Patrick Brosnan

This professor has taught: MATH140, MATH141, MATH241, MATH403, MATH404, MATH405, MATH406, MATH411, MATH463, MATH600, MATH601, MATH602, MATH603, MATH606, MATH607, MATH608E, MATH608J, MATH808C, MATH808E, MATH808K

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Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting a C- Anonymous 11/18/2024	Brosnan is too busy doing proofs while all his students struggle actually understanding the content, with the averages on the midterms being 60%. Extremely unorganized, and almost never finished the examples. He does not prepare you for the exams or quizzes whatsoever, and with the final exam being 50% of the grade, this leaves students extremely vulnerable. The TA for the discussion was 10 times better than him and the only part of the class salvageable. Do not recommend taking any classes with him if you want a professor that is good at teaching or cares about his students. Save yourself the headache and pick someone else.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/15/2024	brosnan clearly knows the topics and goes in depth into each topic. but that's just it, he really goes into it, at the point where you have no idea what he is talking about. sometimes i feel like this guy is yapping to himself for pleasure. if you are into the nitty gritty parts of calculus where you like the proofs, have fun with this guy, otherwise, take 141 with another professor.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 03/19/2024	The curve +5-10% for your grade. W course. 45% of your grade is the final. Easy quizzes, midterms, final is common so it is harder than midterms. Lectures skippable. Learn all of Math141 from textbook, discussions, and webassign.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/31/2023	- he explains the proofs of every single problem, which I found to be very confusing. in his proofs there were a lot of variables and symbols I didn't understand so I would just zone out during lectures. me personally, I did not like his style of teaching because he taught in proofs. so the lectures essentially were pointless to me. - BUT what made the class bearable were the TAs. My TA was great because they explained the problems and concepts really well. And on like 2 or 3 days during the semester, some of the TAs came and taught lecture because Brosnan was sick and these were the most helpful and informative lectures I have attended. so my piece of advice is if you have brosnan, use your TAs to learn the content. Pay attention in discussion, make use of office hours, and ask questions. Also, there are GSS (guided study sessions) for Math141 that you can attend for extra help (I found these to be very helpful) also I would watch youtube videos online for extra help (some helpful channels to me were Professor Leonard and the Organic Chemistry Tutor). - back to the topic of Brosnan: he is funny, but he goes on tangents. everyone learns in a different way, so you may find Brosnan to be helpful, but I didn't. - However, I liked the way his grading for the class was structured (in other words, I am not entirely mad about it). So throughout the semester there is a total of 10 quizzes, 4 midterms, 1 final, and a bunch of webassigns. Out of these assignments, the lowest 2 quiz grades are dropped and the lowest midterm is dropped. This was very helpful for me because I basically bombed one of the midterms. 4 midterms may seem like a lot, and I guess they kind of are because we would have one every 2ish weeks, but having these midterms kept me on track with learning the content. - some final remarks: do the webassigns on time, do the practice problems in the textbook because the quizzes were very similar to these (you learn more about what I am talking about once you get your syllabus), don't be afraid to ask for extra help, and find a good group of people to study with!
