Abram Kagan

This professor has taught: STAT386, STAT401, STAT410, STAT420, STAT650, STAT700, STAT701, STAT750, SURV410

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Abram Kagan STAT410 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/17/2018	His lecture can be boring and hard to understand (due to his accent and handwriting) sometimes, but his exams are easy. If you don't care about learning and all you want is an easy and good grade, definitely go to him.
Abram Kagan STAT410 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/16/2018	He seems scary, but he is actually a sweet old man. He is very kind and genuinely cares whether his students learn or not. However, he does tend to go a bit quickly in class. Quizzes and midterms were straightforward. The final was tougher than the midterms, but still very fair.
Abram Kagan STAT410 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/30/2018	Kagan, despite what many others have said about his teaching style, is not actually that bad of a professor. (Perhaps he was dry and less good when teaching an (imo) uninspired class like STAT400.) The beginning of the class was rather fast paced, with the first day touching upon content of 3 chapters and what is called the Borel-Cantelli Lemma, which definitely scared some people into dropping that day. However, he slowed down and more comprehensively covered the content in those chapters. I feel that he covers the class at a very reasonable pace. Despite his stern, scary expression he is a very kind man, even if you are perpetually delinquent. If you take 410, he will probably like you by virtue of you showing up every class on time. He is very understanding (as I have seen) of unfortunate situations and wants his students to succeed. Exams are straightforward compared to the content which was taught. If he is in a good mood, he tells you what each question is about! If all the so called "great" professors sections are all filled, he usually has slots remaining. Taking his section is not the worst choice in the world.
Abram Kagan STAT400 Expecting a B Anonymous 08/14/2012	Guy knows his stuff, but that's about all that can be said for his teaching. I like abstract, "hard," math, and ignored the other reviews at my own peril-- the result is that I regret taking this class. Stat400 itself, a weed-out class (I guess) isn't especially hard, but I had no motivation due to the poor teaching and totally uninspired textbook. Would've had an A if not for the homework. Not recommended.
Abram Kagan STAT400 Expecting a B mathmajormane 07/07/2012	my courseevalum evaluation: Homework was weighted too heavily into computation of the final grade, as making it 30% of the total unfairly benefits students who resort to unethical methods (e.g. Cramster, solutions posted online) in order to successfully complete it on time. Textbook was difficult to learn from and uninspired (also expensive), alternatives should be considered. No partial credit was given on the homework, which was frustrating and unfair. Professor Kagan, however, was very understanding in not penalizing meaningless numerical errors on exams, though one of my midterms was graded incorrectly (in my favor). Statistical notation is confusing and was under-emphasized in lecture. disclosure: I am a math major that enjoys rigor and abstraction. I also needlessly did poorly in this course due to low motivation related to what I have discussed here. I spent less time studying for either midterm than I spent writing this evaluation. The worst thing about Professor Kagan as an instructor is that he tends to become a bit angry if students answer incorrectly in class, and then take this anger out on the student who happened to answer the question or be called on, regardless of whether the students in, say, the back row had any idea whatsoever what was going on. This greatly discourages student participation and feedback, and destroys the potential for communication between the instructor and students. It's also extremely frustrating to not understand something because of a misunderstood explanation only to have oneself berated with an angry exclamation of "No!" when one answers a question incorrectly. This made me not want to learn. Again, note that I am a math major, even though the following criticism expresses a sentiment less often neglected in the humanities: In terms of the material, the biggest failing of the course material and teaching was that we only ever discussed technical details of the material explicitly on the syllabus. What I mean to say is that there was no attempt even made (either by the textbook or the professor) to give students an introduction to the field of statistics as a discipline, or provide a deeper understanding of what we were learning. There was never any discussion of why what we were learning is important, or why we should care about it, or _exactly_ how it is used in the real world, or why the discussed material was included on the syllabus. There was no attempt made to explicitly connect together the different topics we were learning: how they relate and interact to