Margaret Doucette

This professor has taught: MATH246, MATH246H, MATH401

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Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/10/2026	I always sat in the front, paid attention, asked questions, and really enjoyed her lectures. I actually disagree with people saying that her lectures are disorganized. Her lectures always have the same structure: Setup / Motivation -> Theory -> Example. Not to mention, examples are mixed in with theory so that people follow what is going on. I found her lectures very well structured. On top of amazing lectures, her class is also super organized. The class ELMS page is the most organized class I have ever had. She provides MANY different resources for students, and on top of that her own notes, which I found very very useful. For all exams she gives practice exams, and the discussions are also amazing and amazing practice for exams. She is also a very nice person, and genuinely willing to help. It is clear that she genuinely cares about her students. Overall, I could not have hoped for a better experience with this class. If you really want to learn Diff Eq and understand it then she is the way to go without a doubt.
Margaret Doucette MATH246H Expecting an A Anonymous 01/08/2026	The nicest math professor ever. She rambles sometimes, but even used a mid-semester survey and incorporated feedback to improve her lectures, and actively started including more examples towards the end of the class. Provides an insane amount of resources and even gives handwritten handouts that you can use to pass her exams, which are pretty fair.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/06/2026	Seems like a chill person, though stopped going after week 2 since lectures were just reading off of Justin's notes. Class is not too hard, especially if you've had prior experience with Lin Alg. Matlab assignments were a decent grade booster and didn't even show up on the exam. Midterms were reasonable, the TAs taught everything in the lectures in 1/10th of the time in weekly discussion sections.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/27/2025	Exams are fair and u get a lot of partial credit. She's also nice and her lectures got better throughout the semester.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/23/2025	I think Dr. Doucette was a great teacher and is going to be even better when you take her because of her constant goal to receive our feedback and improve. Admittedly, at the start of the semester her lectures were a bit rough because she was using the chalkboard in a classroom where it was hard to see, and she was kinda all over the place and explained certain concepts too much before doing examples. She overcomplicated a lot of things. However, she consistently asked for our feedback, so she switched to a projector, started doing more examples, and she became more confident in how she explained things, and I ended up finding her lectures super helpful. All I had to do was examples from the textbook to study after getting the basis of each topic down from her lectures. She gives weekly discussion quizzes but they're free because she sends an announcement and describes the exact type of question she's gonna ask on it, so as long as you do practice problems to study beforehand you'll do fine. She also dropped 2 quizzes. I found these helpful for keeping up with the content, as every quiz was basically just one exam-type problem, so by the time the exam comes you've already done each type of question. Her exams were super fair for the most part; the first exam was exactly like the practice exam she had given us and the third exam was easier than the practice exam she gave us. The only exception was exam 2, which was honestly a lot harder than I expected but I still did good (almost every niche thing you'd assume she wouldn't include on it, she did, like the dirac delta and heaviside functions for laplace and also a pretty hard version of undetermined coefficients). Her exam averages were 90.2, 76.4, and 84.9 for exams 1, 2, and 3 respectively. Overall she's a sweetheart and I highly recommend!!
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/23/2025	She doesn’t do a very good job with lectures. They are kind of hard to understand and over complicates some stuff. She does have lecture summaries that are helpful if you miss class or something. Her tests are very easy and she does care a lot about her students, but her tests are so easy that when it comes to the final that she doesn’t write, you are very unprepared. The class average for tests were significantly lower than the final, around 15% lower. If you take her, don’t take her tests as a baseline for how the final will be.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/20/2025	One of the best professors in my opinion. I always sat in front and had zero complaints about the class. The lectures are thorough and have plenty of examples. She goes over things very slowly, and is very open to questions, and very good at answering them. She is also very good at explaining concepts and where they come from. For each class, she posts a lecture summary with plenty of extra resources should you need them. On top of that, she posts her own notes, which I found to be very useful. Overall, I think that she is a great professor, and if you want to take a class to really learn and understand the concepts, you won't regret taking it with her.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/20/2025	She is a very nice person and very understanding, however, after the first exam, I realized it was not beneficial to go to lectures. She is not a very clear speaker and sometimes struggles to clarify ideas when students ask questions. She does give you a lot of resources to succeed, and her exams are fair, bordering on easy, but if your best learning comes from lectures, you should look to other professors.