Professor
Joshua Sparks
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2025 - This is a review for the STATS 20 course taught by Professor Sparks. Professor Sparks is a good lecturer, and he has a lot of enthusiasm when he teaches. He teaches mainly off slides, so it can get dry and boring after some time, but he tries his best to engage the lecture hall when he's teaching. He is also super approachable with questions about the lecture content and about any homework problems. I had a good amount of programming knowledge coming into the class, so I felt that the content was not that hard; however, I felt that the slides were helpful in explaining useful programming concepts and Professor Sparks did a lot of demos in RStudio pertaining to the slide content. As for examinations, the midterm/final content was basically all of the stuff on his slides. All of the questions are manageable. The only "iff" I have is that he sometimes pulls things that were barely covered in class and puts it on the midterm. It wasn't a big deal in the end because he only asks a couple of questions about those concepts and offers 10 points extra credit (on both the midterm and the final). The final was a little tricky if you didn't have programming experience because it did require to you to write some complex data cleaning algorithms in R, but he did give plenty partial credit. The average was ~80% for both exams. TLDR; I would take Professor Sparks again. He's a good teacher, explains concepts well, and his examinations are fair (just the content on his slides).
Fall 2025 - This is a review for the STATS 20 course taught by Professor Sparks. Professor Sparks is a good lecturer, and he has a lot of enthusiasm when he teaches. He teaches mainly off slides, so it can get dry and boring after some time, but he tries his best to engage the lecture hall when he's teaching. He is also super approachable with questions about the lecture content and about any homework problems. I had a good amount of programming knowledge coming into the class, so I felt that the content was not that hard; however, I felt that the slides were helpful in explaining useful programming concepts and Professor Sparks did a lot of demos in RStudio pertaining to the slide content. As for examinations, the midterm/final content was basically all of the stuff on his slides. All of the questions are manageable. The only "iff" I have is that he sometimes pulls things that were barely covered in class and puts it on the midterm. It wasn't a big deal in the end because he only asks a couple of questions about those concepts and offers 10 points extra credit (on both the midterm and the final). The final was a little tricky if you didn't have programming experience because it did require to you to write some complex data cleaning algorithms in R, but he did give plenty partial credit. The average was ~80% for both exams. TLDR; I would take Professor Sparks again. He's a good teacher, explains concepts well, and his examinations are fair (just the content on his slides).
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