ECON 4210

He’s a very nice person, but he seems like one of those professors who views teaching as a distant second to their research. Studying for tests in this class is tough because the professor’s explanations cut corners, as another review mentioned. He uses his own textbook that you need to buy, which oversimplifies the math, does not explain graphs and assumes a good amount of prior knowledge. If you try additional textbook practice problems, they often don’t align with the reading or there is not much to go off of because there aren't many concrete examples in the textbook, and there are no solutions provided, adding to the confusion. While some of the content is interesting, the presentation is choppy, and he isn’t the strongest lecturer. He seems to have a stutter, which isn’t his fault, but it can make it harder to follow, especially early in the semester when you're not used to it. He spends too long on less relevant points and then rushes through key material, and the lecture slides lack detailed explanations, especially for graphs. The general theme in the course is that the instructor and TA assume you can supplement all the gaps you have from class by reading the textbook and I already explained the issues that has. He uses TopHat for in class questions which was an unnecessary expense for students, he could have just used Poll Everywhere.

TA sections, especially with Lingmin, are usually more helpful, though clearer labeling and explanations would improve them. She goes extremely fast---the topics might seem trivial to her, a 6th year PhD student, but many people wish she gave more detailed explanations. She didn’t start posting homework solutions until later in the course after people asked her to. Imagine not having the solutions to the problem sets when you're trying to study for an exam. These could also be much more detailed with explanations.

Forming a group would help a lot for the hw, and I wish I had done this sooner. While tests were generally fair, some questions were harder or quite different from class examples, more like what’s briefly covered (and really under-explained) in the textbook. Thankfully, he records lectures, which helps—without that, I’d rate this class much lower. Overall, I wish there were far more example problems in the textbook, lecture slides, or other materials, complete with explanations and solutions to actually practice and master the content.