Lots of opportunities for grade boosting.

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Be prepared to do a lot of reading and writing. But the TA really helps prepare you for this. The stories an interesting and the lecture is engaging. Highly recommend taking it with the TA “Pardis Aryamand” she is outstanding. So very helpful with her writing exercises.

Honestly Professor Ball is such a gem, I get so many ideas for my essay when I listen to her lecture, but my TA's involvement was honestly lackluster. She wasn't terrible, but I learned that she copied and pasted her comments on our rough drafts. I really enjoyed the class and it's actually super interesting. The required readings are very very lenient, as in the quizzes are very obvious questions that you shouldn't miss from just skimming, and the texts are interesting as well. Professor Ball doesn't edit your papers during her office hours but she does let you talk out your essay and gives you more ideas, and honestly I think some people complaining didn't make good use of her office hours. Overall, easy class, fun class, would reccomend

The positive review from December 9th makes NO sense. That doesn't accurately describe the course, and it wasn't even taught Fall 19. Might be talking about Scand 134, which was taught Fall 19. Anyways, I personally wouldn't take the risk. Do something else!!

*Think about it: are you supposed to be THIS stressed/worried about a GE? No, you're not* especially scandinavian. seriously find anything else like PoliSci40 or Stats 12 or idk

Professor Ball is really helpful and gives interesting and engaging lectures. She'll quiz you on the readings during class, but the quizzes are one question and are usually so easy that you can skim through the readings and still get them right. Plus, you can miss around 4 of them and still get full quiz points in the class. The readings themselves were OK and were pretty interesting, but the way in which a lot of the early readings were written made it really difficult to make connections and good essay topics on them. The essays get easier to write as they go, however. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the TA. I had Mads Larsen and he was a pretty difficult grader, and while I did end up with an A in the class, I wouldn't recommend signing up for this class if you're just looking for an easy A.

Professor is great. Nice, reasonable, and good at teaching. Material is interesting as well. However, if you're looking for an easy A class this is not it. Class is actually quite hard, exams are graded harshly.

Interesting class about the heroic journey in Scandinavian oral tradition. The stories are actually engaging and the professor has a unique perspective of them. From what I've heard about other writing II classes, this class probably has the best readings.

Grade is determined by three essays, clicker quizzes every lecture, and participation in discussion. The final exam is the third essay which is due on the Monday of finals week and assigned two weeks prior.

The essay prompts are well defined and the TAs are usually quite helpful. I am pretty sure that their strategy is to grade kind of hard on the first essay and then ease up on the second and third one. Each essay is longer and worth more points than the previous one.

There are clicker quizzes on the readings in class every lecture. Very easy if you actually read, but nearly impossible if you did not. You can miss up to four lectures worth of quizzes and still get 100%.

Overall, I am very glad that I waited three years to get into this writing II class. Very worth it.

I took this class during the pandemic.
I mean it's pretty easy? It's definitely not a walk in the park, but you're not going to spend 4 hours every week just studying.
You get assigned readings that you have to read online before class that day. It's roughly like two days to do the reading. Some reading took me 1 1/2 hrs. Some readings took me 10 minutes. The course material itself is actually pretty interesting. I'd say like 4/5 readings were actually interesting.
You get participating by either speaking during class (even if you don't have the "right" answer, professor ball always tries to point out the correct things in your interpretation). You could also get your participation points by writing a reflection before class starts. You do quizzes everyday which is why you should attend lecture; the actual quizzes themselves were easy if you read the assignment.
Her lectures weren't the most entertaining. She just read off the slides and added her own ideas. In total. 25 minutes were spent on lecture, and 25 were spent on particpation and quizz.
Now, she had two midterms, and a final. This is where you get all of your points, really.
The course generally has a laid back and easy tone to it, but the tests weren't as easy. There were fill in the blanks about random historical facts she covered for about 1 minute. And honestly, these are Scandinavian names. You're not going to remember Brynhild or Vainamonin when the time comes to recall them. You're just going to think, "Yeah its that one old dude who sang... what was his name?? What reading was he in??" To be fair, you are allowed to use all class materials during the exams, but you don't have all time to be searching through every powerpoint. Also, there's a short answer response, and an short essay in every exam. You get like an hour to do all these three things.
I got a B in all of my exams and I did everything else 100% and still got a B+ so it's not EASY easy, but it's not hard either. I would still recommend this class. While the lectures weren't super interesting, the readings themselves were at times, and the class itself wasn't hard on a day to day basis. 7.9/10

EASY A. You need an iclicker though. I sell them second hand for half off. Text **********