Professor
Abby Kavner
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2024 - You won't learn anything about chemistry in her lectures. She goes off on tangents for her love of rocks and physics concepts. At the beginning of the quarter, she told us that we'd be focusing on quantum mechanics and that it'd be an important topic, just to not have any questions on the final covering that topic. Kavner admitted that she hadn't written the final until 2 days prior, and it's obvious the TA's do everything for her. She's lazy for sure, from a teaching standpoint.
Fall 2024 - You won't learn anything about chemistry in her lectures. She goes off on tangents for her love of rocks and physics concepts. At the beginning of the quarter, she told us that we'd be focusing on quantum mechanics and that it'd be an important topic, just to not have any questions on the final covering that topic. Kavner admitted that she hadn't written the final until 2 days prior, and it's obvious the TA's do everything for her. She's lazy for sure, from a teaching standpoint.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - Overall in the class, the lectures would at time seem disorganized and not completely related to the homework that was assigned that week. Because of this, if you've never taken chemistry before, I wouldn't recommend this class or the honor series in general. She also emphasized a lot of earth science material that didn't always seem relevant to the class. That being said, I don't think she deserves as low a review as she gets. Her tests weren't overly difficult, a lot of the grade consisted of homework (which could be regraded), and you could tell that she had an enthusiasm for teaching. I would definitely take her again.
Fall 2023 - Overall in the class, the lectures would at time seem disorganized and not completely related to the homework that was assigned that week. Because of this, if you've never taken chemistry before, I wouldn't recommend this class or the honor series in general. She also emphasized a lot of earth science material that didn't always seem relevant to the class. That being said, I don't think she deserves as low a review as she gets. Her tests weren't overly difficult, a lot of the grade consisted of homework (which could be regraded), and you could tell that she had an enthusiasm for teaching. I would definitely take her again.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2020 - I love Professor Kavner, she is the sweetest and really cares about her students! However, this was such an unclear and confusing class. She graded none of our work before she submitted our final grades, which was A LOT of work, and then arbitrarily assigned 95% of the class B's with 1 or 2 A's and C's. I did a lot of hard work for this class so I was very disappointed to never receive any feedback and then get a poor grade.
Fall 2020 - I love Professor Kavner, she is the sweetest and really cares about her students! However, this was such an unclear and confusing class. She graded none of our work before she submitted our final grades, which was A LOT of work, and then arbitrarily assigned 95% of the class B's with 1 or 2 A's and C's. I did a lot of hard work for this class so I was very disappointed to never receive any feedback and then get a poor grade.
Most Helpful Review
I took plate tectonics with Kavner. She's great! It was her first time teaching the class so many of the concepts were simplified but we still learned a lot. She is extremely willing to help with the homework and really wants everyone to understand the concepts and get a good grade. The textbooks didn't really help too much but there were some concepts in them that showed up on the exams. The midterm and final weren't tricky as long as you went to all of the lectures. The final paper and presentation wasn't difficult at all- just make sure you pick something that interests you.
I took plate tectonics with Kavner. She's great! It was her first time teaching the class so many of the concepts were simplified but we still learned a lot. She is extremely willing to help with the homework and really wants everyone to understand the concepts and get a good grade. The textbooks didn't really help too much but there were some concepts in them that showed up on the exams. The midterm and final weren't tricky as long as you went to all of the lectures. The final paper and presentation wasn't difficult at all- just make sure you pick something that interests you.
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