Sandra Cerrai

This professor has taught: AMSC674, BIOI601, DATA601, MATH410, MATH463, MSML601, SPHL601, SPHL602, SPHL603, SPHL610, STAT400, STAT410, STAT600, STAT601, STAT818B, STAT818J, STAT818O, SURV410

Sort By:

Information	Review
Sandra Cerrai STAT410 Anonymous 10/21/2024	I think she is OK for the most part in teaching the material, and I think it's generally interesting, but I have a few gripes about the administration of the class. For one, she gets really frustrated when students don't appear to understand the material. The simple reason is that it's difficult to understand the material while taking notes and listening to her--a lot of us understand it after going back to our notes or to the textbook--but apparently she doesn't realize this. On the first midterm, there was one problem that had unclear wording. Several students went up to her to clarify it, but her clarification did not help, and I actually ended up erasing the correct way of doing it. Another part of the same problem used the expected value for a geometric random variable, which she forgot to derive in class and only realized after the exam.
Sandra Cerrai STAT410 Expecting an A DenialWhammy 12/16/2023	Not as bad as I was expecting from the previous reviews. Her exams are difficult but fair if you study previous exams (and there are a LOT of them). I won't lie, I just studied off the textbook, which is a little grief for STAT410, but her lectures were pretty solid as long as you ask a ton of questions. There's also a huge curve in the end if you're worried about your grade.
Sandra Cerrai STAT410 Expecting an A fiftyseven 12/25/2022	I would recommend STAT410 with Cerrai, just make sure you're alright with a class that isn't as easy as STAT400. She teaches very well and I personally liked the style of lecturing - it's taught a bit more like the upper level math courses due to the focus on theory, as the course's name would imply. It might be a bit more difficult for those who aren't into math as she can use some notation and concepts that not everyone will necessarily be familiar with at first. However, she's more than happy to clarify this and did so as-needed when people asked and in the end I found it helped connect it better to other topics and made it better to understand. She follows the textbook pretty well, so if you do miss anything the textbook will be adequate at explaining it. Her exams are pretty fair in my experience, although not always the easiest. On the second midterm, the class generally did rather poorly and she just made up for it entirely by giving a take-home exam. During the exam she's also still receptive to questions, so if you're confused - just ask. There's also a rather large curve at the end. All in all, I'd highly recommend her if you aren't just looking for an easy class to fulfill a STAT4XX requirement.
Sandra Cerrai STAT410 Expecting an A Charl1e1029 12/23/2022	I really liked the ordering of how prof Cerrai structured the content of STAT 410. I also thought her homework’s and exams were very reasonable. Although the averages of her exams were low, she offered quite the reasonable curve and even gave us an extra assignment to boost our grade after the second midterm. Her lectures are quite fast paced, but she interjects quite a bit saying that we can stop her at anytime and ask questions.
Sandra Cerrai STAT410 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/29/2018	Don't take STAT410 with her. Exams are hard and it's very difficult to gage what she expects of her students in terms of what needs to be memorized. For example, many students didn't memorize the formula for the PDF for the normal distribution (because we never had to on homeworks) and then it was worth 20 points on one of the exams. She's a smart person but she isn't friendly. She's very intimidating and hard to approach in office hours, and she gets visibly frustrated when the class doesn't know the answer to something that she wants us to know the answer to. I also feel like she thinks Calc 1 and Calc 2 are much more extensive than they are, given she expected us to have obscure gaussian integrals memorized without teaching them to us.
Sandra Cerrai MATH410 Anonymous 05/18/2018	I thought I’d comment on prof Cerrai since I feel the reviews on this site are not accurate, except for kvsiddarth’s review (there are some reviews on reddit which do a better job). I was weary of taking her this semester precisely because of the Ourumd reviews but her section fit my schedule perfectly so I decided to take her anyways. And she did an amazing job. You can tell that she knows her stuff, knows how to convey it to the class, and makes an effort to make sure that we understand and will repeat herself again if we do not. This is exactly what a prof is supposed to do. And not many upper level math profs do so unfortunately... Sometimes she relates a concept to some other concept in mathematics helping you see the big picture. For those of us math majors this is incredibly useful and interesting. Her exams are not exactly a walk in the park but are not bad either. There are usually 2-3 questions that are extremely fair since they were covered in lecture and another 1-2 that are just random (getting these well depends on how well you know the material or just how lucky you are lol). But fair exams overall. She also curves. Homework is straight from the book. And there are solutions for all problems in the book everywhere so no reason why you shouldn’t get 100 on them. So if you’re a math major serious about math I would definitely recommend her. And if you’re a math major serious about math, and in particular, probability, even more so, since after all, its her field and she is very knowledgeable. So probs the best option for STAT410. I would def take another class with her if I could.
