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Koffi Enakoutsa
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He rescheduled 1 quiz for 3 times and even tried to make us do it over the weekend; cancelled 1 quiz because he messed up his teaching schedule; said he would drop 2 lowest HW in syllabus but just announced he would not do so by the end of the quarter; he made a mistake in the question of the final exam and caused most ppl wasted 30 mins for nothing and did not take any action after the exam regarding this issue.
Let alone the crazy amount of homework (more than 10 hours per week) and random changes to attedence requirements. He refused to admit that things were so unorganized in his class and exerted a lot of pressure on us students.
He is the worst of worst, avoid him at all costs. The other good comments are all his OWN SPAM.
This is a toned down version of my original draft, since eventually things turned out okay personally. I know Koffi reads these reviews, and do feel slightly bad for all the hate mail he received (he did attempt to teach and spent time including office hours on weekends).
DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS if you value your time, GPA, education, or mental health. Honestly not sure what’s left. Koffi assigned a ridiculous amount of homework every week with the justification it’s a summer course. I was accused of cheating 5 times, twice personally and thrice along with the class. We were forced to retake Quiz 1 thrice due to his own errors. He also absurdly changed expectations about attendance when his feelings were hurt because no one enjoys deciphering hieroglyphics with mumbling in the background.
Unlike previous quarters, the final brutal (even ignoring the unsolvable problem). But somehow Koffi finished the entire test in 30 min (clearly missed at least one question he wrote himself). Ultimately, 60% of the test was graded for completion, which is clearly unfair for those who didn’t write gibberish.
Everything was either a personal attack on Koffi or an academic integrity violation. He would constantly argue with students on email or Campuswire instead of addressing very reasonable issues. I’m legitimately traumatized by this class and seriously questioning enrolling in UCLA classes next summer. It used to be tolerable due to the exams, but now nothing redeemable remains.
This class is ridiculous. Not only his teaching style is bad, simply going over his lecture notes on his iPad and intolerable thick accent, the exams are not fair at all. Moreover, he blames the students for the disorganization of the course. Throughout the entire time, his way of addressing those logistics issue is basically just arguing with students. Quiz rescheduled three times and canceled a quiz. Told us to stick with the syllabus when we addressed our concerns of grading but simultaneously telling us he will no longer drop the homework with the lowest grade......Mistake on the final was also addressed not to the students' favor. Overall, he's bad at teaching and punishes students for his own mistakes.
Professor Enakoutsa is hard to understand and so is his writing. During class, he simply works through problems as if he is just doing them on his own, using shortcuts and tricks that a student learning the material for the first time would not know. Lectures are more watching and copying down whatever he has on the board and not fully understanding it rather than him actually teaching the concepts. As this is my second time taking this same course with him, I figured out better ways to learn and study on my own because his lectures are not very helpful. When asked a question, he oftentimes gets irritated and spends more time expressing why he does not like the question than just answering it. He does not seem to be on the same page as his TAs and the lack of communication between them made it difficult to get productive feedback. A lot of questions do not even get addressed; he set up a Campuswire which he said he responds to better than email, but he does not answer most of the questions on there and I have sent him multiple emails that he has not responded to as well. As this is an online course for summer, at the beginning of the course majority of the class was blocked from joining the Zoom and when students brought it up to him he would just say to talk to IT. He would even call out students who asked questions by saying “It’s apparent you have not been logging into class” even though they were having trouble accessing IT. He has argued with his students AND TAs on Campuswire and even copy and pasted a students’ evaluation of him and sent it in an email to the whole class calling the students’ criticism “crazy”. At the end of this course, there were no grades entered in BruinLearn at all and as students repeatedly asked in CampusWire when our grades would be released, the professor ignored them all. Finally, two weeks after the course ended, I emailed Professor Enakoutsa about the release of grades and if we would be able to see our score from the final to which he replied “Waouh! So you have not seen your letter grade in your grade report. The session was over two weeks ago.” Not only was the professor’s response rude, but he also did not answer my question and when I asked again he said the grades cannot stay public forever, however our grades were never made public as far as I know and if they were, he never told the class they were available. Also, he says the grades cannot stay public forever, but our midterm grade and my grade from the final I took with him during spring quarter are still available which strengthens my claim that these final grades were never released. I was finally able to view my final class grade on my grade report on MyUCLA, but I was never able to see what I got wrong on my final or even what my final score was and I never saw the breakdown of my grade, only the overall class grade at the end of the course which is very concerning because going into the final I had an A- but ended the course with a C+. Professor Enakoutsa has not stayed on track with the course plan he posted at the beginning of the course which is fine but he does not mention what section he is in from day to day because it does not match where he predicted we would be. The homework load is also very heavy with three assignments per week with about 25-40 questions in each assignment. Considering this is a condensed summer course, having separate assignments with so many questions took hours to complete every week. The grading for the homework is also very random as some questions are worth one point and others are worth twenty points so every assignment adds up to 100 points. The homework is graded for correctness and it always seems the questions you get wrong are worth the most points.
