This is supposed to be a foundational stats course that the other upper divs build upon, and yet he has failed to convey meaningful theory to most students. The slides are copy pasted text out of the textbook and are hard to parse. Going to lecture is not valuable as he does not explain much properly. The way he sometimes responded to honest questions from students on canvas was condescending. The final lecture was review for the final, in which we failed to get through 1 question out of 7 and no one was happy. I found him to be quite friendly in office hours, but the overwhelming impression is that he is a researcher who didn't want to teach in the first place. Whether that's true, it's the vibe we got! The tests are of reasonable difficulty, but the grading scheme is very harsh. This may just be the TA, but there was little/no partial credit, so minor mistakes are costly. The TA and professor both admitted to not having communicated about grading, or really anything at all. This class is apparently not difficult or confusing when taught by other professors, so do yourself and your stats understanding a favor and avoid.

This class seemed pretty standard for the most part. I feel like the professor could have been a little more engaging, but you can't really have everything you ask for I guess. I do think the participation assignment was one of the most ridiculous things I've had to do at this school—I don't understand how having a baseline of nine questions asked on a discussion post is in any way helpful. I feel like the hardest part of this class was to honestly come up with nine unique questions (like clarifying questions about material) to ask, as I felt pretty secure about most of the content. I understand having a discussion board requirement, but I feel like it should have a purpose, and this assignment just ended in the discussion board being flooded with questions like "Where is the final?" or "What day is the midterm?" just to get points, and many questions I could be interested in were buried under these.