Reviews for STAT420

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Jian Lun Xu STAT420 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/19/2023	This course is rough. You are expected to know the ins and outs of stat410 very well but Dr Xu reviews stat410 material for the first 3-4 weeks. After that, stat420 actually begins. I felt that his teaching was low-key the bare minimum. He would go over the basics of a certain concept (primarily focused on definitions) but then on homeworks and exams would expect you to apply those concepts in very peculiar ways. He also does not host office hours due to being a part time professor but is very responsive to emails and willing to help before or after class. Homeworks were a combination of very lengthy and/or very difficult. For Fall 2023, we only had 1 midterm and he didn't provide a practice test but for the final exam the math test bank was a great resource to use. He also sometimes says during class what types of problems will be on the exams (ex: there will be a problem on maximum likelihood estimators or something like that). Exam questions might also be pulled from the homework (word for word). I'd say the most stressful part of this class (at least for when I took it) was that 76% of the grade was determined by the midterm (33%) and final (43%). This, combined with the difficult homeworks, dr xus teaching style, and unintuitive nature of stat420 material, makes this class pretty difficult. That being said, dr xu has been teaching this course for a loooong time, so if you go out of your way to ask him for help he will definitely make things clearer for you. tldr: this course is hard asf and you should only take it if you can REALLY put in the work.
Joan Ren STAT420 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/19/2023	Professor Ren was great, the class was very challenging but I learned so much math and I came out the other side feeling very confident in my statistics ability. She is harsh with homework and test grading, but the curve is very generous, plus she's just a great professor!
Jian Lun Xu STAT420 Anonymous 05/20/2023	Lecture are kind of hard to follow, but he clearly emphasizes what he wants you to know for exams. Exams are very similar to the ones from past years. Responds to emails very quickly and tries to help as much as possible.
Jonathan Fernandes STAT420 Expecting an A wmy78b 01/23/2023	Jonathan is nice and helpful. I really appreciate that he record all lectures. But the way he taught the class could be better. The contents are unclear and the hand-written notes are hard to read. The course itself is very hard and I hope he can give students better notes to learn. He does give very helpful practice exams but since many people never understand his lectures, it turns out we have to memorize EVERY SINGLE QUESTION which is very suffering. Exam averages are around 80/100. You can easily get 95/100 if you know all his examples and HW questions, but again, it takes a long time.
Jonathan Fernandes STAT420 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 01/03/2023	I'm disappointed to write this review because I've taken STAT 410 with him and had a great experience. this class was insanely hard and jonathan's expectations for the students were definitely way too high. the homeworks were super hard and I always had to google to figure out how to do them since the class notes were not directly applicable. the exams were also insanely hard and we didn't get much help to prepare. for the final exam he told us "if you know all the examples from class and homeworks you'll be fine". like jeez thanks a lot. He also said he'd post class notes but would always do it super late, giving us barely any time to use them for hw/exams. Only giving him this rating because he's a nice guy and was fairly lenient with grading/curving final grades. not really sure what happened but STAT 420 was a pretty bad experience.
Takumi Saegusa STAT420 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/23/2021	My goodness. I certainly hope that Professor Saegusa's performance this semester was just because he was under the stress of the pandemic, but this course was just horrible. The lectures were quite horrid. He spent many weeks on reviewing material from a previous course and spent time complaining on what little time we had left. He spent an excessive amount of time on proofs which never came up again (I would not have minded such proofs if he backed it up with conceptual questions in homeworks/exams that required an understanding of how one proves a particular theorem). One could also expect a typo in his slides in nearly all his lectures. These time-wasting lecture practices lead to the course not covering all the material it planned to cover. The workload for this class is far too much. This is the first semester where most of my classes were 400-level courses, and this course alone consisted of most of my workload in a week. On exams, the professor expects you to answer formally as though you were writing a paper. He insists that you explain each variable that you use despite some variables in statistics being conventional. In addition, the questions on exams were computationally intensive which made the exams very difficult to finish on time and gave you many opportunities to make mistakes. His grading is also quite unforgiving in terms of mistakes made during computation. The professor's native language is not English, and I personally understand the difficulties that come with that. One of these difficulties is determining whether what is said, despite its truth, will come out as rude or condescending. Regardless, the professor said the things he said. He often says that topics are "easy" despite his students not having had the time to process the information. And so, he claims that a topic is easy while his students struggle. After a bad class result on an exam, at least in his perspective (The average was a C-), he said that students should "improve their learning skills." And during the class in which he went over this exam, the professor did not go over a question as it was "too easy." Beyond these examples, he can come off as quite condescending to students.
