Sylvester Gates

This professor has taught: PHYS235, PHYS401, PHYS411, PHYS711, PHYS798J, PLCY689L, PUAF689L

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Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 04/01/2024	Very little direction provided, especially when it came to exams. Grading was confusing. It's mentioned that there is a curve; if there is, I never figured out it out. The lecture slides are very unorganized. Our final grades were delayed by a few weeks because of repeated errors in the grading algorithm. Many people had their final grades changed 3-4 times. He also did not disclose this to students, leading to a lot of panic when you would wake up and see your grade changed yet again. I would not subject myself to this experience again.
Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/22/2023	His slides/lectures were awful (large chunks of the slides would be repeats, material would be covered out of chronological order, his 'lectures' were just him rambling). It felt more like he was talking at us than teaching. There were multiple instances where we were tested on history not covered in class (either because we hadn't gotten to that material yet or because it was irrelevant to the class's overall focus and was, at most, mentioned offhand during a lecture). There was no real way of practicing the science aspect of the class outside of the homeworks, which were poorly written and frequently required information not covered of briefly covered in class. There was also basically no way to know what your grade in the class was. Homework grades would be put directly into canvas while quiz/midterm grades would be sent to you by the TA. Except none of the assignments are weighted correctly in canvas, so you'd have to manually calculate your overall grade. Except he curves the quizzes/midterms heavily (because of how poorly everyone does), but never publishes what this curve actually is. And he sometimes just doesn't tell you your grade on certain assignments so you are left guessing what your overall grade is. 25% of your grade is a term paper he does not give you an actually rubric for and just gives you a vague bullet point list of what he wants included (no word on font/font size, citation format, how many sources he wants, spacing). There are no other written assignments in this class, so there is no way to have prior knowledge about how he will grade it. It felt pointless showing up to class because how poorly taught the material was. I would rather chew glass than take any class taught by him again.
Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/17/2023	Prof Gates is extremely knowledgable about what he is teaching however he is not able to communicate the information in an effective manner. His lectures are confusing and all bounce all over the place. He posts the slides, but they are almost impossible to interpret. The slides are packed full, containing at least 200 words per slide in a variety of different colors, sizes, and fonts. He also does not release accurate grading. I'm writing this review just before the final and I know that I got a 77/100 on the midterm. However, he grades are based off an average, which he does not release. So I don't know if that grade is a C or an A. The same goes for quizzes. There's also a term paper, so be prepared for that, but he won't release information about assignment effectively. The topic can be about essentially everything, meaning he gives no guidance for what to write about and he provides no format for the style the paper should be written in. This leads to students emailing him individually and then sending screenshots of his reply into the class GroupMe. Overall the class is a disorganized mess and I do not suggest you take it.
Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/15/2023	I took this class purely out of interest for the subject and I really enjoyed it. Professor Gates is probably one of the most knowledgable professors I've encountered at UMD and it shows through the content of the class and the way he teaches. You can tell he genuinely enjoys teaching this class and expects his students to be interested in it as well. The class definitely could have been organized better but personally I think Professor Gates' teaching made up for the disorganization. Overall I'd say this class is definitely not easy or light work so make sure you're actually interested in the content (nuclear physics AND wwii history). Professor Gates knows so much and you will learn a lot but be prepared to be engaged and interested in what he's saying. Great class but not for everyone. Great opportunity to learn from a world renowned physicist.
Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/13/2023	As others have said, I have nothing but respect for Dr. Gates as a physicist. It's clear he knows his stuff when it comes to this course, and he clearly understands both the historical stuff and mathematicial stuff that he's teaching. That being said, there's a lot more history than physics in this course (something I wasn't really expecting) and the homework assignments that we get almost exclusively cover the math/physics concepts while we were tested on mostly the historical parts (including some stuff we didn't cover in lecture — you had to be on top of the readings from Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"). With such a wide breadth of material, tests were pretty difficult for a GenEd, and this wasn't helped by the fact that outside of midterm grade updates I had no idea what my grade was in the class. From what I've heard from the non-STEM majors the mathematics aren't exactly easy for people not already familiar with electricity and magnetism (though no actual calculus was required), and our T/A, while nice, wasn't good at explaining stuff (half of a discussion section was arguing with people whether the cross-section of a sphere had surface area 2πr^2 or πr^2). The term paper is fair but a little irrelevant to the course material (it's basically "did you read the Rhodes book", the assignment). I wouldn't recommend this course unless you were extremely interested in WWII, and even then you might find lectures swinging from "too much info all at once" to "tangents so odd that I don't know what to take notes on".
Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/12/2023	Professor Gates is an alright professor. He is passionate about the teaching the content to students. Problems occur with his administration of the class. His assessments contain unexpected and difficult material. I attended every lecture and every discussion, and there was stuff that I had never seen before on tests and quizzes. He is not very organized, and the TA was not very helpful. This class is way too difficult to be a GenEd.
Sylvester Gates Expecting an A Anonymous 12/08/2023	I agree with the review below. But I will say that the grades are curved, though he hasn't said by how much (he briefly said that the average is a b). None of the quizzes or exams are actually on Canvas, so you it's hard to predict what you're final grade is going to be. I'm just guessing my grade based on the distributions that he's shown us thus far (he makes histograms and presents them during class). Additionally, we get problem sets almost every week. They aren't that bad, but can look a little intimidating because of the formulas (which feel as though they come out of nowhere).
Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting a B+ scaredpotter1812 12/06/2023	This is a surprisingly hard class. I'm a humanities major, so the history was easy for me. But the physics was rough! However, my STEM classmates would say the opposite: the history is terrible whereas the physics is easy. The lectures can easily put you to sleep and he doesn't have the microphone on half the time. The TA will be your lifesaver as they will be the ones to actually help you with the practice problems. Expect the quizzes and exams to be difficult, and study accordingly.
Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 11/29/2023	I cannot overstate the respect I have for Dr. Gates. He knows so much about everything he talks about, and he comes across as a very compassionate professor. That being said, the lectures in this class were not particularly captivating. There's a lot of history in this course that I wasn't anticipating--I thought it would be a lot more science based. Dr. Gates clearly has a passion for both history and science. He's so knowledgeable about both, but he doesn't seem to realize that the rest of us are so far below his understanding, so most of the information goes in one ear and right out the other. Overall, this gen ed is way more stress and work than its worth, and I would not recommend it unless you're incredibly interested in WWII and the Manhattan Project. If you only like nuclear physics and aren't a fan of any of the history (like me) I would not recommend it. Also, Dr. Gates will often post test material on Canvas with the expectation that we print it, which is kind of inconvenient if you don't have a printer. The library printers can be a little sketchy. We're allowed to make a formula/cheat sheet for most quizzes and the midterm exam (there's only one midterm). Dr. Gates said that the cheat sheet likely won't help us no matter what we put on it, and he's right--the quizzes are on the most random stuff that was either briefly mentioned during the lectures or not mentioned at all. When we ask what we should study for each quiz/exam, he directs us toward all of the lecture notes from the semester, which are often unclear. The averages were usually low Cs or high Ds. Good luck!
Sylvester Gates PHYS235 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/16/2022	This class was an unorganized mess. We didn't even get the syllabus until the second week. The course is an awkward mismatch of history from the late 1800s to WWII and surprisingly advanced nuclear physics. The math and science part was not taught well, especially in a class with students with no physics experience. The lectures were essentially Prof. Gates muttering to himself (he doesn't know what a microphone is) about random history and science things (a lot of which were irrelevant to the course). The TA seemed nice but was very awkward and was not good at teaching us the math we needed. We also have no way of knowing our actual grades since they're not posted accurately on elms or by his office. The only good thing about this class was that the grading was pretty fair. I still wouldn't take this class though.
Sylvester Gates PHYS401 Expecting a C nmendels 08/14/2013	So I had a lot of problems with Gates' teaching style. First is that, being a theoretical physicist whose career is based on quantum mechanics, he is a bit too good at the concepts in this class. So he would often go over material too quickly for everyone to understand it. Also, he was frequently out of town so we would often have a substitute which was not a horrible thing but I kind of like consistency. However, my biggest problem was his grading. He gave several quizzes throughout the semester and one of those was the day before Thanksgiving. How many people go to class that day? He also refused to let people make the quiz up. On both of the midterms, the front page said you have 2 hours to complete the test. We had 1 hour classes. So pretty much no one finished the tests and the grades reflected that. Even if we had had enough time the tests were incredibly difficult and the grades still would have been awful (virtually all the questions were incredibly difficult unless you knew some obscure math trick). These poor grades are reflected by the grade distribution. I think that over 60% of the class got a C or below, including about 1/4 of the class getting D's or F's. In my opinion, that is an absurd distribution that reflects an awful grade policy. That said, he was good about answering questions so if you knew what you didn't understand you could ask for help easily enough. But I really didn't know what I didn't know until after the tests.
Sylvester Gates PHYS411 Expecting an A anonn 05/13/2013	He explains things well and knows the material extremely well. On top of that, he's a friendly guy who's willing to help his students in any way he can. He had this one inspirational lecture that actually made me want to go home and do some physics. He's an award winning physicist, which is great, but this means that he travels a lot and misses a lot of class. When he isn't in class (which was in total about a third of the semester), he has one of his two post docs teach the class. As a result, the class material gets really fragmented. This is the main reason I'm not giving him 5 stars. Homework takes forever and tests are difficult, but this is no reason to downgrade him. This is just a forewarning.
Sylvester Gates PHYS401 Expecting an A applesandgrapes 12/22/2012	I've never met a man who has such a deep understanding of the subject matter at hand before taking a class with Dr. Gates. He is very passionate about what he teaches and genuinely wants everybody to do well. PROS: - Class is engaging and upbeat - Fair grading scheme - Definite sense of actually learning something throughout taking the course CONS: - Tests are DISGUSTINGLY hard; the first test had an average of about a 50%, and the second test grades were so poor that he did not count it. - Is absent frequently
Sylvester Gates Expecting an A Anonymous 05/02/2008	very good prof. he REALLY knows his stuff and does a very good job presenting abstract ideas to the class. his homework is extremely boring and if you try to attempt the mathematical work, you will need to spend 5-6 hours on it. in the end you might not get the grade you want, but you will have learned a lot... just don't try and challenge him in mathematics cause he will walk all over you.