Review:
As most anybody can tell you, Professor Cruz is an extremely engaging professor who clearly cares about her students and is interested in their thoughts and opinions. She makes an effort to learn her students' names (no small achievement in a class of over 100 students) and is genuinely impressed and interested by intelligent comments and questions. She herself clearly puts very little emphasis on the grading aspect, preferring the class to be a discussion-- one of those very few professors who really does the "it's not about grades, it's what you LEARN" approach.
The problem is that, though interesting, her lectures are EXTREMELY disorganized; if you were expecting to take coherent notes, think again. She jumps around all over the place to the point that you will completely forget what you are talking about, and why. Basically, the class has no real structure, and while the syllabus does earmark certain days for certain topics, the way that the topics are discussed seems completely haphazard. An interesting professor though, and very approachable.

Workload:
Take-home midterm and take-home final. You are mostly at the mercy of your TA's, but grading is generally pretty fair. Most of the reading is probably unnecessary; I personally didn't do any reading until it came time to write the papers (though taht's probably not the best way to go about it). Basically, you could probably get a good grade in the class without ever showing up to lectures, but make sure you go to the recitations (it's 10% if your grade).

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