Takumi Saegusa STAT420 Expecting a C- Anonymous 05/18/2021	Saegusa does a poor job of explaining the material in class. He assigns long homework's that most of the class doesn't understand and is often unhelpful during office hours. He also threw the whole class off with a final nothing like what we'd seen previously, so much of the class dropped at least a letter grade, myself included. I'm only giving him 2 stars because I passed even though my grade was basically nuked down to a D+ by his insane final. I had a solid B before hand, so it's not like I had been struggling. Also he may curve on one exam but refuses to curve the overall grades in most cases.
Takumi Saegusa STAT420 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/04/2021	I've been on the fence between one and two stars for a while, but what pushed me over the edge was Professor Saegusa's inconsistent (and quite frankly, insensitive) homework spacing. Professor Saegusa is barely able to communicate any of the material, and when he does, it is often a proof irrelevant to the homework/tests or a theorem riddled with typos. Don't get me wrong, I like math, but I only want to see the underlying theorem if the professor is capable of communicating the material relevant to homework/tests in the remaining time, and he simply isn't. His tests frequently came with a massive time crunch that left the entire class scoring poorly. Despite this, he only curved one of our exams. I am not salty about a poor grade, in fact I am doing well. Rather, this fits into a constant pattern of him being insensitive about the time we need to do things, be it taking or scanning a test, or going from spacing his homeworks once every three weeks to once a week. That last thing really got on my nerves: his homeworks tend to take 5-10 hours, and there were a few weeks where I did not budget time for them, only to find out Tuesday that we had a homework due Friday. This was incredibly inconsiderate of our time; if you want to go from giving homework once every three weeks to once a week, the students need more of a heads up. He isn't necessarily mean, just inconsiderate. Essentially, if you decide to take Professor Saegusa, know that you will be teaching yourself much of the material, that he will assign homework inconsistently but frequently, that his tests are on a huge time crunch, and that his slides are riddled with typos. Do not recommend, though I know (sadly) that both of the STAT420 options aren't good ones.
Dong Dong STAT420 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/17/2019	Great teacher. Understanding homework can prepare you for the final. His finals are fair and the format are just like the homework and lecture notes.
Takumi Saegusa STAT420 Anonymous 09/11/2019	His teaching is okay in class. In office hours, he's really condescending and makes you feel stupid for asking him to re explain things from class.
Takumi Saegusa STAT420 Expecting a D+ Anonymous 05/23/2019	Was a fine lecturer, but STAT 420 is one those classes where it either clicked right away and you did really well, or it just never did and you'll end up doing consistently poorly despite spending hours and hours studying. Maybe I'm just salty because he mentioned at the beginning of class that he would curve all tests so that the average score was an 80, but didn't end up doing that (I would have gotten a C- if he had)
Takumi Saegusa STAT420 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/12/2019	His exams are not very hard. However, I think he spends too much time covering review topics like convergence in distribution and convergence in probability, leaving us no time to cover other topics other than some basics. I think if you want more comprehensive content you should take someone like J. Xu.
Takumi Saegusa STAT420 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/26/2018	He's a very quiet and calm professor. His exams are similar to HW problems and he curves assignments. Pretty chill.
Jian Lun Xu STAT420 Expecting a B+ ProBoggler 08/01/2008	Professor Xu definitely knew his stuff and was really clear in his explanations. He taught very methodically, writing down definitions, explaining them, giving an example, and repeating. His teaching was so clear there really was no need for questions. His tests were fair, the homework was definitely challenging. The only complaint I would have is that he never held office hours, which would make asking questions, if you had them, pretty tough. If you are into a more engaging class this professor is probably not for you, but he is a good teacher and I would take a class with him again.