| Information | Review |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/30/2024 |
If it weren't for the participation points in lecture, I would honestly skip. He just reads and does the examples from the already posted slideshows. No one pays attention in class. To study for the midterm and final (open note), just spend like one day to go through all of the slideshows and you will be fine. The project was pretty easy with the extra credit opportunities. The only thing that was annoying was that there were no clear rubrics and feedbacks for his exams and the project. But ask questions if you're confused. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/24/2024 |
Dr. Koh is such a great professor! It is clear that he truly cares about his students genuinely understanding the material and wants them to do well in the class. He is great at reading the room and will always be willing to take more time to further explain anything that causes any confusion. He is also always available for office hours or one-on-one meetings after class if you still need some help. Just be sure to come to class since he gives little participation points. Highly recommend for BIOE371!!!! |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/18/2024 |
I really enjoyed having Dr. Koh for this class! Just like other reviews say he often gives explanations that can be difficult to understand (I'm pretty sure due to a language barrier), but his slides completely make up for this. Some tips for the course (study a lot!): 1. I learned mostly from the slides, but they are very good slides and comprehensive. There are practice problems on the slides with steps worked out and the formulas you need to remember are clearly indicated. Memorize the formulas it makes the class easier. 2. Review your DE notes there is a lot of solving methods he breezes by b/c its a prereq course. Dif eq is a very hefty part of this course, so its super important you remember and understand how to solve DEs! 3. Complete lots of practice! He provides weekly worksheets on the content with worked out answers. I came across few incorrect answers, but typically they were arithmetic errors not wrong ways to solve the problems. The solutions sometimes contain different methods than class as a heads up (this doesn't necessarily mean the answer was incorrect). I believe Dr. Koh is just using old resources for the class. 4. Go to office hours whether it be your TA or Dr. Koh's! As you progress through the HWs they get way harder and unrelated to the slides. I had to attend TA office hours for a few of the HWs b/c the slides and the lecture weren't helpful on how to complete them. 5. Ask questions through problems! Dr. Koh doesn't explain concepts the best, so if you're confused about how to approach a problem do it through a practice problem or walk through a solution with him (or a TA). I'm also going to state I disagree with another review here as I feel like I experienced the class totally different than they did. As always take review with a grain of salt, but I'm going to try and provide a lot of info based on my experience! Here are the points I disagreed with: 1. You can do about half the HWs based off the lectures/slides and the practice problem solutions. The practice problem solutions helped me a lot more with the homework! Typically, he gives at least 1 hard question on the HW that I needed to see a TA for. 2. The first exam had a fair amount of linear algebra on it. It was all in the true/false sections of his exam. I do agree that it was mostly ODEs. (Side note: linear algebra explains using eigenvalues as solns to ODEs and is very important in theory so this is why it is taught) 3. I believe my class actually did well on the midterm and curving wasn't involved! I know I got everything correct (through remembering the problems and checking afterwards using wolfram) and made one mistake. My exam was graded accordingly and I got one point off for that mistake. If he did curve he would've added points (he didn't talk about percentage adjustments) which would've pushed me above a 100% for that exam. I found all the midterms (except the final it was very hard) to be fair and similar to in class content. He literally tells people what is going to be on the exam, but you have to attend ALL the lectures b/c he says 1 topic every other class. 4. This class has basis in EE, but people forget that bioes build prosthetics which is basically this class. The "EE" problems are control engineering problems which look like circuits and are used in circuits, but aren't exactly circuits (would take long to explain this lol). You use the linear algebra and ODE stuff you learned earlier in the course to do control engineering. The application is how to design feedback through math (system of ODEs) to make a prosthetic move a certain way. This is a form of bioe its just not pure bio which is why I think people are upset! |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 11/22/2023 |
Dr. Koh is an incredible professor. He is extremely kind and accommodating. He gives real world applications to make the class more engaging and is attuned to the general student response to new content. If he senses there is any confusion he will stay on the topic and explain it again until he feels everyone understands. He will also review concepts from previous classes if it was challenging. He is receptive to questions and genuinely wants his students to succeed. This class is challenging but with Dr. Koh's help it will be much easier to understand! Highly recommend, but do make sure to go to class (like all other classes) for the highest chance of success! |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 11/13/2023 |
Dr. Koh, while nice, is one of the worst professors in the BIOE department-- expect to learn NOTHING from any of his classes. His lectures are confusing, and when asked questions he makes the concept even more confusing than it was to begin with. There was one class where he tried explaining a MATLAB code, only to end the class and saying "oh sorry that's wrong." There was another where he gave out a quiz and when half the class raised their hands to ask quesitons, he gave a hint, leading to more hands to raise (he did not give a quiz again after this). Not only this, but half of his practice problems' solutions are wrong, leaving little material to study with when it comes to exams. The HWs and practice problems are semi-helpful, but ONLY if your TA is good because you won't be able to do it from just Dr. Koh's lectures. I was honestly better off teaching myself from the lecture slides on my own time, but be warned that he does in-class participation assignments very often due to the lack of students attending his class after the first few weeks (I wonder why), and missing these could definitely drop your grade. On top of all of this, Dr. Koh's currciculum COMPLETELY flies off the rails after a couple of weeks. The first midterm ONLY focused on ODEs when the first "unit" was 50% linear algebra, and then after this point he actually started giving us electrical problems more complicated than what we see in BIOE457. This is compleletly inconsistent with other professor's lectures (the semester before didn't touch on any electronics), and none of it is explained well either. The practice exams he gives to study are from ENAE301, and both these and any problems provided are not as hard as the ones on the exams at all. Even our TA felt bad after the first one. Dr. Koh says that he won't curve or change the grade distribution, but I'm convinced that he saw the results on the first midterm and bumped all our grades up by a significant amount, without saying anything because the average was way higher than what anyone expected. As someone who had him for 241 for his first semester teaching, I expected him to get better, but he's unfortunately just the worst. I don't know why they're giving him more classes to teach in the department when he has one of the worst reviews out of all of the professors in the department. Good luck though, and make sure to make friends in the class and ask the TA a lot of questions! |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/16/2023 |
