INST380 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Elizabeth Bonsignore INST380 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/08/2024	I think this course would do well with anyone else teaching it. When you are being taught about "Empathy" by someone who has none, it makes it hard to understand the course materials. Beth held her students to the most professional standards while easily being the least professional teacher I have ever had in my 17 years of education. She shows up to class on average 15 minutes late and commonly doesn't start class until 30 minutes into class. During the month of March, there wasn't a single class that she wasn't late to, or delayed class (sometimes more than once and would still show up late), or moved to Zoom the day of. Most of the time going to class was a waste of time because of how late she would start class. She also graded an assignment from January at the end of March and gave out zeros unless you could explain your writing process. Her instruction is always extremely long and convoluted with no real deliverable at the end of it. When asked what exactly was meant to be turned in, she refused to answer the question. Any question you asked her was met with a convoluted response back with no real answer. She would also attempt to host extremely sensitive conversations in an awkward, forceful, and passive-aggressive manner. One time after watching a film about the oppression of African Americans, she said something about being invited to the cookout. When a student tried to ask her about the integrity of a question on the quiz because it wasn't in line with the course materials, she told them to stop wasting her time because nobody would care about their grades next month. One time, she was asked for an extension on an assignment, and before she responded to the email she extended it for the entire class. She then responded by saying that the student couldn't have the extension because they emailed "One business day before the due date"so Friday before the Monday), despite the assignment already being extended for everyone. I have never had a teacher who cared so little about genuine learning, lacked this much maturity, and cared so little about the course materials. Talking to her would make things more confusing, and she would often use gaslighting tactics to void herself of responsibility of things she said or did.
Elizabeth Bonsignore INST380 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/08/2024	Dr. B had the highest expectations of behavior from us while failing to uphold those standards for herself. She was late to class nearly every day due to car troubles or attending other meetings, and would spend 10 minutes after arriving setting up, so we rarely started class before 15 minutes into the period. Smaller assignments were graded within a reasonable time period, but assignments related to our semester long project wouldn't get graded for a month or more, so we didn't have time to apply feedback. She kept pushing due dates for the semester project, which would have been nice for people who needed it, but it meant that timelines were super unclear and due dates ended up clumped together. She also didn't seem to understand the criteria for her own assignments -- she would spend 20 minutes explaining (overexplaining) something, and then we would still have to ask questions to understand what the deliverable actually was. She made students feel like they were wasting their time for asking questions about their grades. I did not feel respected by her. If you have no choice but to take her class: Take a deep breath. The assignments are tedious, but they're not difficult. The semester long project requires you to perform an interview and attend an event -- don't wait until the last week to find those. There are a lot of readings that you have to summarize for a grade, but if you do them one at a time and summarize as you go it makes the whole thing a lot more manageable. You'll be okay.
Elizabeth Bonsignore INST380 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/31/2024	I'm going to start off by saying that I don't think the difficulties created in this class are entirely professor B's fault. The class was newly structured which is probably what resulted in a lot of the bizarre assignment structuring. That being said, like the other reviews here are mentioning, it was an incredibly stressful class with not a lot of justification for what we got out of it. Even though the workload of the semester-long project was apparently reduced, it still felt like I was doing a group project by myself. ESPECIALLY the first quarter of tasks, which had a lot of busywork that took up so much time just to not end up being used again ever (for example, we had to find like 15 professionals on our topic and interview 2... what was the point of the other 13??). The class sessions also just consisted of reading some articles or watching some videos and then writing comments questions takeaways, which is really boring and pretty much done in like every other INST class. The concepts and topics being presented were actually pretty interested so this was a pretty disappointing and unengaging way to present them. Finally, the biggest issues I had with her is her delayed grading and her somewhat insensitive comments. Like the other reviews mentioned, she seemed to be very busy and graded things a long time after they were turned in. I get that she has other responsibilities and grading big projects are time-consuming, but only finishing grading the first quarter of the project tasks when we were nearly done with the final parts is ridiculous. She had some good feedback, but I was unable to make