STAT 3110

This course is not too bad — the lectures aren't great, but I personally found the content pretty interesting, and the midterms/homeworks are not bad at all. If you have taken a stat class before you should be able to pull, at worst, an A-. Prof. Perez-Suarez made a ton of previous exams available to us to study for the tests, which was very helpful.

THAT BEING SAID...

This class does NOT do a good job of teaching linear algebra. Everything is very mechanical and memorization-oriented, with no understanding of WHY a certain concept might be important to understand, or even what a concept like "basis" or "linear independence" means in practical or geometric terms. I wrote this review primarily so I could share the following resources for understanding the linear algebra section of the course – these videos combined are less than an hour long, and while they don't give you the actual algorithms/maths to solve the problems, they will help you understand the concepts 100x better. Learning linear algebra w/ no prior background in the subject from just the lectures and notes felt like that scene in Harry Potter where Harry tries to push his cart through the magic pole into Platform 9 3/4 and keeps just running into a brick wall; watching these videos helped me "cross over" into actually UNDERSTANDING linear algebra concepts like matrix multiplication and made solving the problems in class 100x easier.

VECTORS, VECTOR ADDITION, AND SCALAR MULTIPLICATION: https://youtu.be/fNk_zzaMoSs
VECTOR "SPAN," BASIS VECTORS AND LINEAR INDEPENDENCE: https://youtu.be/k7RM-ot2NWY
MATRICES: https://youtu.be/kYB8IZa5AuE
MATRIX MULTIPLICATION: https://youtu.be/XkY2DOUCWMU

These videos literally saved my life (OK, they figuratively saved my life, they literally saved my A)

Bruh... I can't even begin to explain why you should take this class with David but also why you shouldn't. I'll start with the niceties. He's very lenient. He let us have two double-sided sheets for the first two exams, and for the final, let us have four-double sided sheets. He provides calculations for distributions so you don't have to write them out by hand. He provides his notes, online, so you don't even have to come to class necessarily. His tests are definitely a lot easier than the other professors, when you compare the two professors (James Lee was the other) exams.

Onto why I don't like David. I don't respect him as a professor, really. By mid-November I just stopped showing up because I realized all you need are his notes to show up. He uploads his notes a few hours before class begins so you can follow it during class, so it's quite useless to come to class. He makes so many mistakes, especially when he's lecturing in real time. He is also so, so awkward. Whenever a student asks a question he honest to god just cannot answer them because he has no idea how to, but also because I don't think he even understands the question itself (although 100% of the time they're not difficult questions to understand...). Even his notes have mistakes sometimes which I don't understand why. It's just kind of useless to go to class or even be in class which is why I stopped go. Also, he's so strict on the homework for some reason - even if you get the right answer he'll deduct points if he notices even the slightest error in your work (I wrote 10 instead of .10 and I got two points off on the homework).

Take what you will from this review. It's really not that bad taking the class with David just sort of... cringe and embarrassing. I would recommend him though because he is a lot more lenient and easier than the other professors. He added three points to our first exam at the end of the semester to "help everyone out", which is a plus.

*I took this Spring 2021* I actually really liked this class, I learned a lot. David is very nice and a great professor. The class is very simple in terms of organization, which i really appreciated. 2 midterms, and one (cumulative, but mostly just on the last unit) final i believe. Homeworks arent always weekly, I believe there were about 7 for the semester total, and one drops. His lectures are packed and not boring, A LOT of examples which helped so much. I definitely recommend taking this class with David, he's super understanding with online learning. I have heard some not-so-good reviews about other professors, so make sure you enroll in his class. He is also a very generous grader (that could change when we go in person, but still something to consider) for sure my favorite core class for the stat major!