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/29/2023	The professor clearly has a passion for calculus as seen through his lectures. However, he spends too much time proving theorems and techniques and not enough time explaining and doing practice problems. Frankly the proofs aren't something you need to know unless you can't remember a trig identity or substitution method or something. If you have a friend who took AP Calculus BC in high school (or if you took it), I'd use those notes since the textbook can also be confusing with its math language. Warning that I took AP Calculus BC my senior year and got a 5, but there is some content covered in MATH141 that I did not learn last year. Paul's Online Math Notes or the Organic Chemistry Tutor on Youtube are also good options if you need help. There's a quiz every Thursday, so be prepared for that. Your TA should be nice enough to tell you what sections the quiz covers, and it's just two questions. The WebAssign homework assignments are finicky with how you enter your answer, and some of them require a calculator even though there are no calculators allowed for any exam or quiz in this course. The questions there are also much harder than on any test you're going to take for this course. Don't slack on studying for the final, since it's 45% of your grade. Best I can say is to show all your work and write down any formulas so you can get pity points for knowing those.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a B homework420 12/19/2023	Very fun professor, and very reasonable with midterms and quizzes. The quizzes in particular are just taken directly word for word from the book (at least my TA did that), so I essentially just mastered those questions. The midterms are very reasonable as well. However, I feel like he spends WAY too much time doing proofs instead of actually explaining the formulas we need to know. He knows this too but it does not seem like he will change this. I think this is stupid cause we are NEVER tested on the proofs ever. In addition I feel we are underprepared for the final, so start studying early for that. Overall, you can tell he is a nice guy but I really wished he would spend less time with proofs.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/19/2023	Very nice guy and has a good sense of humor. His teaching style is a bit confusing, because he spends the lectures writing proofs for rather simple concepts and does one or two examples near the end of class. The webassign homeworks are challenging but good practice, and he makes them due the morning of each exam which is pretty nice. His exams are 4 questions, 25 points each, similar in difficulty to the homework/textbook problems, so if you know what you're doing in the homework, you'll be fine. The course was fairly light until the sequences and series unit, which I needed to do lots of extra practice outside of lecture to keep up with. The final exam is like the midterms, but on steroids.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a C- Anonymous 12/18/2023	Prof. Brosnan should not be teaching a 100 level course. Having a final exam worth 45% of a grade is insanity. His exams are extremely easy, on the plus side, but the final exam is so much more difficult and a massive shock. Nice guy, but could the WebAssigns he begs us to complete be worth more than 5% of our grades?
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/15/2023	Not a very good lecturer. Confusing and has bad handwriting sometimes. WebAssigns are dumb sometimes but they can be helpful for review for quizzes and midterms. He drops 2 lowest quizzes and lowest midterm grade, but THE FINAL IS 45 PERCENT OF YOUR GRADE so it doesn't even matter. Quizzes and midterms are relatively easy if you study and know the material from watching organic chem tutor and reading textbook bc everyone knows you cant learn anything from brosnan. Overall, calc 2 is a weedout so j study and hopefully ur chillin.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Anonymous 12/12/2023	Honestly, I was always good at Math my entire life and I took him for Calc 2 and I started not understanding what's going on. It is definitely a somewhat difficult course but I found his teaching to be difficult to understand. He spends alot of time explaining things that you won't use and when it comes down to the formulas or examples, he runs out of time so it is very rushed and he does not go over it again. Oftentimes, he gets confused at what he's writing or messes up on the board which is okay because everyone makes mistakes but that just adds to the difficulty in following along. I know people who excel in my class, but I am not one of them and I struggled alot and had to mainly rely on the TA who was actually easier to learn from
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/06/2023	Not a good lecturer. Not enough examples, subpar explanations, and sloppy handwriting. Stopped going to lecture bc of how useless it was. Just read the textbook, watched youtube vids, and went to discussions. The exams and quizzes aren't that bad if you do the webassigns and prac problems.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/01/2023	Professor Brosnan seems like a fun, smart guy, but the teaching style is just not for me. He focuses too much on the proof aspect instead of explaining the formula and how to correctly use it. For most topics, he will just start a proof, then write the formula, and then do one or two example problems without diving too far into the concept. The midterms are four questions, worth 25 points each, so if you miss one question, you can watch your grade drop in real time. The final being worth 45% of the grade is honestly insane, even he says his exams are easier than the other professors', but he does drop one midterm and two quizzes. The WebAssign homeworks are super difficult compared to the exam problems so they are not comparable, and some of them require a calculator and won't be seen on any of the quiz/exam material because calculators are not allowed. Overall, Professor Brosnan is a nice guy, but the class and it's content can be a struggle because of the lackluster explanations and I will never get over how much weight is put into the final exam. To anyone who took AP Calc BC like I did and got a 3 or less, you will go over all of the same topics (and a few extra ones), but the difficulty will be increased ten-fold.