American Politics with Vallely is a very solid, fairly interesting intro into the Political Science department. Vallely is funny at times, though overall his lectures are kind of dry--he tries very hard to get students involved though, and is very approachable. He is a lenient professor, who will postpone a paper's due date for several days for nearly any reason, and is a moderately difficult grader. The format of PS 04 was, I think, three 5 to 7 page papers, three tests including midterm and final (essay tests) and then a longer 10 to 12 page paper at the end. Or something along those lines.

The reading for American Politics was pretty interesting stuff, and about three hundred pages a week or so. The class format tends to be lectures interspersed with discussions and questions. I heard he gave his morning PS 04 class doughnuts, but he didn't like ours as much, since we were a little less talkative.

Good seminar with a non unreasonable, although certainly challenging, work-load. Like any seminar the quality of the class will depend on the students in the class as well as the prof, but nonetheless Vallely does a good job of keeping the enitre group involved.

One of the more valuable aspects of the class, was the time spent, not just on the material, but on the appropraite way to approach political science, answering questions not just on the specifics of a certain topic, but more general question as to how we think about political science and though processees that can be applied any other political science course.

Readings on the whole were very good, some were a little dry, but most were fairly interesting. Strongly Recomended.