Professor
Sarah Kareem
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Most Helpful Review
Professor Kareem is very organized, and her lectures show it. Overall, I think she is pretty effective in getting what she wants you to know from each of the readings across. While there is a lot of reading, I skimmed most of them because lecture was informative in general; she covers what you need to know and links that to the themes. I will stress that there is a lot of information to take in. I always took copious amount of notes every lecture. There are three papers and a final exam. The final exam was long; I took the whole three hours and filled my whole blue book. The final consists of literary term identification (she gives you a list out of which she will choose beforehand), short passage ID in which you ID the text and write about its significance/relation to the text as a whole (not too difficult because they were either passages covered in class or there was some clue that they were linked to the text), and an essay. For the essay, you are given some prompts to choose from and basically have to trace how a theme has changed across the literary periods covered in the class. I thought the grading was fair. But I had a good TA who helped a lot when I was writing my papers. I know I definitely learnt quite a lot from this class.. Overall, I think this class is difficult but fair. Just be ready to dedicate a lot of time to this class.
Professor Kareem is very organized, and her lectures show it. Overall, I think she is pretty effective in getting what she wants you to know from each of the readings across. While there is a lot of reading, I skimmed most of them because lecture was informative in general; she covers what you need to know and links that to the themes. I will stress that there is a lot of information to take in. I always took copious amount of notes every lecture. There are three papers and a final exam. The final exam was long; I took the whole three hours and filled my whole blue book. The final consists of literary term identification (she gives you a list out of which she will choose beforehand), short passage ID in which you ID the text and write about its significance/relation to the text as a whole (not too difficult because they were either passages covered in class or there was some clue that they were linked to the text), and an essay. For the essay, you are given some prompts to choose from and basically have to trace how a theme has changed across the literary periods covered in the class. I thought the grading was fair. But I had a good TA who helped a lot when I was writing my papers. I know I definitely learnt quite a lot from this class.. Overall, I think this class is difficult but fair. Just be ready to dedicate a lot of time to this class.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2025 - I found this class to be pretty boring but what I expected from it. Kareem’s lectures weren’t particularly engaging but they weren’t boring either and the workload was very light. My biggest complaint was how many things I had to print unnecessarily which in my opinion was a waste of my time, money, and paper. The readings weren’t particularly interesting but Kareem’s lectures were well organized and sometimes intriguing. She was strictly against computers for note taking in lecture which I find to be a bit excessive and at times counterproductive. She also had notebook checks and did one collecting notebooks right before the final which meant we didn’t have access to our notes for studying unless we took pictures of all of them which felt ridiculous to me. I think she is a good lecturer and communicator though and I would recommend her overall. I had Jesus Diaz as a TA and he was alright but I wouldn't recommend him, his sections felt like they were going by in slow motion.
Winter 2025 - I found this class to be pretty boring but what I expected from it. Kareem’s lectures weren’t particularly engaging but they weren’t boring either and the workload was very light. My biggest complaint was how many things I had to print unnecessarily which in my opinion was a waste of my time, money, and paper. The readings weren’t particularly interesting but Kareem’s lectures were well organized and sometimes intriguing. She was strictly against computers for note taking in lecture which I find to be a bit excessive and at times counterproductive. She also had notebook checks and did one collecting notebooks right before the final which meant we didn’t have access to our notes for studying unless we took pictures of all of them which felt ridiculous to me. I think she is a good lecturer and communicator though and I would recommend her overall. I had Jesus Diaz as a TA and he was alright but I wouldn't recommend him, his sections felt like they were going by in slow motion.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2017 - This class is honestly pretty difficult, but not too bad depending on your TA! The TA I had fall quarter (Seth) was very nice, but made us write a paper every single week... which was a lot. I much prefer my more laid back TA for winter quarter (Sean) who hosts more conversation-based sections. It's a lot of reading, so if you don't enjoy reading lengthy (and extremely difficult to decipher) dissertations written by age-old philosophers, I wouldn't suggest it. As for Professor Kareem, I found her to be a little difficult to understand at times, especially compared to Dienstag. Her points aren't nearly as precise or engaging, but she's an okay lecturer.
Fall 2017 - This class is honestly pretty difficult, but not too bad depending on your TA! The TA I had fall quarter (Seth) was very nice, but made us write a paper every single week... which was a lot. I much prefer my more laid back TA for winter quarter (Sean) who hosts more conversation-based sections. It's a lot of reading, so if you don't enjoy reading lengthy (and extremely difficult to decipher) dissertations written by age-old philosophers, I wouldn't suggest it. As for Professor Kareem, I found her to be a little difficult to understand at times, especially compared to Dienstag. Her points aren't nearly as precise or engaging, but she's an okay lecturer.
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