Neil Goldsman

This professor has taught: EDSP652, ENEE304, ENEE307, ENEE313, ENEE313H, ENEE488, ENEE614, ENEE704

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Neil Goldsman ENEE304 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/09/2024	Dr. Goldsman is a great professor who knows his stuff. Very friendly, gives extensions if needed, and explains concepts very well. 304 is still pretty new but he does a good job of making sure you understand BJTs and MOSFETs and making sure you get why and how they work. We don't do too many circuit problems but overall the class was good.
Neil Goldsman ENEE304 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/29/2024	Goldsman is a very nice guy but a rather dry lecturer. He spends a lot of class rambling through examples, and often struggles to find the right words or will double back on his sentences several times to amend what he's saying. He always seems to be more or less winging his lectures, and it feels like he doesnt quite know what he is about to say or describe next until he does it, especially when he makes diagrams or graphs and spends half of the time just drawing and labeling different things. He at least explains concepts somewhat clearly, and his assignments clearly relate to what we do in class and especially the textbook. The textbook is being written by Goldsman, and he added a chapter a few weeks before the class ended too (it was a short chapter). Some students dont like how derivation heavy the course is, but its a pretty significant part of the content and is honestly not that bad when you can follow the work in the textbook and on exams the derivations are very straightforward.
Neil Goldsman ENEE313 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/15/2021	Goldsman is in general a solid teacher and a very nice guy. His homework and CAD assignments (while lengthy) helped with learning the material well. His exams were decently straightforward, without any confusing or gotcha questions. One gripe I had about the exams was that they were quite long, so I ended up taking up almost all of the allotted time. I appreciated that he got rid of the final exam this semester and made the final assignment a short MOSFET CAD assignment instead. His handwriting is mostly readable, but gets worse over the course of the lecture as he begins to up the pace of his writing. And as others have noted, he sometimes says the correct thing while writing something else on the board. But he would generally fix it promptly if someone brought it up. The pacing of the lectures was mostly followable, but he would sometimes think that he was explaining things too slowly and try to speed things up. Not many people agreed that he was going too slowly, so we were able to keep his pacing manageable.
Neil Goldsman Expecting an A Anonymous 01/12/2021	Goldsman is super nice, know his stuff, and is good at teaching it. I retained almost nothing from 303, but his lab manual/textbook presents almost all of the same info from 303 in a much more concise and easier to understand way. The labs were online for F20 in SPICE which took some getting used to. The labs took a while to complete and people tended to fall behind. Genuinely don't know how people did them in person since building circuits in a simulation seems like it would take much less time. He got rid of exams and instead added one or two additional parts to the labs that were challenging but interesting. Overall, highly recommend taking 307 with Goldsman
Neil Goldsman ENEE307 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/31/2014	Goldsman is awesome! 307 is a pretty laidback class. There were labs due every two weeks, but if you work hard one week, you don't have to come the next week, which is nice if you have an 8 am lab. Lectures are pretty useful, even moreso than the 245 lectures, where Goldman basically reviews 303 stuff, so it is recommended you go if you don't have a grasp of the material. Midterm and final were pretty straightforward, he has review sessions and posts old exams. Overall a relatively pain-free class class, try to take him over Newcomb if you can.
Neil Goldsman ENEE307 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/27/2011	He seems like a cool guy, and he lectures at a reasonably pace at review sessions, but during the normal 50-min lectures, he tends to rush and go through material at a dizzying rate. His notes can become an incoherent scrawl and he tries to race through his notes and diagrams. He's also a bit touchy about students talking during his lectures. The actual lab is pretty easy, and of course, depends mainly on how your TA is. Malfunctioning parts/breadboards/probes were an issue though. The midterm and final are straightforward, and basically test the same material as the posted practice exams. His lectures vary in usefulness, especially since, due to lab scheduling, you may be covering topics in lecture that you've already encountered in the lab itself, but going to reviews is vital.
Neil Goldsman ENEE307 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/18/2010	He is a good professor who knows how to teach this course. He explains the material well and his exams are straight forward. But he really need to pick up right TAs for this course. My TA graded lab reports not on the quality of work but his gradidng formula depended on if he liked the student or not. Other than that Prof. Goldsman is a very good teacher. Highly recommend him for ENEE307.
Neil Goldsman ENEE704 Expecting an A jml 09/09/2010	I thought I understood microelectronic device physics but after taking this course, I realized my prior understanding was superficial. Goldsman is really good at conveying material in both a conceptual and detailed manner. He doesn't use any notes, yet his lectures stayed organized and focused, and he writes everything on the board so it was easy to follow him and still take good notes. The projects were challenging and time-consuming, but they were specifically designed to complement and apply the core material without redundancy.
Neil Goldsman ENEE313 Expecting an A mcraton 04/08/2010	I had goldsman for 307 and 313. He is pretty reasonable about moving things around and stuff if there are conflicting tests in other classes or anything like that. Sometimes it is hard to keep up in lecture because he makes a lot of little mistakes when writing things down (even while he explains them correctly) He does not speak in a cryptic way like out of a textbook and is not bad at explaining concepts. he makes an effort to learn peoples names that participate or whatever which is nice. Tests are not that bad, they are for the most part very straightforward and he doesnt try to trick you or anything. for 307 his lectures didnt keep up with the labs so i stopped going because he was lecturing on the stuff we had learned the week before, but hey. its a lab. its mostly on you to figure it all out anyways. it did help that i had an excellent TA for both 307 and 313.
Neil Goldsman ENEE307 vbury 12/17/2009	He definitely knows his stuff, but I never went to lectures enough to greatly benefit from them. Very often the lab equipment was faulty (shorted-out breadboards, wires, etc), but none of that was his fault. It was an OK class, but he is a harsh grader for a 2-credit course. At least he's not as bad as Peckerar.
Neil Goldsman ENEE307 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/15/2009	Knows his material but takes forever to review labs in lecture. The grading for the midterm was extremely harsh and the grading for the final is very similar. Averages hovered around the mid 40s. When these supposedly "trivial" midterms and finals add up to half your grade, and the material is difficult stuff to absolute memorize and master, there is an issue with the course management. This is a 2-credit course for goodness sakes, how can half the class get Cs????? He grades on a bell curve, so so disastrous and unreasonable.