Haley, John  

Missed the first day, went to the second day. Went to the midterm. Went to the Final. Three days of class total. I got a B, easy. This kind of shit gives our school a bad name.

Professor Haley is an incredibly intelligent man and this is his first quarter teaching at poly. He has taught at law schools and that is a bit of the problem. I took Pols 245 with him, and he is unable to teach to students who do not have extensive legal knowledge coming into the class. He is unorganized and confusing and will use terms that the majority of the class will not understand because it is a 200 level class. I feel that I was lucky and had knowledge going into the class so I did alright. He did not have a good syllabus prepared at the beginning of the class, and we got very little information about how he would be graded. This quarter he had a credit/no credit assignment which we turned in about halfway through the quarter, and a paper about a pending supreme court case due on the last day of class in the last week. The two written assignments are 50% of your grade (no rubric or clear explanation of what was expected on the paper) and the other 50% is the final. Studying for the final is difficult because there is no study guide and he is very evasive when you ask specific questions. Students would ask for a definition for a term and he would go on a tangent about an example of an example and never answer then question. The final wasn't terrible, but I did study a lot because I had no idea what would be on it. Haley can be very interesting and he is very knowledgeable. Once he gets organized and assigned to higher level classes (300-400) he could be a very good teacher, but for this class it was rough. Do not go to his class hungry or tired because you will have trouble paying attention, it is a very slow and tedious class, which could be improved.

Haley seems like he is an excellent Law School professor that was awkwardly placed in an undergraduate program. His experience and knowledge of the law is very clear but it doesn't come through in his 245 lectures. He will often go off on class-long tangents of examples that will only confuse you further. To be fair, this is his first quarter at Cal Poly and maybe he'll get better with experience, but if you don't have at least some sort of grasp on law I wouldn't bank on it. The only reason I did well in this class was because I knew most of the material going into it. Also, your grade is based 50% on making a list of Justices, and writing about a current court case, and then 50% on the final which is cumulative and you have no idea what he's going to put on it. Questions are useless because he will take 10 minutes answering a question that should only take a few seconds to highlight the main ideas.