each other, how we should think of them in relation to the field as a whole, and we gained no insight into how an actual statistician views statistics. Professor Kagan also never provided any commentary on the textbook: why is was selected, its strengths and failings, why the author made certain decisions, etc. As a result, our reading lacked objectivity, which made it harder to understand where the author was coming from. Professor Kagan was, to say the least, unenthusiastic about teaching this course, and rarely seemed to enjoy himself while lecturing. He wasn't alone-- no one in the classroom seemed to care very much, or to be having fun, and even someone with an interest in statistics might be put off by the uninspired presentation. The class also moved slowly, and I felt like skipping class to study from the textbook was actually more efficient. Additionally, questions not explicitly related to the material on the syllabus (i.e. what we "had" to cover) were discouraged even when students infrequently expressed genuine interest. To professor Kagan's credit, I can say that he really knew the material. Unfortunately, this didn't translated into clarity of exposition in lecture. It's strange.. because I can't tell exactly why, but I always felt like I had to relearn the material from the textbook after lecture. In lecture, it wasn't clear what we were doing, or why we were doing it, or if there were other ways of doing it. I would ask questions, but the thing is, I couldn't even find questions to ask which would help my understanding. I also felt social pressure from my silent peers and the professor (I worried that he would be unhappy or offended if I took up class time by asking for something to be re-explained) to not ask questions in lecture, so as not to hold the class up. I think most of the lectures went misunderstood by the majority of the students. Attendance was also regularly low, though I appreciated that it wasn't required. Another unfortunate thing about this course is that there was a lack of mathematically challenging problems on homework and exams, i.e. problems that require mathematical creativity and thinking. Rather, the problems solved were all formulaic. The difficulty of this class was in figuring out exactly what we were expected to do, and in understanding all of the confusing and sometimes ambiguous notation, i.e. needless difficulty without any didactic value, though I suppose the department needs to weed out students somehow. Unfortunately, a class like this might also discourage students with an actual interest in Statistics from taking more classes in the subject. The bottom line here is that even if this is an applications class, students should be required to do more than memorize how to formulaicly solve a certain type of problem in order to do well. This failing is also exacerbated by the instructor telling the student exactly what type of problems will be on the exams, as it amounts to only teaching for the test, and does little for anyone's actual mathematical ability. Another positive thing though was that Professor Kagan provided solutions to the exams immediately after we took them, though homework solutions were unfortunately never provided.
Abram Kagan STAT400 Expecting a B Anonymous 07/14/2011	This class was like going to prison, sodomy and all. Impossible to learn anything from lectures or notes. Be prepared to study very hard on your own.
Abram Kagan STAT400 Expecting a B chrisgrady 06/22/2011	It's ok? You get it? It makes sense? These are the only questions this guy asks otherwise he is alright.
Abram Kagan STAT400 Expecting a B pluralfacade 12/08/2008	It was very hard to learn from Professor Kagan's lectures. Once in while I would pick something up but it was pretty hard to do so without some pre-reading. Eventually I would just skip class and read the textbook to learn whatever material was needed to do the homeworks, which themselves were extremely excessively challenging and often time-consuming.
Abram Kagan STAT400 Expecting an A ecdysis7 06/09/2008	Not a great professor. He did not post the proper edition of our textbook online and so many students (such as myself) bought the wrong textbook. I only figured this out after the first homework, which I failed because the problems did not match in the two textbooks... when i asked prof kagan if it were possible to drop a homework since it was his fault that some of us had failed in the first place he replied: "one or two percent of your grade is no great tragedy." I guess it wasn't in my case but I hope it didn't affect someone else. As for the class itself, the tests are really, really easy and if you're the type of person who can sit through a boring lecture you should do fine on the homework, which is worth a whopping 35% of your grade.
Abram Kagan STAT400 Expecting an A TVanBlar 05/14/2008	Really smart and funny guy. A little hard to understand because of his accent. Goes through many examples and lets you know what's coming up on tests. Lecture is difficult to follow but with a decent TA and using the textbook it is more than manageable.