Shalom Yotam, I have been requested by Mike Saks and Eric Careln to do Something "ktsat lo naim" as my role as your teaching mentor. Here is the message that I got from Mike and Eric together with the email from one of your students (whose name I was asked to remove). Please remember that the students are VERY WEAK and I constantly am shocked by their extreme ignorance, and lack of understanding of basic mathematical notions that we take for granted. So I really recommend that you "dumb it down" and make it as explicit as possible. You are welcome to use my lecture notes in https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/DrZProbabilityHandouts.html Lehitraot, Doron --------------- Subject: Your help needed as teaching mentor Dear Doron, You are the teaching mentor for Hill Assistant Professor Yotam Smilansky. Yotam is teaching 477 this semester. The message below comes from a 2nd year honors student. Eric and I don't know whether the concerns of this student are widely shared by students. (Yotam taught the same course in Spring 2020, and his student evaluations (attached) were good). The student writes in a way that is thoughtful and credible, and so warrants some attention. Please contact Yotam immediately and discuss this with him, and help him assess what if any adjustments are needed in the course. Please don't share the student's name with him. You might ask him how this semester seems to be comparing to spring 2020. (i don't know what his grades were in Spring 2020, but I'm guessing they were not bad since a very tough grading scale tends to depress student evaluations.) You might ask him about the results of his first exams, and whether the grade distribution is roughly in line with what is typical for this course. (I attach historical grade distributions for 477 which Yotam got at the beginning of the semester. To avoid any misunderstanding: The historical distribution is a guideline not a rule. It is certainly possible that a particular class will differ significantly from the historical distribution, but such deviations should be carefully considered.) Please keep us informed. Best, Mike (also on behalf of Eric) Michael Saks Distinguished Professor and Chair Department of Mathematics Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey New Brunswick Campus From: NameRemoved Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2020 6:16 PM To: ugvc ; chair Subject: Concern on Math477 Section 02-03 Dear Professor Carlen and Professor Saks, I am a minor in mathematics and am taking Professor Yotam Smilansky's Math477 class this semester. I think I should share with you my experience in this class. I have found myself always lost in this class, compared with several other math courses I have taken at Rutgers. Yesterday morning we had our 2nd midterm. The exam was to check whether we were able to distinguish different probability distributions. However, those distributions were not properly explained at all in his lectures. As a result, I had to check each distribution in order to figure out which one the problems were asking for. For my previous math classes, I was able to connect the problem with corresponding theorem or definition once I finished reading the problem. And I was also aware of the methodologies and common mistakes when solving that kind of problems. However, this is not the case in Math477. Even though I checked answers with classmates after the exam, I am still not confident on the ways I approached the problems. For example, the last question of the exam mixed dependent events, Bernoulli distribution and maybe hypergeometric distribution together. And we had to understand those concepts really well in order to solve it, but the professor did not explain them clearly at all. This is definitely not the experience when I was taking previous math courses. What concerns me more is that I always need to spend an extraordinary amount of time outside of class in order to survive this course, because I need to find supplementary sources such as Youtube tutorials to clear up my confusion on the course materials even though I went to the professor’s and TA’s office hours. For one of my homework, it took me more than 20 hours but I still could not finish it. I literally have no time left for any other course I am taking this semester. I am in the honors problem with a 4.0 GPA, and have always enjoyed the challenges in my math courses. However, taking this course makes me lose interest and confidence in math. Several of my classmates in this class share my experience. For example, a classmate (also with a 4.0 GPA) who is the smartest and most hardworking person I have met at Rutgers, did not do well on the 1st midterm and told me that they would probably fail the 2nd one. And they said working hard to get a B in this course may be the best possible outcome at this point. In addition, we have to give one single answer to each problem in all midterms and are not able to show details on how we solve them. If there is any calculation error, we would lose all points for the problem. In terms of grading. it means that students making mistake on calculation accidentally and students who don’t know how to solve the problem at all cannot be distinguished. Many of my classmates were asking for the option to upload their solutions (with all steps of how they solve the problems) to exams, as we were able to do in prior semesters. But the professor said he and the TA cannot handle the grading workload as there are 4 midterms required by the Math department. Furthermore, the answers to the homework provided by the professor sometimes refer to some terminologies and concepts we have not learned yet. For example, a solution using logical expressions (such as "for all" / "there exists" symbol) may be troublesome because this course does not list Math300 (Math Reasoning) as a prerequisite and many of us are clueless about those terminologies. Professor Smilansky is a smart mathematician and he has been very organized in this course. However, he is not an effective instructor and many of us are having a really hard time in his class. I would appreciate it if you can offer some intervention on his pedagogy on our behalf, maybe sitting in one of his lectures to see whether he can improve his teaching. If there is any pedagogical tutorials in the Math department that can be made available to Professor Smilansky to improve his teaching, maybe that’ll help to salvage the rest of the semester for us. Thank you very much for your understanding and help. Sincerely, NameRemoved -----------------