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/20/2025	She is a really nice professor and wants to help students as much as possible, but her lectures are just too confusing and difficult to follow. I learned much much more from the 50 min discussion sections with the TA each week. MATH246 is an unpleasant class at UMD and there is an unreasonable amount of material to cover in a 3 credit class, which she acknowledged herself and isn't her fault. Despite this, she would always tell us that we should be responsible for knowing every single thing in the class, but I felt like this led to a deemphasis on which topics were the most important to focus on. Another thing I disliked was that she made it seem like the class was going to be curved in the end (for example telling us not to take the makeup final since it wasn't going to be curved thus implying the general exam would be curved), and then not curving it in the end! To be fair she said at the beginning of the semester that the class may or may not be curved, but given the way a curve was talked about and implied several times, it was disappointing. Overall, it was just a confusing class and you have to be prepared to spend a lot of time studying yourself regardless of which prof you choose.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/20/2025	Meg is not a terrible professor. She's a caring person and very new to this. She seems open to feedback to help her improve, even giving us an extra credit course feedback assignment. With that being said, this class was a mess. Lectures were disorganized and not very helpful. On top of that, there was content that she basically expected us to self-study that she said was 'fair game' even when she hadn't uttered a single word about it in lecture. She does not do very many practice problems in class, and in fact, she didn't even really listen to the course evaluations, as that was by far the most popular complaint by most of the class. She did not curve our final grades or round (I finished with an 86.5% and got a B). Her grading on exams is extremely generous. If you at least know what you're doing and make an honest attempt on every question, you will be fine. The weekly discussion quizzes are practically free, as two are dropped, and the TAs spend the entire section giving you identical problems with different numbers. There are three Matlab assignments, and aside from the first one being a bit tedious, they're nothing to worry about, just do them on time. Personally, I did not expect to do very well in this class, but with her grading scale, you should not really have to worry about failing if you put a few hours a week into this class. If you're someone comfortable with self studying and don't enjoy coming to every lecture, she is the option for that. But as someone who went to every lecture and found myself lost pretty often, it was a drag, and I feel like a lot of time was wasted on tangents that were not helpful to my understanding of the content. I would just take Stefan.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/19/2025	I went into the final exam with a 95.54, I had not attended any lectures to achieve this grade and so I wasn't too worried about the final itself. fastfowarding about 2 weeks I got my grade back for the final, a 77. which put my grade down to just .02% away from an A-. Maybe she isn't allowed to curve the grade, but nonetheless it is crazy to not get a grade increase from 0.02% when I know some professors round up .5%. Maybe its nothing on her, but I cannot believe my grade is being held from a 0.02% change
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/19/2025	Differential Equations is not the most interesting math class and the pace of that class is insane but Margaret Doucette makes the class extremely fair and fully prepares you for anything you need to know. We cover an insane amount of materials every class but that is just how the course it but she made it very easy to understand and provided you with resources you need to catch up. The weekly quizzes were always not about quizzing us but about helping us learn the materials as the TAs just helped us solve the questions if we got stuck. She posted great lecture notes and practice midterms and final exams that fully prepared us for all the exams. Although I found the lectures tiresome and boring, I knew I had to attend since I would miss so much material otherwise. The exams themselves were super fair as I never needed to do work besides exam practice problems and listen to the lecture to succeed in the class. She also greatly improved at teaching throughout the semester, especially with the microphone and the paper notes (instead of the chalk) and I know that she will get much better over time. Overall, good teacher to get you through the class even though sometimes you will hate going to class. She truly cares about the success of her students and the flaws that she does have she can definitely improve on.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/19/2025	Great teacher. She was all over the place during the lectures, but the notes she posted online and the study guides were very helpful. The exams were fair and not too difficult.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/18/2025	Her exams are very fair and she's very transparent about what you need to study. She described every quiz before discussion and gave you a review of topics that are fair game on exams so you knew what to study. She wants you to succeed and asks for student input on how she could be better since she's very new to teaching this course. Diff eq is known to be a hard math course so she did well for what it is. She sometimes overcomplicates topics and explains it super poorly so you just leave lecture confused but I believe she'll get better with time. Overall, it wasn't an easy A per se but it certainly wasn't the worst class ever.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/18/2025	I have no idea why she's so hated. Yeah she's clearly new to lecturing, but she's clearly making a great effort to be a good fair professor. Over the course, I've seen her become a much better professor. Her exams are super fair, and match the level of questions she uses as example perfectly. Yes it's MATH246, you'll be studying quite a bit, but you'll be fine if you're putting in the effort. 5 stars would totally take again.