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a B apandya7 11/30/2023	Professor Brosnan simply does not know how to lecture and goes over proofs for formulas (not needed information) to then skip over the explanation of the formula (important information). Sometimes he get's very confused in his own proof and drops it all together. Some of my class had switched professors, however I naively decided to stay in the class -- very big mistake. His final for the class is a whopping 45% of the grade which is ridiculous considering the hours of homework of webs assigns only accrues 5% of the total class grade. Overall, although Patrick is knowledgable and an intellectual mind, he cannot teach and is not fit to be teaching MATH 141. I even suspect he is confusing to those in 300-400 level classes
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Anonymous 09/03/2023	Really nice guy, funny but extremely confusing. Took two days of his class and understood nothing. He mostly just talks and writes the equations on the board without actually explaining or giving examples.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting a C- Anonymous 05/03/2023	Good guy, looks like he's very smart, but confusing lecturer. His lectures and explanations got too wordy for me and lacked examples to see how the things we were learning in the class applied, and if we did have examples, they would be rather abstract and difficult to understand. Also, the grading system is wacky with 50% of the grade being the final. The first exam is "easy," but the exams after are not as easy and the discussion quizzes did not help your grade either. At some point, as did most others, I just stopped heading to class and watched Justin's Youtube videos. Would recommend avoiding this guy.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting an A- Anonymous 01/27/2023	Pretty quirky professor but he's not bad. Honestly just used Justin's video the entire time, but the best thing about Brosnan is that his MatLab are extremely simple and are the easiest of the Calc 3 professors. No assigned homework, but I would highly recommend looking over them before taking quizzes. Exams aren't too bad either as long as you study the review and understand the content.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Anonymous 01/03/2023	Professor Brosnan is a very nice and well meaning guy, he does genuinely care about his students performance. This being said, I found his lectures a little scattered and confusing and oftentimes had few examples. I used his lectures alongside Justin Wyss-Gallifent YouTube videos which I found helped clear any confusion. He does make lectures light-hearted as he makes a lot of jokes and will tell some brief stories every now and again. His exams are almost exactly like the homework so if you do the recommended problems you should be familiar with the exam content. He does give 1 or 2 of his previous exams as practice for each midterm and held several review sessions during class before the final. The Matlab assignments are extremely easy and could be done in a few minutes. This semester (Fall 2022) Brosnan decided to only have 2 Midterms instead of the usual 4. This was meant to reduce the number of stressful exams across the semester, but in reality it just made the 2 midterms worth more and harder to study for as they covered more content. This was his first semester trying this so it may not happen in the future. Our final grade was curved.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/30/2022	Nice and funny guy in class, but his lectures were very confusing so I stopped attending them. As many will tell you, the Justin Wyss-Gallifent videos are 100% the way to complete this class. If you watch them and actually do homework problems until you understand the material, you will be fine. His exams were pretty easy and the Matlab assignments are practically nonexistent. Just make sure you prepare yourself well for the final as it will not necessarily be the same difficulty as the midterms. From my experience, this class requires some self-control to actually make yourself watch the video lectures and complete the optional homework. Which if you are coming in as a freshman student with AP Calc credit might be a new experience. Overall, I think you get out what you put into this class.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/19/2022	Professor Brosnan is a weird but really fun guy. However, for non-math majors, his lectures are difficult. They are full of proofs and very few examples. I just watched Justin Wyss-Gallifent's lectures on YouTube after our first exam, and I did great and had less of a headache doing the homework each week. Overall, we only had 2 exams which were comparatively the easiest out of all of the 241 professors this semester. If you do the homework, you will do fine on his exams and TA quizzes. Matlab was also simple--each of the three took a total of maybe 10 mins each, which had my friends in the other 241 classes cursing at me over their 5 hour matlabs. Would recommend for the easy tests and quizzes (and no graded HW) as long as you are disciplined enough to do the suggested HW problems and sit down with some classmates during class time to watch the lecture videos on YouTube.