I've taken two courses with professor Wilson and I enjoyed both of them. Wilson proves that he is both competent in his knowledge of history and reasonable in his expectations for his classes.

Most of the work in his courses consists of reading, either novels that pertain to the period or from first-person documents. You're given a reasonable period of time to read these (a couple months for the novels and a week for the shorter first-person accounts). In the case of the novels, you are required to write a short, 3 page book review. He gives you clear guidelines for structuring and proofreading your book reviews in the course syllabus, so if you are a descent writer and can express your opinions well, you'll get a descent grade. For the first-person accounts, you're given a short-five question quiz on the selection. These quizzes are easy and are given only to force you to do the reading. All-in-all the assignments for the course are very reasonable.

Wilson teaches through lecture. He shows PowerPoint slides with the general outline of the topics he is discussing. DON'T just write what is on the slides. You need to take good, detailed notes on what he is discussing so that you can not only understand the event/person completely but also put it in the bigger picture of the period. I found that, as long as you paid attention in class and took good notes, everything made perfect sense.

Wilson gives three exams in his courses - 2 regular exams on particular parts of the course and a cumulative final exam. The tests contain fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice, short-answer, and essay questions. Study early and hard for the exams, as they make up most of your grade. Spend the most time on the short-answer and essay questions, since these require the most thought. Although the final is cumulative, most of the material is from the most recent material, and there are fewer short-answer/essay type questions. Finally, check that your exam was graded properly since he usually has a graduate assistant grade the objective parts of the exams, and he won't know something was mistakenly marked wrong unless you tell him.

You will find that Wilson is very easy to like. He is very willing to help when you don't understand something. He knows the material he teaches inside-out. He is able to make history seem real through his own experiences (especially in 20th Century History). He is always interested in knowing the reasons a student is struggling so that he can make suggestions for improvement. He encourages discussion in his classes and respects students opinions and conclusions about topics. If you need credits in history, definitely take a course with him.