Thomas Abt

This professor has taught: CCJS225

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Thomas Abt CCJS225 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/13/2025	Do not take this class. The professor is incredibly egotistical and literally talks about himself and the book the entire time. The entire curriculum for the most part was based on himself. Save yourself and your sanity, you are expected to read 150-200 pages for homework and is honestly such a waste of time. You can tell he is passionate about his job but is not experienced enough to be a good teacher. This was supposed to be an interesting and easy gen-ed but literally took up my entire life. Could not recommend you to run away more.
Thomas Abt Expecting an A Anonymous 05/09/2025	save yourself from taking this class. its not a fun or easy elective. i can tell that the professor is very passionate about what he is teaching, but there's an unreasonable amount of reading for a 200 level class. there are three question quizzes every class, and participation is a big part of your grade. there's one midterm and the final, as well as a big paper due right before the final. the midterm and final aren't that difficult if you understand the general topics but there are a bunch of random questions and its hard to study off of just his slides. so if you take this class, just know there's a lot of reading and a lot of in class participation involved.
Thomas Abt Expecting an A Anonymous 05/07/2025	The amount of reading I had to do for this class is insanely unreasonable. It's way too much and to make sure you do it, he gives quizzes at the beginning of class that could cover anything from that material. He also makes it hard to participate because he's so intimidating, but participating is a huge chunk of the grade. I hate talking in this class because I sometimes feel judged by him when I give an answer, but a professor should create a welcoming environment. He doesn't post participation until the very end, so you won't even know if you need to participate more or not. I don't really feel like he cares about our grades in the class. The exams are the slides, which is nice, but that means you have to know literally everything, except for specific numbers. There is a short paper due right before the final, which sucks, and provided no rubric or any real expectations. Since this is a 200 level class, most of us don't know how to write an op-ed, so more direction would have been helpful. I learned a lot from this class, but I just hate how everything was formatted. His book, which was assigned, was super insightful, but the book by Steven Pinker took way too long to get to the point and ignored important factors that could combat his arguments. If you can, don't take this class. It's not worth your time.
Thomas Abt CCJS225 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/24/2024	he's definitely knowledgeable and passionate about this field, but i think the class is just so poorly structured. the entire course is centered around the two books we read. first we read the better angels of our nature by steven pinker - genuinely the worst thing Ive ever read that required like 150-200 pages of reading a week. It felt so loosely related to the course content and was so difficult to understand just because of how long and tiring it is to read. Pinker is honestly an annoying writer and says a lot of questionable/offensive things in his book. The second book we read was the professors book called Bleeding Out. His book is honestly pretty good and insightful, but again the structure of the course really detracted from this. we have two exams - the midterm (15%) and the final (25%), each were just based on the books we read. we also had quizzes (25%) every class to ensure we did the readings; the quizzes are pretty easy and he drops the lowest three. there's also a participation grade (15%); participation is easy but the discussions aren't particularly engaging and just kind of felt like being quizzed on what we read. every class had a quest speaker, and that would end up on the exams too. at the end of the semester we had a final paper (20%) where you select a type of violence and propose an intervention plan. atp in the semester, the only adequate exposure we had to developing intervention plans was by reading Bleeding out - but this focuses on community gun violence, we didn't really have a lot of practice in thinking about how to develop plans. He also only gave us 900 words (hard limit), and was really particular about the structure/writing style, and asked for us to include things that felt like we would need a lot more than 900 words to adequate explain (keep in mind that he wrote an entire book proposing a plan, but we're expected to do it in 900 words). But he also just gave such little direction in writing the paper. he didn't even post a rubric. this was the only writing assignment we had in the entire semester, so I had no idea what he wanted to see in our papers. it also feels like there's little room for improvement during the semester. the exams were not that hard, but there's no extra credit or anything like that. fuck up on one thing and you tank your grade. overall the class is just so unengaging, too time consuming, with unreasonable expectations and badly structured. its doable, but really annoying. I learned nothing
Thomas Abt CCJS225 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/12/2024	unreasonable amount of reading for a 200-level class. We had one midterm and a final that we received no study material other than "reviewing the slides". He is a generally good guy who seems knowledgeable about the field but not the best professor. Will not recommend this as a Gen-ed.
Thomas Abt CCJS225 Anonymous 12/12/2024	I registered for this course thinking it was going to be more about how our brains register conflict and what makes us respond the way we do, violent or not. I was seriously mistaken. The content was more about history and statistics than the psychology of the issue. Throughout the entire semester, I dreaded this course and had to fight my eyes from nodding off every time. The PowerPoint presentations were very minimal and boring. They did not add to the class; they just had random points from the books that were not helpful or interesting. There are guest speakers at most of the lectures, and you should take notes cause he asks about them on the exams. There is a midterm (50mcq), a final (60mcq), and a paper (900 words). He gave us 1 hour for the midterm and then gave a lecture. He did not give us a study guide for the exams and just told us to "study the slides," which again were not very useful. As a criminology course, it should expand our knowledge of why people commit crimes, and it does not. I would not recommend this class, especially if it's with him
Thomas Abt CCJS225 Expecting a B- Anonymous 10/24/2024	He taught this class once a week for 2.5 hours. There is a 3-question reading quiz at beginning of each class. This first book he made us read required 200 pages of reading a week and it did not have cliff notes online. The exams were on the books. He went through the slides way too fast for anyone to even comprehend them.