Margaret Doucette MATH246H Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/18/2025	I will keep it short. Are her lectures perfect? No, but they are not bad by any means. She teaches well but could use more examples. She is, however, the nicest math teacher ever and gives you an absurd amount of fantastic resources. If you put in the work, read her lecture summaries, and just do some practice problems, you will do great in this class. She cares about her students, and is an incredibly nice grader as long as you proved you understood the general concepts on exams.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/18/2025	I don't get all the Doucette hate. This was her second semester ever teaching and she was tasked with teaching the juggernaut of diffeq. The only critique I have of her is that sometimes she can go a little fast during lecture and can get sidetracked because of a question someone asks. She is not a bad professor and was much better than Stefan. Her exams are fair and she will not be the reason you do bad. She provides so many resources and opportunities for you to learn the material so you don't bomb a midterm. She is lenient with grading and the final isn't worth 50%, which is what the final was worth if you took Stefan. She used to lecture on the chalkboard but in the middle of the semester, she switched to lecturing on pen and paper and projected them on the projector and then scanned the notes and posted them on canvas. Overall, she is a good professor and her exams are fair, I would take her again.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Anonymous 12/18/2025	Horrible lecturer, but outside of that she is great. She is super kind and gives very fair exams. She doesn't give homework either. I remember before our last exam she was super busy and said she probably wasn't gonna give us a practice exam. Yet she still found the time to get us a practice exam accopanied with worked out solutions. You can tell she wants everyone to succeed in her class.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/17/2025	Super nice, gave all the material needed to succeed. Every test was fair and the quizzes made sure you were keeping up timely. The TAs were insanely good and I really liked my discussions.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/17/2025	I think many of the reviews from the beginning of the fall semester were a little early. It was clear that the professor had anxiety while teaching, but has the course went on, she began to become more comfortable, which could be seen by her lecture style. This professor has the most organized Canvas page ever. For every lecture, notes are posted, a summary with additional resources is posted, practice problems are posted, and what the quiz is on is posted. This made the class very easy to navigate. For exams, the professor posted not only a practice exam but also a study guide, which clearly outlines the units being tested and the topics needed to ace the exam. She was also very clear in the fact that she wanted all midterms and even the final to be fair and not ridiculously hard. Although her lectures may be confusing, I think anyone could get a good grade in this class if they are willing to apply themselves inside and outside the classroom.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/16/2025	Doucette is an extremely nice teacher and genuinely cares about each and everyone of her students. Her exams are very fair, and she posts helpful reviews for each midterm. There are also weekly quizzes, which sounds bad, but I actually liked these because they were a good checkpoint to see how you were doing on the content. I would highly recommend taking Doucette for Math 246 if you get the chance. The only reason I didn't give 5 stars is that I would have liked to do more examples during lectures.
Margaret Doucette MATH246H Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/13/2025	A lot of resources are provided for studying outside of class. Justin Wyss-Gallifent's notes in tandem with practice problems from the textbook were particularly helpful for me. For assignments: 3 midterms, 3 matlabs, 1 final - if you feel confident in the material it is not hard to do well on any of these. I think she does a good job of setting you up for success: go to class, study outside of class, and use the resources she gives you. One big thing that I really appreciated about the professor that I think is probably not emphasized enough: the teacher asked for feedback during the middle of the semester. AND, she very noticeably incorporated our feedback and her teaching improved (I think do more examples was a popular response). I wish all my professors did this. The only reason I'm giving 4 stars instead of 5 is that the beginning of the semester was a little rough. As other people have said, she stutters a bit and didn't do a great job of explaining concepts (though if you go through the online resources after class and study, it will make sense eventually). But, like I said, she improved drastically after receiving feedback, and has been much better since. I think she'll only continue to get better, and if she's teaching one of my later math classes I will happily take her again.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/13/2025	This course was not made to be one that students struggle through. Professor Doucette made it as lenient as possible, and made it clear that she is willing to help whenever. The quizzes and tests are very straightforward, and there is plenty of material for preparing. My TA, Sanghoon, made discussion extremely helpful, as he would cover what we needed to know. Sanghoon prioritized our learning and made the weekly quizzes a good opportunity for that.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/12/2025	Since this was MATH246, taking her felt fine - her lectures were sometimes improperly paced or didn't cover required material, and were sometimes difficult to follow - she still seems pretty new to lecturing. However, she gave many online resources, including alternative notes and additional review materials, which made the class content easy to catch up on. Halfway through the semester she changed the format of her lectures for the better, so she might be even better next semester.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/11/2025	Dr. Doucette is very nice; lectures can at times feel very dense / rushed, but that is more due to the amount of DiffEQ content rather than a fault of the professor. Ask a question literally any time during lecture, and she'll answer it immediately. Exams are very fair and build off of weekly quizzes, first exam average was 94%. At least with my TA, weekly quizzes were in the discussion section and mostly served as attendance. If you attend the lectures, the quizzes are a breeze, I think the average for the quizzes was 95%+ and they count for 15% of the grade. She also provides a lot of external resources and handouts, yeah you'll probably just cheg or organic chemistry tutor a concept you dont understand but its nice that its there.