Upon first meeting Professor Enakoutsa during our first Math 32A lecture, I found him to be interesting and an entertaining teacher.-- He seemed funny and I was optimistic about learning multivariable calculus from someone with such a passionate personality. It was the next class meeting, however, where seats previously filled became vacant, that I realized I may have made a mistake in choosing this professor....
Nevertheless, I stuck it out the remainder of the quarter, dedicating a great amount of my own time and energy to Math 32A outside of lectures and discussions; I began to "speak his language" (that is, better decipher the material through his French accent) and was able to gain a relatively high confidence in the subjects we were learning. Seriously, I could detail each and every chapter in the textbook and describe succinctly the ins-and-outs of vector functions, directional derivatives, and parametric equations.
Apparently, all of this effort proved meaningless when I received my final grade, (which I will not share because, frankly, I'm embarrassed) which was the lowest grade I have EVER received in any class I've taken. EVER.
I reached out to Professor Enakoutsa to communicate my concern, to which I received NO REPLY. Unfortunately, this was as I had expected as I sent him several emails DURING THE QUARTER regarding homework and test material which met the same fate.
I tried very hard to look past the less-than-flattering reviews I had seen for Professor Enakoutsa and allow myself to develop my own opinion on him, but I am saddened to say that they are all true... the negative ones, at least-- DO NOT be fooled by the rare sprinkling of overly positive reviews left by "real students" on this website or the Reddit forums; They have been angrily crafted by the terribly fragile ego belonging to none other than Professor Enakoutsa (But if you're looking for a laugh, go search up this name on Reddit, you won't be sorry lol ;)). In fact, as I write this, I am bracing myself for a bitter response from one of his anonymous accounts, which is ridiculous and sad.
Long story short: Avoid Professor Enakoutsa... SERIOUSLY! The material was interesting. The class was unorganized. The assessments were fine. The homeworks were long. Professor Enakoutsa was the worst I have encountered at UCLA.
if you have any commitments that make you miss class he will be horrible about it. i had work during his class once a week, and enrolled late, and he was cold, unforgiving, and actively pointed out and made fun of students leaving early to go to their jobs. it’s really not fair towards working students, and it’s kind of odd how he acts like they don’t deserve to be in his class because they have to work to be able to afford to be there in the first place. his class material is fine, he is understandable and a good teacher but has an extremely questionable attitude towards students who have priorities other than him.
DO NOT TAKE KOFI. He only teaches from the textbook which makes going to class not worth it, but even if you do go, his handwriting is illegible. He has been rude to students, posted his own poor reviews in order to talk down on students, and his tests have many errors which are not corrected until you are taking them. I loved math so much and even competed for four years in math but I do not wish to take another math class because of the professor.
Professor Enakoutsa overall seems like a nice guy, he'd make jokes in class and always thanked us for coming to lectures and is definitely passionate about math. Unfortunately I did not understand anything when I went to lecture. I really struggled to follow, not just that he had an accent (I could mostly understand him in that sense) but the math explanations were unclear and I would get lost on problems that were much simpler than he made it seem. Most people stop coming to lecture after one week and self study. Many students said if you go to his review sessions he goes over everything you need to know for exams and found the exams easy. I went to every review session and studied at least a week for every exam and I still failed EVERY EXAM. I think I would have performed a lot better with another professor but honestly just happy to have passed the class. The only thing that saved me was that it was curved at the end. If you have experience with concepts of multivariable calculus I think it is probably a much more doable class, it was just my first time learning these things.
