STAT 6160

Denny is a terrible instructor who has no idea how to lecture, grade, or write a test. His lecture slides consist of incomprehensible, poorly-scaled screenshots of equations. He wastes multiple lectures talking about absolute nothingness, like how good it is to study statistics. He makes you do advanced statistics on a graphing calculator for tests, which are ridiculously difficult, but he doesn't realize this because he deludes himself by giving extremely generous grades. The final project barely related to the course content. He is unable to keep himself organized, and only assigned three homework assignments the whole semester despite promising one approximately every other week. He at least acts like a nice instructor who is willing to help, but he won't help you due to his deep incompetence. You will learn nothing in a class with Denny, but at least it's not too hard to get an adequate grade by taking advantage of how little he cares.

This class wasn't that great overall. Prof. Tang is a nice guy, but he didn't plan the class very well and he felt like he was unable to adapt to the needs of his class.

We only had one short homework assignment before the midterm, which left most of the class feeling unprepared for the difficulty of the exam. When we asked him to give us more practice assignments, he agreed that we did not have enough practice assignments and then gave us 2 short assignments between the midterm and the final. The homework was graded on completion and our lowest score was dropped, so effectively we only had 2 required assignments throughout the semester. It is a little strange to basically beg your professor to give us more work so that we can engage with the material and prepare for the exams, but that is basically how this semester felt. Lectures were fairly dry, and since there were so few assignments, there was not much of an incentive to pay attention even if I wanted to, which I couldn't.

Another strange moment of the semester was when Prof. Tang told us halfway through the semester that he had been contacting the wrong TA. I'm not sure how it took him 7 weeks to realize that the TA that he had been contacting was not assigned to his class, but it did.

The content in this class was actually pretty interesting. He just needs to take the time to design this class better. Give more assignments and give students a way to engage with and practice the material. I think this class has great potential, but as it is I can't say that I would recommend the class.