use of it because most of the project was already turned in. As for her insensitive comments, she made a few weird statements about body dysmorphia (which was someone's chosen topic) amongst other things. She claims she wants to generate conversation and critical thinking, but there's a big difference between doing that and just being straight up weird and insensitive. In my opinion, her comments really leaned towards the latter and I hope she re-evaluates the way she wants to hold try and hold deep conversations. I do want to mention that I believe she really did genuinely want us to build connections and put ourselves out there, at least towards the beginning of the semester. She encouraged us to choose topics on what we were passionate about and to go out of our comfort zone and challenge ourselves. However, because of how cumbersome the first parts of the projects were, most of the class got immediately burnt out. A lot of students stopped showing up because of this. On top of the mostly busywork class sessions alongside her constant weird comments that made a lot of people uncomfortable, the students just weren't comfortable with participating. I think she felt this change as well. At the end of the semester, she did ask for feedback and seems to take it seriously. If she is still teaching this class for next semester, make sure to let her know the parts of the class that needed work because I do think she wants to improve the class.
Elizabeth Bonsignore INST380 Anonymous 12/22/2023	THIS CLASS IS NOT AN EASY A FOR AN UPPER-LEVEL MAJOR ELECTIVE FOR INFOSCI!!!! I do not know if she has genuinely just lost her touch but disregard the decent reviews below because she is a completely different person nowadays it seems. This class was incredibly disorganized and unstructured. We were given heavy readings and long videos every week, INCLUDING on weeks that we had to turn in our big change-making challenge phases (sometimes they were all due on the same day). For all the work we had to do, the professor acted like there was absolutely no flexibility and no room for extensions on some of the most difficult parts of the course. The grading rubrics and criteria for so many of the assignments, especially the weekly summaries and change-making challenges were so unclear that my fellow students and I constantly had to get clarification on certain points and send emails, which she often responded to incredibly passive-aggressively. There was an overall sense of confusion about what was required from us, and when the professor and the TA finally started putting in grades (we waited until class was almost out for the semester to get grades back from Sep/October), people realized they had been doing assignments wrong for a lot of the semester but their grades were now suffering because the professor hadn't given feedback in time for them to change how they were completing assignments. The TA graded our assignments incredibly harshly for what was supposed to be a weekly summary that just showed our understanding of the source and the unit, and copied and pasted the same comment for each student's feedback, as the students compared our feedback and realized we were not getting anything of value while the TA was still taking off ridiculous amounts of points even though certain things were not specified in the criteria for the assignment. Lastly, the professor was not willing to hear about circumstances (mental or physical health, religious absences) outside of the student's control that may have come up in the semester. She has a habit of making some extremely controversial comments in class just for the shock factor, but it is so consistent with each class that I am beginning to think she genuinely believes what is coming out of her mouth. For how hard she tries to portray herself as progressive, I think she is trying to hide her real feelings about political topics. The reason she was not able to get a decent discussion flowing a lot of the time was because the class would get into a nice conversation about our module and then she would just make an out-of-pocket comment that would leave everyone so surprised that we just were silent. I hope no other students have to deal with this professor and they replace her for 380 immediately.
Elizabeth Bonsignore INST380 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/21/2023	She is, by far, the worst professor I've encountered. She is incredibly inconsiderate, and here's why: Assignments are never graded on time, which makes everyone feel incompetent once grades are finally released. Her offensive remarks are so severe that if I were to repeat them, she would likely face dismissal. She requires emotional support and lacks self-awareness. Despite the class being initially easy and interesting, she obsesses over making it unnecessarily challenging. As a result, she exhausts her students, and every group chat revolves around our struggles with mental health due to her relentless approach. Despite our small class size, the average grade is embarrassingly low due to her methods
Elizabeth Bonsignore INST380 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/24/2023	I have NEVER commented on a teacher before, but seriously if you can, take her!!! She is the best! The class is a bit of work because you have weekly assgiments, and it is very group oriented, but if you get a good team in the begining it will be fine (if you dont.. well good luck Charlie). She cares about your preference in teamates, if you have some, if not she groups you by topic. She takes time to grade assigments, but she is a very nice grader and actually gives constructive feedback. She also truly cares about you learning the material.