Sandra Cerrai STAT400 Expecting an A autonym 05/24/2012	Fairly straightforward lecturer. Her teaching strategy never moves much beyond writing formulas and doing examples. However she does try to deliver some intuition behind the math, and makes an effort to stay in touch with the class and get a sense of students' understanding, as much as possible in a large lecture. The book is not great but it gets the point across. Unfortunately HW comes from it that you must turn in. Not a terribly difficult subject, I wouldn't sweat the professor too much.
Sandra Cerrai STAT400 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/23/2010	I took this class when she first taught it in Fall 2009 as a freshman. I was also in Math241, which gives me a basis to compare to this class. She was horrible at answering questions, she didn't know the concept of a class curve, and she would spend all of lecture writing indiscernible symbols on the board that were useless theory and proofs of formulas, then on the tests she would have these horribly complex and contrived applications that we had no idea how to do, along with the ridiculous proof questions. However, this being her first semester in America, we broke her in for you guys, demanding that she curve the class, forcing her to hold review sessions during lecture, begging her for extra office hours, and constantly going to her TA's (which were extremely helpful) for help. So, back in my day, this class was a pain in the ass, now for you guys, it should be okay. She had this awesome TA, Ziliang Li, who basically saved my life in this class with his wonderful help during discussions about homework/quiz questions that helped me a lot.
Sandra Cerrai STAT400 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/17/2010	I kind of see what oldmanjess (below) means about the textbook. I wouldn't call it terrible, but it was kind of confusing. But Cerrai did a good job explaining what the confusing parts meant. She is also a very nice person with respect to grading tests, she doesn't take off very many points. As for her accent, she went to high school and college in Italy and because of this she doesn't have the best English vocabulary, but she knows the English she needs to teach STAT400. As for her accent it took me like maybe 2 classes to get used to it then I didn't have any problems after that. She also is pretty funny, which was nice to have during a hour fifteen lecture. She gives 2 midterms and 10 homework assignments with one dropped. (but the homework assignments weren't collected, instead your TA gave you a "quiz" where you just had to redo one of the hw problems without notes) STAT400 itself is a lot of logic in the beginning, and kind of some stressful estimation stuff towards the end, overall not that hard computationally, but somewhat difficult conceptually.
Sandra Cerrai STAT400 Expecting an A oldmanjess 10/13/2010	Dr. Cerrai's method of teaching assumes the students know nothing of the material. She teaches in a clear, logical manner. She also writes big, which helps with note-taking. Some students in my class say they have difficulty with her accent. I don't have that problem. The lectures seemed pretty structured to me: concept->proof->example. STAT400 is in between MATH240 and MATH141 in difficulty. Expect 3-4 hours per week of homework/study. Unfortunately, it is important to attend every lecture, because the book is TERRIBLE! There must be a better book out there, math department!
Sandra Cerrai MATH462 Expecting an A kvsiddarth 05/04/2010	This course is a hard course, the material is challenging but also very very useful. It is very hard for any professor to teach this class well. But Dr. Cerrai does a great job. Although she writes all over the board, she teaches very well. If you pay attention when she teaches you will be able to figure out whats going on. She goes over every detail and make an effort to do a good job. She also has a sense of humor and this makes the class a lot more fun. I could not make it to her office hours all semester, but she always found time to accommodate me was extremely helpful. Her exams were not bad at all she is a very easy grader. I would definitely recommend her, but just remember to attend class every time and pay careful attention. For a course of this caliber she is very good.
Sandra Cerrai STAT400 Expecting a C Anonymous 12/01/2009	I completely agree with the other review, who said it perfectly. While she seems like a very nice person and she tried very hard, her teaching style needs major work. About 10-20% of a given lecture was actually new/useful material, where the other 80-90% was her repeating herself again and again. The comment about the lack of organization was a MAJOR problem for me (and I believe it is a problem many UMD math department teachers have). I would recommend someone else if you can, unless you're really good at learning from the book with minimal useful lecture time.
Sandra Cerrai STAT400 Expecting a B Anonymous 11/17/2009	The main problem I had with her was her lectures were too unstructured for me. She writes very large, which is good for reading, but she doesn't really follow a pattern as to where she writes stuff. I would often bring my text book to class so I could at least give my notes some structure. She seems nice though, and occasionally says amusing things. Her tests weren't always what I was expecting, but they weren't horrible either. Overall I would say she's fairly average.