Dr. Alex, as he prefers to be called, is a very fair albeit somewhat harsh grading instructor. You will work very hard for the grades you recieve in his class and lose entire points on papers for what other instructors will deduct a fraction for. An example is on my 18 page analysis paper that he complemented on by the way, I missed one justification in one paragraph out of the entire paper, and lost 1 of 3 points for that section. While I did miss including the justification in that section (oversight in a long paper) to deduct 1/3 of the grade for the covering the subject matter for that area was a bitter pill to deal with considering the remaining pages of detailed information. This dropped me entire letter grade for the paper. This is just one example, this carries over into the classroom as well, do not be late or short on your word with count for your responses or DQ's. This is tracked very closely. He is very subjective as to what he considers as relative and what is not to the conversations and you have no idea if you have contributed often enough "substantually" in his opinion until your grade come in; he does not use the flag system UoP has. I suspect he is one of the professors determined to not allow any student to recieve an A in his classes. I never made and A on any paper, nor did any one else I spoke with, 90, was the best grades and my final A- grade was as high as his grades went. These things being said he grades your papers promptly and has your responses back very quickly which is wonderful. If you understand the subject matter easily and can follow the rules to the letter, you will have no problems. I had trouble with the materials and he provided additional websites to assist my attempts to understand what I was trying to grasp.