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting a B- Kpr2022 12/18/2022	Professor Brosnan is a nice guy, however, he can be a very unorganized professor and frequently goes on tangents. He focuses mostly on the proofs that bore you, slaps an equation on the board, circles it, and never explains how to actually do the problems. I learned 90% of the content from Justin's videos and just grinding the homework. Most of the class quickly stopped attending lectures because we realized he didn't actually teach us the content. His final was 50% of the grade which was also rough as the average was a 65, however he did curve all of our grade by 10%. Only two midterms with the second covering way too much material, I'm a A/B student and if it wasn't for the curve I would have ended with a C-. Not because I didn't understand the content, but because he does not curve midterms because "its too much work" and fails to prepare us for what he puts on his exams.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/11/2022	While Dr.Brosnan is an extremely kind and charismatic professor, he has been one of the worst professors I have ever had. He is the only MATH241 professor (to my knowledge) that changed the structure of the class to two midterms (15% each), weekly quizzes (15%), A matlab assignment (5%), and a final (50%). Both midterms were only 4 questions because he "didn't want to have to grade another question". The first midterm was taken the same week as the other class' first midterm and the second was a combination of the second and third midterms. Our class average for the first midterm was around a 88% and the average for the second exam was a 63% (with the median being 61% meaning more than half the class received a failing grade). While taking the second midterm, NO ONE (out of a 150 person class) had finished at the 45 minute mark and everyone was visibly struggling, Dr.Brosnan then announced to the room he was leaving for another class and left before the exam was over. This struck me as incredibly unprofessional and cowardly of him to leave so he could not be confronted about the unfair exam. I am an engineering major and have taken hard/unfair exams before, but the professor always had the decency to talk to the class about it with the students. When confronted about the exam in class, Dr.Brosnan justified the exam by saying it "wasn't that bad" and when someone mentioned that the average was a D he said that "a few students did very well". I do not recommend Dr.Brosnan as a professor to anyone. Most people end up not going to lecture and watching Justin's video lectures off of youtube (the average attendance every class is around 40 students). You're much better off with a professor who cares about the success of their students and is dedicated to their work.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Anonymous 12/11/2022	Do not take Professor Brosnan's class. He deviates from the standard math curriculum of four exams, worksheets, and homework. Instead, he only does two exams and jam-packs the material into those two exams. The reviews previously stated that although he only has two exams, they are relatively easy to make up for the sheer amount of content in each exam. However, the average for the second exam was around 60%, and he refused to admit or curve the exam. This left the students extremely vulnerable going into the final, which is weighted 50%, unlike the students who have other professors. He refuses to add more exams claiming that it is easier for the students, which in reality, reflects his laziness as a professor. With that, there are difficult quizzes every Thursday created by the TAs, so there is no standard on which everyone is being graded on. These should be helpful to our grades to outweigh the exams, but, instead, they do the exact opposite. His in-person lectures are disorganized. He rarely can complete examples of the content and then expects students to be able to know the entire process. His ego and laziness get in the way of recognizing his mistakes, and he does little to combat that. He tries to tell the students not to worry about grades and there will be some kind of curve at the end, but he does nothing actually to provide actual comfort to students. He refuses and is unwilling to accept his mistakes and recognize that he is making this entire process horrible for all students. He is, for the most part, unavailable for students outside of class, and it is apparent that he does not really care about students' success. I am truly shocked that he has managed to get this high of a rating with how catastrophically horrible this semester has been with this class. Even though he comes off as friendly and funny in the beginning, he is the worst professor I have ever had. If you end up having him, I would recommend not ever going to class as it makes everything more confusing, and instead, watch Justin's youtube lectures. I
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Anonymous 12/01/2022	He's an alright professor. I mainly learned the content by watching Professor Justin's videos and reading the textbook because his lectures can be slightly confusing and his handwriting is sometimes hard to read. However, his exams are extremely straightforward and are often directly based on the suggested homework problems (all of the homework problems were optional). The MATLABs are also extremely easy and never took me more than 30 minutes to complete, and the weekly quizzes helped boost my grade.
Patrick Brosnan MATH404 Expecting a B Anonymous 08/19/2022	I enjoyed him as a person, but his teaching style could be a bit disorganized. In particular, we didn't have our the majority of our homework graded until the last week of class. Also, he wrote pdf of lecture notes on the class material but only released them about two weeks before the final.
