Professor
Michael Suman
2 of 4
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Most Helpful Review
This review is for CS 145 (American Sitcom). This class was a torture! The books assigned for this class are written by Feminists who are gender studies majors from who knows where. Instead of concentrating on Civil Rights movement and all related things of 60s-90s, these "authors" are taking their time to talk about Sexual life of women, female empowerment, many chapters about gays, and other irrelevant things. In one example, they devoted entire section to Sex and the City saying that it 100% reflects on female desires of today. Yeah right. In another instance, they do voted several chapters to talk about Gay culture in American sitcom. The worst part is that half of the midterm and the final are based on these books and ask for a specific answer: "What does Will's kissing of Grace tells you?" Note that Will is gay. It is not a written book but a compilation of different articles written in different styles and sometimes contradicting each other. As for the TA, Juanita is an animal. She literally took off a point from every section of my essay and said that it had a bad structure. Really? Structure is one out of five criteria, each worth 5 points. In conclusion it was a complete torture, unless you are fascinated about Sitcoms, feminism, gay culture, and learning about something that will not be useful in your life! Sum an seems to be a nice guy, but the subject stinks and grading is horrible and biased - check his grade distributions and you will see.
This review is for CS 145 (American Sitcom). This class was a torture! The books assigned for this class are written by Feminists who are gender studies majors from who knows where. Instead of concentrating on Civil Rights movement and all related things of 60s-90s, these "authors" are taking their time to talk about Sexual life of women, female empowerment, many chapters about gays, and other irrelevant things. In one example, they devoted entire section to Sex and the City saying that it 100% reflects on female desires of today. Yeah right. In another instance, they do voted several chapters to talk about Gay culture in American sitcom. The worst part is that half of the midterm and the final are based on these books and ask for a specific answer: "What does Will's kissing of Grace tells you?" Note that Will is gay. It is not a written book but a compilation of different articles written in different styles and sometimes contradicting each other. As for the TA, Juanita is an animal. She literally took off a point from every section of my essay and said that it had a bad structure. Really? Structure is one out of five criteria, each worth 5 points. In conclusion it was a complete torture, unless you are fascinated about Sitcoms, feminism, gay culture, and learning about something that will not be useful in your life! Sum an seems to be a nice guy, but the subject stinks and grading is horrible and biased - check his grade distributions and you will see.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2016 - TA's sucked when I took this course. All they did was grade the tests and papers. Open note exams, but the prof will give you about 200 questions for the two books total and ask you like 20 of them on the test, so you can't skip the reading if you want to pass. Tough grader, lectures were repetitive. Overall this class had too much work, uneasy grading scales and curves, and I DO NOT reccommend taking this class if you wish to have free time. This class had me sacrifice about 3 weekends total just to get thru the boring readings.
Fall 2016 - TA's sucked when I took this course. All they did was grade the tests and papers. Open note exams, but the prof will give you about 200 questions for the two books total and ask you like 20 of them on the test, so you can't skip the reading if you want to pass. Tough grader, lectures were repetitive. Overall this class had too much work, uneasy grading scales and curves, and I DO NOT reccommend taking this class if you wish to have free time. This class had me sacrifice about 3 weekends total just to get thru the boring readings.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2020 - Be prepared to teach yourself the entire quarter with Suman. He only posts audio podcasts as lectures, no accompanying videos or slides, where he will go on many side tangents. This podcast format did a disservice to an otherwise interesting class. TA was virtually nonexistent, didn't even know their name and didn't have any contact/criticism/help from them once. Suman grades notoriously hard, I was expecting this from other reviews, but I scored low on the midterm and was not given a single word of criticism or suggestions on how I could improve. I spent weeks on the research paper, put my all into it, just to score low on it also - only problem is, all of the comments left on the paper were positive and complimenting my thesis and analyses. Not sure why I scored low, and wish I had some form of critique to grow from. Overall, least engaging class I've ever had, but interesting concepts if you're a media studies comm major. Also, final grade in class is based on only 3 assignments, so be prepared!
Fall 2020 - Be prepared to teach yourself the entire quarter with Suman. He only posts audio podcasts as lectures, no accompanying videos or slides, where he will go on many side tangents. This podcast format did a disservice to an otherwise interesting class. TA was virtually nonexistent, didn't even know their name and didn't have any contact/criticism/help from them once. Suman grades notoriously hard, I was expecting this from other reviews, but I scored low on the midterm and was not given a single word of criticism or suggestions on how I could improve. I spent weeks on the research paper, put my all into it, just to score low on it also - only problem is, all of the comments left on the paper were positive and complimenting my thesis and analyses. Not sure why I scored low, and wish I had some form of critique to grow from. Overall, least engaging class I've ever had, but interesting concepts if you're a media studies comm major. Also, final grade in class is based on only 3 assignments, so be prepared!
2 of 4
