures are really well organized. He posts that day's lecture slides each morning at 8:00am (I would definitely print them out - he talks pretty fast and it's better to take notes on your printed slides rather than scramble to write and not listen). Most of the topics were interesting and he made them relevant and understandable. The class is based off of a midterm, a final, a 4-5 page paper, pop quizzes (we only had 3 all quarter), and discussion participation/attendance. The paper was based off of current topics and did not take a terrible amount of time.

CONS: For an intro class, there was a ridiculous amount of reading. Half of what we were required to read did not end up on the midterm or final. Although most material was interesting, some of the readings were so tedious that it seemed almost impossible to retain any of the information, let alone finish what we were supposed to read. He keeps you in check to make sure you're getting them done as well by having random quizzes that count for 10% of your grade (the lowest quiz score is dropped). The average was about 3 readings a week, 40ish pages each (seriously). There was no reader so we had to print them all out ourselves with our own computer, and then bring them in to section (discussions are mandatory). I'm pretty sure everyone put "make course readers" in their evaluations, so hopefully the classes to come won't have to print out hundreds of pages themselves.