Elizabeth Bonsignore
INST380

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/08/2024

I think this course would do well with anyone else teaching it. When you are being taught about "Empathy" by someone who has none, it makes it hard to understand the course materials. Beth held her students to the most professional standards while easily being the least professional teacher I have ever had in my 17 years of education. She shows up to class on average 15 minutes late and commonly doesn't start class until 30 minutes into class. During the month of March, there wasn't a single class that she wasn't late to, or delayed class (sometimes more than once and would still show up late), or moved to Zoom the day of. Most of the time going to class was a waste of time because of how late she would start class. She also graded an assignment from January at the end of March and gave out zeros unless you could explain your writing process. Her instruction is always extremely long and convoluted with no real deliverable at the end of it. When asked what exactly was meant to be turned in, she refused to answer the question. Any question you asked her was met with a convoluted response back with no real answer. She would also attempt to host extremely sensitive conversations in an awkward, forceful, and passive-aggressive manner. One time after watching a film about the oppression of African Americans, she said something about being invited to the cookout. When a student tried to ask her about the integrity of a question on the quiz because it wasn't in line with the course materials, she told them to stop wasting her time because nobody would care about their grades next month. One time, she was asked for an extension on an assignment, and before she responded to the email she extended it for the entire class. She then responded by saying that the student couldn't have the extension because they emailed "One business day before the due date"so Friday before the Monday), despite the assignment already being extended for everyone. I have never had a teacher who cared so little about genuine learning, lacked this much maturity, and cared so little about the course materials. Talking to her would make things more confusing, and she would often use gaslighting tactics to void herself of responsibility of things she said or did.

Elizabeth Bonsignore
INST380

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
05/08/2024

Dr. B had the highest expectations of behavior from us while failing to uphold those standards for herself. She was late to class nearly every day due to car troubles or attending other meetings, and would spend 10 minutes after arriving setting up, so we rarely started class before 15 minutes into the period. Smaller assignments were graded within a reasonable time period, but assignments related to our semester long project wouldn't get graded for a month or more, so we didn't have time to apply feedback. She kept pushing due dates for the semester project, which would have been nice for people who needed it, but it meant that timelines were super unclear and due dates ended up clumped together. She also didn't seem to understand the criteria for her own assignments -- she would spend 20 minutes explaining (overexplaining) something, and then we would still have to ask questions to understand what the deliverable actually was. She made students feel like they were wasting their time for asking questions about their grades. I did not feel respected by her. If you have no choice but to take her class: Take a deep breath. The assignments are tedious, but they're not difficult. The semester long project requires you to perform an interview and attend an event -- don't wait until the last week to find those. There are a lot of readings that you have to summarize for a grade, but if you do them one at a time and summarize as you go it makes the whole thing a lot more manageable. You'll be okay.

Elizabeth Bonsignore
INST380

Expecting an A
Anonymous
01/31/2024

I'm going to start off by saying that I don't think the difficulties created in this class are entirely professor B's fault. The class was newly structured which is probably what resulted in a lot of the bizarre assignment structuring. That being said, like the other reviews here are mentioning, it was an incredibly stressful class with not a lot of justification for what we got out of it. Even though the workload of the semester-long project was apparently reduced, it still felt like I was doing a group project by myself. ESPECIALLY the first quarter of tasks, which had a lot of busywork that took up so much time just to not end up being used again ever (for example, we had to find like 15 professionals on our topic and interview 2... what was the point of the other 13??). The class sessions also just consisted of reading some articles or watching some videos and then writing comments questions takeaways, which is really boring and pretty much done in like every other INST class. The concepts and topics being presented were actually pretty interested so this was a pretty disappointing and unengaging way to present them. Finally, the biggest issues I had with her is her delayed grading and her somewhat insensitive comments. Like the other reviews mentioned, she seemed to be very busy and graded things a long time after they were turned in. I get that she has other responsibilities and grading big projects are time-consuming, but only finishing grading the first quarter of the project tasks when we were nearly done with the final parts is ridiculous. She had some good feedback, but I was unable to make use of it because most of the project was already turned in. As for her insensitive comments, she made a few weird statements about body dysmorphia (which was someone's chosen topic) amongst other things. She claims she wants to generate conversation and critical thinking, but there's a big difference between doing that and just being straight up weird and insensitive. In my opinion, her comments really leaned towards the latter and I hope she re-evaluates the way she wants to hold try and hold deep conversations. I do want to mention that I believe she really did genuinely want us to build connections and put ourselves out there, at least towards the beginning of the semester. She encouraged us to choose topics on what we were passionate about and to go out of our comfort zone and challenge ourselves. However, because of how cumbersome the first parts of the projects were, most of the class got immediately burnt out. A lot of students stopped showing up because of this. On top of the mostly busywork class sessions alongside her constant weird comments that made a lot of people uncomfortable, the students just weren't comfortable with participating. I think she felt this change as well. At the end of the semester, she did ask for feedback and seems to take it seriously. If she is still teaching this class for next semester, make sure to let her know the parts of the class that needed work because I do think she wants to improve the class.

