Dude this class made me lose brain cells

First of all, Professor Odhiambo is a very nice person and was very helpful whenever I reached out for help. He had a lot of office hours, and he would almost always respond to my emails quickly. Additionally, the class material was not inherently difficult (coming from somebody with zero background in statistics).

However, I think any student in the class would agree that the class was not well-structured. I believe this may have partly been the result of this being Odhiambo's first time teaching the class. *It is plausible that Prof. Odhiambo's Stats 10 may be a much better experience in the future.*
1. The organization of the class was very messy. I remember that I thought there was no syllabus until I asked a classmate, who told me that it was named "stats_lecture4" or something along those lines. In the beginning of the quarter, we also could not access any of the lecture slideshows for a few weeks due to some technical issues.
2. As someone who had zero programming experience, learning to program in R was not that bad. However, it was frustrating that Prof. Odhiambo gave fairly unclear/vague directions on some of the first homework assignments, which I thought was not appropriate for beginner programmers. Prof. Odhiambo would also sometimes spend entire lectures programming in R; I appreciate the intention as a way to teach it, but he spent a decent amount of time sorting out issues in real time (such as using the wrong function or using the function incorrectly. An example is him using corr() and never figuring out that it was supposed to be cor(). I understood this, but I figure most people did not and were just very confused).
3. Some quizzes suffered from a major amount of typos. On at least one occasion there was a question with no correct answers because of a typo. For the first quiz, we were quizzed on things that were never taught anywhere in the class (nor in the textbook. I would know because I read through all of the chapters listed in the syllabus). Partly compensating for this is the fact that he allowed two attempts on each quiz and always took the better one. Similarly, he would sometimes give flat-out incorrect formulas in class (such as square root-ing the numerator of the correlation coefficient). I am sure that these incorrect formulas confused a decent amount of people.
4. In my humble opinion, I believe he did not do an adequate job teaching some of the key concepts. So, Stats 10 as a whole (I believe) is basically just leading up to the concepts of hypothesis testing and confidence intervals. I felt that he gave way too little coverage of foundational/key concepts such as the normal distribution / central limit theorem, t distributions, and z/t scores. I believe the topic of the two sample t-tests (both for paired and independent data) were both covered in one 50 minute class period. I felt that he barely, if at all, explained the reasons for doing any of the hypothesis tests. The burden was often placed on the TAs to do much of the teaching. **Massive shoutout to my TA Yunan Yan: he was incredibly nice, helpful, and smart. I would highly advise choosing him as a TA for any statistics course!**
5. Both of the midterms are take-home / do on your own time. However, the second midterm had questions covering content that was not taught anywhere (in lecture or in the textbook), and the study guide for the final also suffered from this same issue. There was a huge amount of uncertainty about what exactly on the study guide would be on the final. I understand that a study guide is better than no study guide generally, but I would say it was somewhat straight up misleading because of things on there that we actually did not need to know. I would estimate about half of the stuff on the study guide were things that we were eventually told would not be on the final.
6. There were many issues in grading. I completely do not blame the graders (who were not the TAs), who I am sure were likely just working off Prof. Odhiambo's answer key. One example is that on the last homework, the grading was so incorrect that some people falsely received Ds when their true grades were As (later corrected). Of course, for what it's worth, I am grateful that Prof. Odhiambo went in and corrected grades every time one of these issues arose.

STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU NOT TO TAKE THIS COURSE WITH COLLINS ODHIAMBO UNLESS YOU FEEL VERY ENERGIZED AND PREPARED FOR ALL OF THE FOLLOWING TROUBLES

He does answer questions and respond to emails. Generally, he can become an ok professor if he can:

1. Have a better idea of what a syllabus is. The syllabus was completely messed up in the first half of the quarter. So the contents of the lectures were imaginably chaotic too.
2. Strengthen the communication between him and the graders. The graders completely messed up the grading process (and certainly the grades too haha) of homework and exams and he had no idea about that.
3. Have a better grasp of English conversations because he seems to struggle very frequently with understanding what students asked in lectures.
4. Express his requirements for homework and exams in a less ambiguous way. Create fewer ambiguous questions in quizzes.
5. Teach us all of the knowledge needed for homework, quizzes, and exams. Make students listen more and Google less.
6. Set up recordings from week 1 and upload them regularly. Know that his accent made it impossible to understand what he said without watching the recordings.
7. Stop feeling good about everything in this class. Start to understand that he made 200 students' winter quarter terrible as HELL.

Btw, a funny scenario illustrating point 3:
- Student: Will there be a curve for the final exam?
- Collins: It will be on 17th, but if you cannot make it on 17th, come on 24th.
P.S.: He said so because he did not confirm the time of the final until week 7 or 8 I can't remember