Margaret Doucette MATH246H Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/11/2025	Not sure why the other reviews are so bad, exams are usually fair and generously graded (averages in the mid to high 80s) and she is very nice and helpful in office hours. The lectures are sometimes hard to follow and could generally use more examples but its partly just that 246 is a very difficult class. But definitely read Justin's notes as they are very helpful for doing well on exams and problems.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/05/2025	Super nice teacher. Exams are super fair, you don't need to put in too much work to do well.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 10/18/2025	I have NO idea why her reviews are so low. For 246, she stated herself that the pacing of the class is not up to her. We cover an insane amount of material in this class, which can be difficult given that we only have two lectures a week + one discussion section that basically just serves as time to take our weekly quiz. However, she tells us what topics are going to be on the quiz beforehand, so as long as you do the practice problems, it should be an easy A--or a B at worst if you make a small computational error. Also, her exams are beyond fair. All I did to prepare was do all the practice problems, look at her extremely detailed lecture summaries, study guide, and one practice exam, and the midterm was basically the same thing. The average was an A. You can tell that she truly wants her students to succeed. Even though her explanations can be a bit hard to follow every now and then, I really do chalk that up to the unintuitive order/pacing of the course. (For example, you're allowed to take this course without having taken 240, even though linear algebra concepts quickly become fundamental to understanding the material.) All in all, this is the most fair math class I'm taking right now. I think most people giving her low reviews have just been spared from having a truly unfair math class and/or a professor that doesn't care. If you do the work, which trust me really isn't that much, you will be FINE. I'm sitting at a 99.25% right now having just done the textbook problems, study guide questions, and asking for help in office hours--which are useful by the way!! Math at UMD is hard. This class, however, is reasonable--and oftentimes even enjoyable.
Margaret Doucette Expecting an A Anonymous 09/19/2025	If you want to be given Justin's MATLAB projects, told to read Justin's notes, and have the lectures then be confusing instead of make sense, she's the best choice for that.
Margaret Doucette MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 09/05/2025	Assigned a quiz first week that has topics not covered in lecture. All over the place during lectures and very hard to follow.
Margaret Doucette MATH401 Expecting a B- Anonymous 08/14/2025	Dr. Doucette is not a bad professor, but I think she’ll get better over time. Her lectures can sometimes be confusing, for me mainly due to occasional backtracking to small, situational points instead of focusing first on the big picture idea. At times it makes explanations feel more complicated than they need to be. She is a very nice person, is open to feedback, and it does feel like she cares. All the assignments were more than fair, exams included. The course isn’t necessarily hard, I would just say you need to heavily rely on doing very well on the exams. The homeworks can be long at times, but the questions are usually straightforward or at least entertaining and fun. Groupwork really isn’t that bad, it isn’t necessarily super difficult, but if you can get a group of people you enjoy working together with it can fly by fast. If you are taking MATH401, just make sure you go over Justin’s notes and review, she’s a decent option and will definitely get better with time.
Margaret Doucette MATH246H Expecting a C Anonymous 05/27/2025	Lecture: This was her first time teaching so I expect it to get better but overall a mid to bad lecturer - she stutter a lot and go pretty fast sometimes. Obviously diffeq is a difficult class but I don't thinked it helped the majority of students' understandings when she would go over the proofs for formulas/methods for a long period of class. She got better at the end with more examples but other students and I completely stopped going to class after about 2/3s of the semester. I personally think that learning from the textbook website helped a ton, I would just either read through it or copy it and have ChatGPT explain it to me with examples, after I would do a ton of examples the textbook website gives. If you did this and went to lecture like a couple friends did you will understand lecture much more but probably not all of it. Tests: There were 2 midterms unlike other sections who had 3. The midterms were very fair she said multiple times that she doesn't want us to have to memorize the crazy formulas which was completely true, there was no mechanical vibrations or runge trapezoidal formulas on the tests or anything crazy even though she would go though them in class. If you don't procrastinate studying like I did then you will be fine on the tests just be really good at the main stuff and know when to use each method. Our averages were a B and a C with a B average on the final. The grading was also fair with a decent amount of partial credit, although she wouldn't give points back easily. Homework: There is homework in her class unlike other sections and if you take tests decently then I would recommend taking another section just because of this reason. If you take tests poorly then the homework will help because they were graded pretty easily if you put in effort. This was by far the worst part of the class there would be about 1 a week but they were insane especially if you weren't caught up on material. Pages and pages of work, on average I would say about 3-5 hours per homework if you do them with no help but some of them would be much worse. The matlab assignments were also crazy there were 3 but were definitely a lot.
Margaret Doucette MATH401 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/27/2025	Pros: Pretty nice person Class is not hard at all for a math400 Pretty receptive to feedback IMO, this is her first time teaching at UMD Cons: Lectures are kind of all over the place, it's hard to learn/glean anything from them She also just reads off Justin's notes, once I realized this I never showed up for lectures Groupworks SUCK, they are done in groups of three but what always happens is one person does matlab one person writes and if you are not one of those you are kind of just sitting there. easy points but sometimes the most boring hr of my life Some of the homeworks are SO LONG Overall shes not the best, but if you have her you will be fine. She also improved over the semester and I can see her being a lot better in the future