Elizabeth Bonsignore
INST380

Anonymous
12/22/2023

THIS CLASS IS NOT AN EASY A FOR AN UPPER-LEVEL MAJOR ELECTIVE FOR INFOSCI!!!! I do not know if she has genuinely just lost her touch but disregard the decent reviews below because she is a completely different person nowadays it seems. This class was incredibly disorganized and unstructured. We were given heavy readings and long videos every week, INCLUDING on weeks that we had to turn in our big change-making challenge phases (sometimes they were all due on the same day). For all the work we had to do, the professor acted like there was absolutely no flexibility and no room for extensions on some of the most difficult parts of the course. The grading rubrics and criteria for so many of the assignments, especially the weekly summaries and change-making challenges were so unclear that my fellow students and I constantly had to get clarification on certain points and send emails, which she often responded to incredibly passive-aggressively. There was an overall sense of confusion about what was required from us, and when the professor and the TA finally started putting in grades (we waited until class was almost out for the semester to get grades back from Sep/October), people realized they had been doing assignments wrong for a lot of the semester but their grades were now suffering because the professor hadn't given feedback in time for them to change how they were completing assignments. The TA graded our assignments incredibly harshly for what was supposed to be a weekly summary that just showed our understanding of the source and the unit, and copied and pasted the same comment for each student's feedback, as the students compared our feedback and realized we were not getting anything of value while the TA was still taking off ridiculous amounts of points even though certain things were not specified in the criteria for the assignment. Lastly, the professor was not willing to hear about circumstances (mental or physical health, religious absences) outside of the student's control that may have come up in the semester. She has a habit of making some extremely controversial comments in class just for the shock factor, but it is so consistent with each class that I am beginning to think she genuinely believes what is coming out of her mouth. For how hard she tries to portray herself as progressive, I think she is trying to hide her real feelings about political topics. The reason she was not able to get a decent discussion flowing a lot of the time was because the class would get into a nice conversation about our module and then she would just make an out-of-pocket comment that would leave everyone so surprised that we just were silent. I hope no other students have to deal with this professor and they replace her for 380 immediately.

Elizabeth Bonsignore
INST380

Expecting a B
Anonymous
12/21/2023

She is, by far, the worst professor I've encountered. She is incredibly inconsiderate, and here's why: Assignments are never graded on time, which makes everyone feel incompetent once grades are finally released. Her offensive remarks are so severe that if I were to repeat them, she would likely face dismissal. She requires emotional support and lacks self-awareness. Despite the class being initially easy and interesting, she obsesses over making it unnecessarily challenging. As a result, she exhausts her students, and every group chat revolves around our struggles with mental health due to her relentless approach. Despite our small class size, the average grade is embarrassingly low due to her methods

Elizabeth Bonsignore
INST380

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
05/24/2023

I have NEVER commented on a teacher before, but seriously if you can, take her!!! She is the best! The class is a bit of work because you have weekly assgiments, and it is very group oriented, but if you get a good team in the begining it will be fine (if you dont.. well good luck Charlie). She cares about your preference in teamates, if you have some, if not she groups you by topic. She takes time to grade assigments, but she is a very nice grader and actually gives constructive feedback. She also truly cares about you learning the material.

Reviews for INST380