Also his handwriting is so hard to read T^T
the reviews of koffi for 32A are extremely black and white- no nuance. there are people screeching that he is a demon and other people saying he's great. i would say in reality, he is in the middle. I do agree with the people that say the overwhelmingly positive reviews are fake, but I do not agree with the people saying he is a demon. Baseline for me was that koffi was a confusing lecturer, but he was very caring about his students so you can still do well in the class.
First, the grading scheme was 10% homework, 5% Quizzes, 30 % best midterm grade, 55% final exam or 10% homework, 5% Quizzes, 22.5% midterm 1, 22.5% midterm 2, 40% final exam, whichever would benefit you most. I also believe the grade boundaries are 93% is an A unless he decides to change it. Homework was a PITA and very long, but the proofs were usually not graded.
Koffi's lecturing style was very confusing. He could introduce topics okay, but I would always get very lost. He goes very very fast because he tries to cover every single section of the chapters assigned in calc 32A. No triaging of what is most important to learn, he just teaches it all. That means he teaches things so fast that an entire concept would go straight over your head. Also, sometimes he teaches a concept in a way only a math major would understand. I would be terribly confused until I went to discussion, when my TA would reexplain it in an 100% times easier way. Also to anyone complaining about his accent: I swear it's not that bad, you will get used to it quickly. I think anyone so fed up over it has never heard an African accent before.
The exams were very fair, and never asked anything out of the scope of the class. They might ask stuff out of the scope of koffi's lectures (which were confusing) but they never asked anything out of the realm of the textbook. I agree with all the other reviews saying that you must attend the review sessions! Koffi goes over unreleased problems that are very similar to the test, so if you know how to do those you will be well-prepared for the exams. For me, I am not a math major and this is my last math class. I did well in the class by going to lecture to hear announcements, teaching myself the content 100% through the textbook, going to midterm review sessions and completely grinding whatever he gave us, and then going to every. single. discussion section and grinding what the TA gave us.
One more thing- Koffi really does care about the students and content. He loves math very much, and is the most passionate teacher (does not help him be more coherent though). He also took two of the hardest 32A topics off the final and made them homework only in response to the protests. He also made a homework assignment extra credit and added extra credit to the exam. In each class after the strikes, he would echo how he felt for everyone who was affected by conflict and he seemed really genuine.
TLDR: lecture confusing, everything else fine enough
He rescheduled 1 quiz for 3 times and even tried to make us do it over the weekend; cancelled 1 quiz because he messed up his teaching schedule; said he would drop 2 lowest HW in syllabus but just announced he would not do so by the end of the quarter; he made a mistake in the question of the final exam and caused most ppl wasted 30 mins for nothing and did not take any action after the exam regarding this issue.
Let alone the crazy amount of homework (more than 10 hours per week) and random changes to attedence requirements. He refused to admit that things were so unorganized in his class and exerted a lot of pressure on us students.
He is the worst of worst, avoid him at all costs. The other good comments are all his OWN SPAM.
This is a toned down version of my original draft, since eventually things turned out okay personally. I know Koffi reads these reviews, and do feel slightly bad for all the hate mail he received (he did attempt to teach and spent time including office hours on weekends).
DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS if you value your time, GPA, education, or mental health. Honestly not sure what’s left. Koffi assigned a ridiculous amount of homework every week with the justification it’s a summer course. I was accused of cheating 5 times, twice personally and thrice along with the class. We were forced to retake Quiz 1 thrice due to his own errors. He also absurdly changed expectations about attendance when his feelings were hurt because no one enjoys deciphering hieroglyphics with mumbling in the background.
Unlike previous quarters, the final brutal (even ignoring the unsolvable problem). But somehow Koffi finished the entire test in 30 min (clearly missed at least one question he wrote himself). Ultimately, 60% of the test was graded for completion, which is clearly unfair for those who didn’t write gibberish.
Everything was either a personal attack on Koffi or an academic integrity violation. He would constantly argue with students on email or Campuswire instead of addressing very reasonable issues. I’m legitimately traumatized by this class and seriously questioning enrolling in UCLA classes next summer. It used to be tolerable due to the exams, but now nothing redeemable remains.
This class is ridiculous. Not only his teaching style is bad, simply going over his lecture notes on his iPad and intolerable thick accent, the exams are not fair at all. Moreover, he blames the students for the disorganization of the course. Throughout the entire time, his way of addressing those logistics issue is basically just arguing with students. Quiz rescheduled three times and canceled a quiz. Told us to stick with the syllabus when we addressed our concerns of grading but simultaneously telling us he will no longer drop the homework with the lowest grade......Mistake on the final was also addressed not to the students' favor. Overall, he's bad at teaching and punishes students for his own mistakes.
