| Charnley Matthew Summer 2016, 01:640:477:B1 — MATHEMATICAL THEORY OF PROBABILITY (index #02048) Enrollment= 25, Responses= 14 Part A: University-wide Questions: |
Student Responses | Weighted Means | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strong Disagree 1 |
Strong Agree 5 |
No response |
Section | Course | Level | Dept | ||||
| 1. The instructor was prepared for class and presented the material in an organized manner. | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 12 | 0 | 4.71 | 4.74 | 4.88 | 4.63 |
| 2. The instructor responded effectively to student comments and questions. | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 11 | 0 | 4.79 | 4.74 | 4.84 | 4.50 |
| 3. The instructor generated interest in the course material. | 0 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 10 | 0 | 4.50 | 4.62 | 4.75 | 4.42 |
| 4. The instructor had a positive attitude toward assisting all students in understanding course material. | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 14 | 0 | 5.00 | 4.93 | 4.93 | 4.61 |
| 5. The instructor assigned grades fairly. | 0 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 9 | 0 | 4.57 | 4.74 | 4.74 | 4.50 |
| 6. The instructional methods encouraged student learning. | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 9 | 1 | 4.69 | 4.77 | 4.73 | 4.39 |
| 7. I learned a great deal in this course. | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 10 | 0 | 4.71 | 4.74 | 4.79 | 4.48 |
| 8. I had a strong prior interest in the subject matter and wanted to take this course. | 0 | 1 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 0 | 4.07 | 4.30 | 4.27 | 3.67 |
| Poor | Excellent | |||||||||
| 9. I rate the teaching effectiveness of the instructor as: | 0 | 0 | 1 | 3 | 10 | 0 | 4.64 | 4.59 | 4.77 | 4.41 |
| 10. I rate the overall quality of the course as: | 0 | 0 | 1 | 5 | 8 | 0 | 4.50 | 4.48 | 4.68 | 4.31 |
What do you like best about this course?:
in class practice problems that reinforced what the class learned that day
Even though this was an 8 a.m. summer class and many of the students were tired and distracted, the instructor seemed to put a lot of effort and enthusiasm into the material he was teaching. He offered a lot of office hours which were very helpful.
Although there was little time to learn the material, I think I acquired an accurate understanding of the subject matter.
The teacher is really patient and passionate.
There are enough review materials for preparing the exams. Easy to understand for the professor's explanation.
The practice problems will helped introduce the material and set a good foundation!
If you were teaching this course, what would you do differently?:
go over the harder homework problems assigned. give more examples that were not in the textbook
When presenting new material, I would give more simple examples to explain concepts. I felt like often, we would learn a new theorem or proposition, and be given one extremely simple example followed by one hard, overly complicated example. I understand that there is more of a time constraint when going through material during a summer course, but I think it would be more effective to give less complicated examples and more simple/moderate examples to demonstrate concepts. Additionally, when it comes to grading, I think quizzes should be a smaller percentage or equal percentage to homework/practice problems. I find it unfair that we only have 4 quizzes worth 20% while there were 18 homeworks only worth 10%. I did poorly on only 1 quiz and it pulled my entire grade down, while I spent hours competing all of my homework and do not have much to show for it. For future classes, I think either these grading policies should be adjusted, or one quiz grade should be dropped to compensate.
I found that the last three chapters seemed rushed. A longer focus on this material may be more beneficial.
I would assign less homework; maybe one assignment every other day. Even though you should be studying (i.e. doing problems) every day in a summer course, some days it was hard to complete homework on time if you have other obligations in addition to the course.
In what ways, if any, has this course or the instructor encouraged your intellectual growth and progress?:
The use of practice problems during every lecture definitely helped to learn the material
I've learned countless of new ways to think about probability and even find myself thinking about what I've learned during this course when I play card games with my family.
Other comments or suggestions::
This class was tough and had dry material but the professor definitely made it more bearable
The layout of the course was very effective with daily homework and weekly quizzes.
Overall, Matt Charnley is a really good instructor! He is really passionate about teaching and wants his students to do well.
Maybe can be less homework and hope the exams are straight forward as what professor said.
The only problem I had with this course was the amount of formulas that we had to memorize. That might just be because I'm not great with memorization, but having a small formula sheet in my previous statistics courses really helped me personally.