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Andrew Harris ASTR410 Expecting a ? grumble 05/05/2016	Perhaps he's fine in lower leveled courses, but my god, is he an absolutely awful professor to have for ASTR410. Currently, the class average hovers around 50%. While low grades (which will be curved) are typical in upper level physics and astronomy courses, but those averages are somewhere around 70% or so. Not 50%. The homework assignments should be fairly simple and the solutions are typically solved with basic algebra or maybe some calculus in the form of derivatives or integrals. Should be easy to solve, right? Of course not. He's so incompetent at teaching us what he sees to be the basic tenants of radio astronomy that we cannot even use the formulas he haphazardly puts on the board, despite that many of the solutions should be plug+chug substitution level algebra. Why is this the case? Perhaps we, as senior level astronomy students who have backgrounds in advanced physics and mathematics, are just totally incapable of using algebra. Or maybe it's because he fails as a lecturer. The first midterm was a disaster. Average was around 50%. The day that we discussed the midterm in class, he basically told us that it was our fault that we failed, despite the fact that the class was fairly unanimous in failing and the students who got the highest grades (around 65%) basically said "I guessed and apparently the guesses were good." Sometimes whole classes do fail exams. It's a thing that's not uncommon to upper level physics/astronomy courses. What's uncommon is the professor not accepting a single ounce of the blame and telling the students that the poor results are on us. Then we have the term project. This, I'm forced to assume, was supposed to be a semester-long project with a lot of thought and detail put in. How much have we talked about it? In a numerical sense, the answer has to be somewhere between 0 and 1. The only times we've ever talked about the project was to extend the due date a week after he had failed to ever bring it up in class. What's it supposed to be about? What level of detail? Are we supposed to come to some numerical conclusions? Your guess is as good as mine, because the due date for that project is in about 5 days and he's yet to talk about it. If you haven't been persuaded on why you shouldn't take the class, consider this. He's TERRIBLE with partial credit. Didn't get the exact result that he did while following the same exact generalizations and same exact assumptions? That sucks, you get 1/15 credit for that problem. Don't take Harris. For 400 level classes, there are far better options like J. Sunshine and D. Hamilton who effectively teach the class while also making exams and problems fair (and don't fucking blame the student when almost all of us fail a major exam).