Professor Enakoutsa is hard to understand and so is his writing. During class, he simply works through problems as if he is just doing them on his own, using shortcuts and tricks that a student learning the material for the first time would not know. Lectures are more watching and copying down whatever he has on the board and not fully understanding it rather than him actually teaching the concepts. As this is my second time taking this same course with him, I figured out better ways to learn and study on my own because his lectures are not very helpful. When asked a question, he oftentimes gets irritated and spends more time expressing why he does not like the question than just answering it. He does not seem to be on the same page as his TAs and the lack of communication between them made it difficult to get productive feedback. A lot of questions do not even get addressed; he set up a Campuswire which he said he responds to better than email, but he does not answer most of the questions on there and I have sent him multiple emails that he has not responded to as well. As this is an online course for summer, at the beginning of the course majority of the class was blocked from joining the Zoom and when students brought it up to him he would just say to talk to IT. He would even call out students who asked questions by saying “It’s apparent you have not been logging into class” even though they were having trouble accessing IT. He has argued with his students AND TAs on Campuswire and even copy and pasted a students’ evaluation of him and sent it in an email to the whole class calling the students’ criticism “crazy”. At the end of this course, there were no grades entered in BruinLearn at all and as students repeatedly asked in CampusWire when our grades would be released, the professor ignored them all. Finally, two weeks after the course ended, I emailed Professor Enakoutsa about the release of grades and if we would be able to see our score from the final to which he replied “Waouh! So you have not seen your letter grade in your grade report. The session was over two weeks ago.” Not only was the professor’s response rude, but he also did not answer my question and when I asked again he said the grades cannot stay public forever, however our grades were never made public as far as I know and if they were, he never told the class they were available. Also, he says the grades cannot stay public forever, but our midterm grade and my grade from the final I took with him during spring quarter are still available which strengthens my claim that these final grades were never released. I was finally able to view my final class grade on my grade report on MyUCLA, but I was never able to see what I got wrong on my final or even what my final score was and I never saw the breakdown of my grade, only the overall class grade at the end of the course which is very concerning because going into the final I had an A- but ended the course with a C+. Professor Enakoutsa has not stayed on track with the course plan he posted at the beginning of the course which is fine but he does not mention what section he is in from day to day because it does not match where he predicted we would be. The homework load is also very heavy with three assignments per week with about 25-40 questions in each assignment. Considering this is a condensed summer course, having separate assignments with so many questions took hours to complete every week. The grading for the homework is also very random as some questions are worth one point and others are worth twenty points so every assignment adds up to 100 points. The homework is graded for correctness and it always seems the questions you get wrong are worth the most points.
Upon first meeting Professor Enakoutsa during our first Math 32A lecture, I found him to be interesting and an entertaining teacher.-- He seemed funny and I was optimistic about learning multivariable calculus from someone with such a passionate personality. It was the next class meeting, however, where seats previously filled became vacant, that I realized I may have made a mistake in choosing this professor....
Nevertheless, I stuck it out the remainder of the quarter, dedicating a great amount of my own time and energy to Math 32A outside of lectures and discussions; I began to "speak his language" (that is, better decipher the material through his French accent) and was able to gain a relatively high confidence in the subjects we were learning. Seriously, I could detail each and every chapter in the textbook and describe succinctly the ins-and-outs of vector functions, directional derivatives, and parametric equations.
Apparently, all of this effort proved meaningless when I received my final grade, (which I will not share because, frankly, I'm embarrassed) which was the lowest grade I have EVER received in any class I've taken. EVER.
I reached out to Professor Enakoutsa to communicate my concern, to which I received NO REPLY. Unfortunately, this was as I had expected as I sent him several emails DURING THE QUARTER regarding homework and test material which met the same fate.
I tried very hard to look past the less-than-flattering reviews I had seen for Professor Enakoutsa and allow myself to develop my own opinion on him, but I am saddened to say that they are all true... the negative ones, at least-- DO NOT be fooled by the rare sprinkling of overly positive reviews left by "real students" on this website or the Reddit forums; They have been angrily crafted by the terribly fragile ego belonging to none other than Professor Enakoutsa (But if you're looking for a laugh, go search up this name on Reddit, you won't be sorry lol ;)). In fact, as I write this, I am bracing myself for a bitter response from one of his anonymous accounts, which is ridiculous and sad.