Patrick Brosnan MATH404 Anonymous 06/21/2022	He's really nice and has a sense of humor. We didn't use a textbook but his lecturing style makes it easy to take notes as he writes everything he says on the board. The homeworks were generally short and not too difficult. We had two exams which together were worth something like 80% of the grade.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/05/2022	Great guy very smart his lectures were a bit confusing he literally teaches pretty much straight from the text book so if you wanna do the best skim it before class.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/31/2022	Dr. Brosnan is a really nice professor. He assigned few homeworks.
Patrick Brosnan MATH603 Anonymous 12/31/2021	Great prof. Very lenient.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Anonymous 12/20/2021	Good dude, he is really knowledgeable in mathematics but has a hard time expressing his ideas. Watching another profs videos on the topic was more beneficial than attending his lecture but he's not a bad choice. He's really nice though which is always a plus.
Patrick Brosnan MATH241 Anonymous 11/17/2021	Fantastic man, you can tell he really has a passion for mathematics and he brings energy to his lectures. However, the quality of learning you might get from his lectures for calc 3 are far below the quality of the videos posted on youtube by Prof Justin on exactly the same topics. Often I find myself skipping lecture just to go straight to watching a 50 min video at 1.75x speed. In class there is a lot of waiting around for examples that don't show too much, and often are hard to even keep track of because of his handwriting. It's not so bad for me because I also have screenwriting but some other students may struggle.
Patrick Brosnan MATH403 Anonymous 01/04/2021	Brosnan managed to switch to an online format with little to no hassle and he cares a lot about his students and their performance. The notes were quite organized and easy to follow as well. The only reason he's 4 stars out of 5 is because he does this thing where he goes through a proof and in some parts says the result is obvious when the jump to a conclusion is not so clear.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a B- Anonymous 09/05/2020	His exams throughout the semester are not difficult at all. But that’s the only thing he has going for him. His lectures are really confusing and he does not prepare you for the final exam which determines way too much of your grade. I had an A before the exam and ended up with a B-.
Patrick Brosnan MATH405 Expecting an A- Anonymous 03/29/2020	He's a really nice guy, but he has this really annoying habit of deciding he's "bored" halfway through a proof during lectures. Harsh grading in exams but curves at the end of the semester. I would recommend him overall for 405 since he's an algebraist so he has a lot of interesting things to say about the subject.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a D- Anonymous 03/07/2020	My failing grade is mostly due to me being a bad student and going through a rough patch but I also have stuff to say about his class. He's a pretty okay person and his tests were decently easy but he just goes on and on about proofs when we could be doing examples and actually learning how to solve the problems. So I guess take his class if proofs help you. Also I felt severely under prepared for the final and bombed it. I went from a C+ to a D-.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/19/2019	Makes Calc 2 doable. He drops a midterm, like half of the quizzes, and 5 or 6 homeworks. Lectures are a bit proof-heavy, but the midterms are easier than some other professors'. Final is rough, but he does curve.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/17/2019	I enjoyed his class. His exams were far easier than the other professors. He is not the best teacher but definitely worth taking him for those easy exams. He also drops 1 midterm, 2 quizzes, and like 4 homeworks... (Fall '19)
Patrick Brosnan MATH403 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/07/2019	Super chilled prof, thinking of him makes me giggle. I learned so much from him! What's really cool about his teaching style is that he's pretty personal about the stuffs he teaches, so the emphasis on the material is heavily flavored with an algebraist's perspective. The whole class was keen and fun and backed by solid motivations. Wish we had a longer semester to cover more. If you're taking classes with him, please take good care of him. Go to class and envision his brilliancy.
Patrick Brosnan MATH403 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/26/2019	An awesome professor. Although MATH403 is a hard class, Patrick made the content enjoyable and easy to understand. He is super helpful during office hours and is looking out for his students.
Patrick Brosnan MATH141 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/22/2018	Easy exams, but doesn't teach