Ben Goldschlager

This professor has taught: MATH141

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Ben Goldschlager MATH141 Expecting a B- Anonymous 02/28/2024	He's a nice guy who is quite literally the best mathematician I have met, but since he's a grad student with zero teaching experience it hurts his teaching skills sometimes. Because of this it took me and some friends spending countless hours studying the homeworks, with some problems being so impossible that Ben would attempt to do the problem during office hours and after about 15 minutes be like "Yeah this is not on the quiz" which was pretty demoralizing since we would have 20-30 problems to memorize how to do since he will pick 2 of these questions at random to put on quizzes. We had 3 midterms, with the first two not being horrible, then the 3rd midterm tanking everyone's grade so bad that he handed us back our midterm packets, gave us a week to study, and had us retake the EXACT same midterm and averaged the old and new scores together. The final was harder than previous finals but Ben at least stayed afterwards to go over the final problems which helped us figure out how well we did (not well at all). He doesn't record lectures, so attendance is important, but he counts your worst midterm for half and worst two quizzes for half so that's cool I guess. Overall, you're better off taking this class with someone else unless you want to be grossly prepared for Calc 2, attend every office hours for Calc 2, make a bunch friends to study for Calc 2, name your future kid Calc 2, go to sleep at night thinking about Calc 2, and suffer the scars and PTSD from when you hear something related to various topics from Calc 2.
Ben Goldschlager MATH141 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 01/04/2024	I'll be the first to write a review. I was a part of his first-class teaching MATH141. He was simply not a great teacher. He is a math genius and can do our calc problems extremely easily to a fault. He will skip unintuitive steps and explain extremely intuitive steps. He writes very fast and by the time you decipher what steps skipped to get to an answer, he is already on the next problem. His exams were also quite inconsistent. The quizzes were fine as they were just made up of homework problems however the 'midterms' were very unpredictable and extraordinarily difficult to study for. It became a running joke in our class that everyone was failing even though that wasn't really the case. Our grades came out fine overall with the class likely scoring around the average for the course however to get this grade I had to put in a significant amount of hours studying. Office hours were also often packed and on multiple occasions it seemed the entire class was in office hours which should have been a clear signal that everyone was confused. But, Ben is a pretty nice person and his office hours were reasonably helpful as he would pretty much do whatever problem you wanted and would explain steps if specifically asked so 2 stars.
Ben Goldschlager MATH141 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/13/2023	HavingBen as a professor was helpful in how he emphasized understandings of the topics over mindlessly doing practice problems, without actually understanding the applications.