Long story short: Avoid Professor Enakoutsa... SERIOUSLY! The material was interesting. The class was unorganized. The assessments were fine. The homeworks were long. Professor Enakoutsa was the worst I have encountered at UCLA.
if you have any commitments that make you miss class he will be horrible about it. i had work during his class once a week, and enrolled late, and he was cold, unforgiving, and actively pointed out and made fun of students leaving early to go to their jobs. it’s really not fair towards working students, and it’s kind of odd how he acts like they don’t deserve to be in his class because they have to work to be able to afford to be there in the first place. his class material is fine, he is understandable and a good teacher but has an extremely questionable attitude towards students who have priorities other than him.
DO NOT TAKE KOFI. He only teaches from the textbook which makes going to class not worth it, but even if you do go, his handwriting is illegible. He has been rude to students, posted his own poor reviews in order to talk down on students, and his tests have many errors which are not corrected until you are taking them. I loved math so much and even competed for four years in math but I do not wish to take another math class because of the professor.
Professor Enakoutsa overall seems like a nice guy, he'd make jokes in class and always thanked us for coming to lectures and is definitely passionate about math. Unfortunately I did not understand anything when I went to lecture. I really struggled to follow, not just that he had an accent (I could mostly understand him in that sense) but the math explanations were unclear and I would get lost on problems that were much simpler than he made it seem. Most people stop coming to lecture after one week and self study. Many students said if you go to his review sessions he goes over everything you need to know for exams and found the exams easy. I went to every review session and studied at least a week for every exam and I still failed EVERY EXAM. I think I would have performed a lot better with another professor but honestly just happy to have passed the class. The only thing that saved me was that it was curved at the end. If you have experience with concepts of multivariable calculus I think it is probably a much more doable class, it was just my first time learning these things.
Also his handwriting is so hard to read T^T
the reviews of koffi for 32A are extremely black and white- no nuance. there are people screeching that he is a demon and other people saying he's great. i would say in reality, he is in the middle. I do agree with the people that say the overwhelmingly positive reviews are fake, but I do not agree with the people saying he is a demon. Baseline for me was that koffi was a confusing lecturer, but he was very caring about his students so you can still do well in the class.
First, the grading scheme was 10% homework, 5% Quizzes, 30 % best midterm grade, 55% final exam or 10% homework, 5% Quizzes, 22.5% midterm 1, 22.5% midterm 2, 40% final exam, whichever would benefit you most. I also believe the grade boundaries are 93% is an A unless he decides to change it. Homework was a PITA and very long, but the proofs were usually not graded.
Koffi's lecturing style was very confusing. He could introduce topics okay, but I would always get very lost. He goes very very fast because he tries to cover every single section of the chapters assigned in calc 32A. No triaging of what is most important to learn, he just teaches it all. That means he teaches things so fast that an entire concept would go straight over your head. Also, sometimes he teaches a concept in a way only a math major would understand. I would be terribly confused until I went to discussion, when my TA would reexplain it in an 100% times easier way. Also to anyone complaining about his accent: I swear it's not that bad, you will get used to it quickly. I think anyone so fed up over it has never heard an African accent before.
The exams were very fair, and never asked anything out of the scope of the class. They might ask stuff out of the scope of koffi's lectures (which were confusing) but they never asked anything out of the realm of the textbook. I agree with all the other reviews saying that you must attend the review sessions! Koffi goes over unreleased problems that are very similar to the test, so if you know how to do those you will be well-prepared for the exams. For me, I am not a math major and this is my last math class. I did well in the class by going to lecture to hear announcements, teaching myself the content 100% through the textbook, going to midterm review sessions and completely grinding whatever he gave us, and then going to every. single. discussion section and grinding what the TA gave us.
One more thing- Koffi really does care about the students and content. He loves math very much, and is the most passionate teacher (does not help him be more coherent though). He also took two of the hardest 32A topics off the final and made them homework only in response to the protests. He also made a homework assignment extra credit and added extra credit to the exam. In each class after the strikes, he would echo how he felt for everyone who was affected by conflict and he seemed really genuine.
TLDR: lecture confusing, everything else fine enough