<p>"Instead, all he did was go to Amazon, look up all the books that he was supposed to have read, and check out the Amazon user comments of those books."</p>
<p>I'm quite surprised this is not considered cheating. While I can't speak for Berkeley in particular, I don't think most professors expect the students to have done all the reading. That said, most serious political science courses require students to come up with original arguments supported by textual evidence. You can't do this and get strong grades if you haven't done the reading.</p>