Spring 2022 Course Evaluations

What aspect(s) of the course or instruction could be improved?

n/a Staying on schedule If Professor Pokorak kept to the syllabus, I believe that would be the biggest improvement. Better keeping up with the syllabus We ended up falling behind on the syllabus, and I am sad that we had to switch professors so late in the semester. Nearly everything. Why did we spend one hour of class watching music videos and rambling about current events? There was barely a classroom discussion, it was just the professor and a few gunners pontificating. Somehow the rest of the class was worse! This professor does not know how to teach. He assigns too much reading, does not give enough direction on what to actually read and then does not often get to any of the assigned material. When asked how far ahead we should get, because of course he does not assign readings per class but per subject, he said, "when in doubt, just read more." Fair play if he did not already assign over 100pages of reading!! Our class was over a month behind in readings. When we did discuss the readings he failed to properly use class contribution and he often just clicked through a powerpoint that had no information on it. He often would say, "well, we talked about this," when we had not in fact talked about it. He made students get into panels and meet outside of class hours with the intention of having those panels lead the class. But he did not make them lead the class. It was hard to tell who the panels were as he did not force them to talk or give them opportunity to do so. Finally, the midterm was poorly written, grammatically and substantively. He actually included a question that was a fill in the blank from a court decision. Is that a test of knowledge? Even if it was meant to be a freebie/bonus, it was a waste of our time and a ridiculous question. Please, assign students readings per class and then go over the readings in class! Also, don’t just give your take, make the actual legal analysis first, then add in your two cents. Finally, if you’re going to waste time with panels, make them answer every class question or get rid of them. The class was very behind and I felt like we did not learn a lot of the actual material that we needed to know. Further, the midterm exam was nothing like it was described as being about the broad concepts when in reality it was about specific things in the cases and texts, and although I studied and felt very comfortable with all the concepts I felt very unprepared once I opened the exam. Professor Pokorak got off topic very often. We would spend an hour of class sometimes on topics unrelated to ConLaw and his instruction was unorganized and very hard to follow. We would have a lot of reading that we didn’t cover, having been behind on our syllabus by about a month before Professor Reyes took over the course.

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