APMA 3080

Houston Wood was truly incompetent. His recorded lectures consisted almost entirely of transcribing notes from the textbook. He offered little to no explanation of concepts beyond what he copied, word-for-word, from the text. His lectures had virtually zero structure and he would transition between topics without making it clear that he was doing so.

We didn't really have class this semester. We were supposed to meet Mo/Wed, however, instead of holding Monday class he simply made the designated class period into his office hours (he held no other office hours). During Wednesday class, we would be put into breakout rooms with classmates and told to "do group work." He didn't actually provide us with any particular work to do during these classes, but rather, just told us to "work on something linear algebra related." This usually meant working on that week's assigned homework/worksheet silently, asking your groupmates for help when you needed it.

In general, Professor Wood was very slow to understand and answer questions. Often, when a student asked a question, they would have to repeat it several times before Professor Wood seemed to grasp what they were asking. Even then, his answers were sometimes misleading (in our very first lecture I asked a very basic question to which he provided an answer that turned out to be blatantly wrong).

I very quickly gave up on watching lectures. The topics covered each week were listed on the syllabus, so I simply read the relevant sections of the textbook and took notes.

Overall, the material for this course is not overly difficult. The work is challenging, but it is definitely possible to succeed and gain a robust understanding of the material just by reading the textbook. I struggled with the exams in this class, especially the first exam which I was very under-prepared for. Make sure to rework all of the relevant homework/worksheet problems before each exam and you should be fine.

If you feel confident in your ability to teach yourself the subject, then go ahead and take this class with Professor Wood. If you think you will need support and guidance from a competent professor, do not.

For lecture, Wood literally copies and writes everything straight off the book and constantly misspells and makes conceptual mistakes despite being very knowledge of the field. You can study for over five hours a day for this class and still end up with a poor grade because of how obnoxious the exams are designed. You would think that they would base the exam structure off the various quizzes (which are relatively fair) but nope. Not only this, but he literally told the class that they only curve final grades after the first exam had an average of a 69% AND DOESNT EVEN ACKNOWLEDGE THE MENTION OF ANY CURVE AFTER GRADES ARE PUT IN. Linear Algebra itself is actually a quite intuitive subject that isn't too difficult but please for the sake of your GPA and sanity, take anyone else because his class doesn't measure how well you know the concepts and problems to your actual grade in the course.