I don't think this professor deserves as much hate as he gets. He is funny and doesn't really care if you come to class or not, but that being said, there was no TA for this class when I took it, and I truly believe that makes or breaks one's ability to truly grasp the class, which is why I wasn't able to get an A. I studied insanely hard for this class, and in the end, really, none of the in-person workshops helped anything. If I could say anything to those taking this class, it would be to watch the online lectures and practice the homework over and over and over. That's all that the tests will be on: problems just like the homework. Get the general idea from the videos, and just repeat the past exams and midterms until test day. Roberts is not very good at explaining problems. He gets jumbled and confused and never really answers the questions asked, but the class in itself is not that hard if you understand that the real learning comes from the videos, the homework examples, and if you can, the PLF for the course (which is especially handy if you aren't offered a TA like I wasn't). Don't be scared to take Poli Sci 30; it's interesting, and I am genuinely horrible at math and was able to get through it, but be prepared to work for your grade.

This class was fun and easy. Would recommend for any poli sci majors or if you are interested in the subject. I'm not a poli sci major but I took the class anyway as a prep class for my major and I found it pretty easy with a very manageable workload. You have a module for (almost) each class meeting which has a preview quiz, then some videos to watch and take notes on, then a closure quiz. Sometimes the closure quiz lowkey isn't about what the videos covered but most of the time it makes sense. There are 6 additional homework assignments scattered throughout the quarter, about 2 weeks apart from each other usually. These go more in depth with scenarios and more detailed situations than the closure quizzes. They are sometimes a bit long but they mimic the midterms pretty closely and end up being helpful. Prof Roberts is a super nice and funny guy, and clearly wants his students to do well. The 2 midterms and the final were pretty straightforward, and he gives lots of practice exams and study guides, and allows a cheat sheet on all of them so you will be very prepared. Lecture participation is recorded using poll everywhere so if you need to miss class you can just log on and answer the questions from wherever as its not based on accuracy. Overall a great class, sometimes in person class meetings feel unnecessary/a drag to get through, but fun and easy.

This class is organized in a way where basically you teach yourself. It's called a flipped classroom and I am not really a fan. You would "learn" the material yourself through an online textbook and online problems, and then go over it in the lectures with the professor. I didn't really enjoy the coding, or the structure of the class. It wasn't that hard, although the final felt significantly more difficult than the midterm and the practice.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS! Even though the content itself was super interesting, I find the grading policy to be extremely unfair. Prof Roberts guarantees that your final paper grade would be an increase from your initially selected research project, but that was not the case. I dropped a whole letter grade because of it, and kept making mistakes with the grading policy making everyone believe they were in a better position than they initially thought. The workload is pretty rough too.

I won't bash Professor Roberts because he really is a good guy. Go to his office hours if you have questions and he'll give you the help you need. It's just that the class is pretty exhausting, I wouldn't recommend taking it as an entry upper div like I did. I will concede that this will prepare you for harder classes in the future, and the course material really is interesting. Just make sure you're good at reading a lot and studying even more for the exams. The paper wasn't all that bad either, collaboration was optional. I'd take the class again, just be prepared for a real hard few months.

I thought this class would be super cool, and it was alright, but nothing special. More of an emphasis on the actual coding and computer science stuff than analyzing the results of data. It's a mix on both, but more stats than poli sci. Overall, easy class to fill that Poli Sci stats requirement, so would recommend just to get it out of the way. Easy, but tedious class.

The HW is super annoying because the assignments are so long, making it take forever. It's a flipped classroom, so you learn through the HW assignments. It's kinda figure it out on your own cause of that. Sometimes, you don't know the answer and there's nobody to teach it to you!

For lectures, Roberts goes through a Jupyter Notebook every class, which is graded. Ironically, going to lecture is the best way to be lazy, because you can just copy the Professor's work on the big screen. If you don't go to lecture, you have to figure out the questions yourself, which can be hard. So I recommend going to lecture, so that you can copy Roberts notebook and take less time to do it yourself.

TA sections were not helpful. Mine were on Zoom and nobody really cared, including my TA. Sometimes there were practice Quizzes but that was the only helpful part.

Grading: Quizzes, mostly easy are worth a good 40% of the grade. Take the practice quizzes and you'll be fine. The final was weirdly hard, considering the quizzes were easy, but I still got an A so no complaints.

I'll probably forget most of this and never use most of it again to be honest. But it was easy and doable.

I struggled with statistics in high school, so I came into this course afraid of how challenging the material would be for me, especially with the focus on R which I had never done before. However, Professor Roberts made it clear from the first day that he wanted us to do well in this course. He drops our lowest quiz grade, provides extra credit opportunities, and completes our coding notebook assignments in tandem with us during class which helps me to understand better. We had four quizzes in this course, one online due to the evacuation and fires and three in-person which consisted of a 10 question multiple choice portion about statistical concepts and a Jupyter notebook which focused on applying the R functions we have learned. I have done well on all the quizzes, and as long as you complete the homework, are engaged in lecture and compete the Jupyter notebooks, you will have no trouble scoring well on exams. My only critique is that lectures often ran long, but only about 5-10 minutes over. This was only because Professor Roberts explains concepts in lecture in great depth to ensure we have a solid understanding, and that can lead us to take a bit longer on the Jupyter notebooks. Overall, this course made me more interested in statistics and data science and confident in my use of R which will serve me well in the future.

OK, I applied to this class a week late but trust please pay attention to this class. It is a self-taught coding class at least the quarter I took it. The modules are really interactive and if you pay attention you should do well if you remember the codes on paper because you will be tested on it. The lecture itself is like a homework give away but he will expect you to know the content before class. Best of luck.

Yo this class was brutal I mean absolutely brutal. We would have several things due in the span of a week. I can live with weekly quizzes, and the occasional writing assignment. But this guy would have us do a writing assignment every 10 days it seemed, with online quizzes and also quiz us in lecture on the quiz we just took! also his lecture skills absolute garbage. like his slides made no sense there wasnt a common sense way to follow along to take notes. We had Unit exams also known as problem sets plus a midterm and a final. OH MY GOD THE MIDTERM AND FINAL. Bro he showed up to the midterm TEN MINUTES LATE and refused to give us the extra time on it. like brother youre the reason why we dont have time. so then on to the final. he gives us examples of previous finals with INCORRECT answer sheets. Like what the actual fuck. With the final practices theres segments that require drawing and graphing, for my cheat sheet. Just to show up for the final and it is all multiple choice. I mean god damn it I could have added more notes in the space of my graphs.
Also he didnt fix grades that he said he was going to fix. which is why i got the C+. I had a 79.78. I sent an email saying something along the lines like "Hey i noticed my grade is reading at a C+ and there's a few things that havent been corrected and that can boost my grade to a B-. Which ya know is a big deal for my gpa." Just to see my final grade as a C+ like are you fucking kidding me. I cant even retake the class.

My overall issue is the sheer amount of information he was throwing at us and we didnt have a discussion section. Like if we had that then we probably would have been a lot better off. So yeah I don't like the guy.

I loved this class! I'm a Poli Sci major that really enjoys STEM and it teaches R in course kata. It's a lot of async work but I really enjoyed it. However, if you have to code in R in the future for stats it's not very applicable in R studio. Quizzes are just like the practice quizzes they give out. I'd recommend this class if you're interested in coding and need a pre req!