Dr. Koh is very nice and was very understanding when I couldn't attend lectures due to personal reasons. However, his teaching style is not helpful. Reads off of the slides and sometimes literally rewrites exact things on the slides onto the whiteboard then points at it and goes "like that..." Attendance is "mandatory" in the sense he will give out a couple pop quizzes throughout the semester if he notices people aren't attending lecture. He also has participation assignments every now and then. I honestly skipped 50% or more of the lectures and skipped a quiz and still had an A+. When I did attend lectures, I would tune in and out and slides are posted before hand so I didn't need to pay close attention. Final project is how he drops your grade when he realized our midterm scores were too high, but I found the topic (designing a prosthetic) enjoyable at least. Homework can be challenging because they are slightly convoluted, so start early but TAs can help and I emailed him a few times for help and he answered. Midterm used to be take home, open note, and all-day, but this semester he made it in lecture 50 minutes. Still open note, but the time crunch was insane. Somehow got a 50/50 on the midterm even though I know I didn't get the first problem right but I'm not gonna complain because either my TA was awesome or he added a tiny grade bump. I also never went to discussion because all of the discussion content is posted too. Unfortunately, he added a final exam and while it is open note/internet, he expects us to be able to do differential equations and linear algebra even though neither of those are prereqs for the course. Also, if you take this prof make sure you have a good computer with good storage because he is going to have you download every single possible add-on to MATLAB on the first day when you only need like 3 and he has lots of materials you need to download for assignments. Not a big deal, but something to think about if your computer doesn't handle that well! Wish he would be a bit more understanding about how realistic it is for students to gain mastery of difficult mathematical concepts in just a couple of classes. My tip would be get the assignment done early, keep all of your work and practice accessible for exams, and work with your classmates. Also consider taking an Intro to Matlab course if you have zero coding experience because it is intimidating at first! Overall, he's really nice and I appreciate that he seems knowledgeable and wants to help students out, he's just not great at the execution of his goals. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A Anonymous 03/15/2023 |
Dr. Koh is a nice person overall. However, that is the only positive I can say about this class. For starters, I do not think I learnt a single thing from one of his lectures. The only things I learnt through this course were through looking at the slides afterwards. If you were to ever come to lecture, you would see that NOT A SINGLE PERSON would be paying attention to what he was saying. People were doing other HWs and finding any way to distract themselves from the actual lecture. Then came the homework for this class. They would take a long time and would be much harder than the examples that he provided in class. I had the best TA for this class and he would essentially spend 3 hours (including before and after discussion) to answer people's HW questions. He would also be very fair in grading our HWs. I believe the average in the class was "too high" for Dr. Koh by the time it came to the final project, so he graded it quite harshly. He also expected us to know a lot of Linear Algebra, which as many people mentioned is not a prequisite for this course. I |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/28/2023 |
Dr. Koh is a nice guy. He will help you if you go to officer hours. However, his office is in a restricted area of AJC, so you need to let him know ahead of time. I learned nothing from his lectures. He is difficult to understand and just reads off the slides. I completed the homework assignments by going back through the lecture slides. I also had the best TA ever. He explained concepts I did not understand and gave hints as to how to complete the homework. The midterm was open note and he had officer hours to help students. I had over 100% in the course until the final project. I swear he realized he needed to create a grade distribution and then failed everyone on the final project. Differential equations and linear algebra are not prerequisites for this course, but he expects you to have mastery of the subjects for the final. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Anonymous 01/25/2023 |
Blames students for not understanding the material when the whole class is struggling to pass. Much harder than previous lecturers for the class. Exams are lengthy, challenging, and not curved. Lectures were impossible to follow, he even once did a whole lecture with a dry erase marker that wouldn't write. Mostly reads off of slides, but the examples on the slides are always significantly easier than the problems on the exam. Even the TAs felt bad for the students in this course. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 01/07/2023 |
Let's begin this review with a personal anecdote in regards to the last homework we had for the semester. I showed one of my electrical engineering friends one of the questions, which NO ONE had figured out (I asked 13 classmates), and my EE friend responded that this was a question that was straight out of the class material for ENEE222. ENEE222 is a weed-out electrical engineering course, "Discrete Signal Analysis". That alone should tell you how astronomically difficult this course was, and how useless Dr. Koh was as an instructor. I have to admit, he is a really nice guy. I honestly felt bad for him at first -- maybe it's his first time teaching, maybe he's never taught linear algebra in general. But my sympathy for him dissipated quickly when I realized he had no sympathy for his students either: for starters, he refused to curve. Not sure if this is because he planned to curve the final exam (somehow the average was an 83.9 and I got an 83, which boggles my mind), but the idea of not having any extra credit or cushioning from homework after performing poorly on midterms was mentally stressful for the entire class. Dr. Koh was assigned with teaching linear algebra in BIOE371. NOT controls, or discrete signals, or anything RELATED to block diagrams. I had shown previous BIOE371 students the material we were learning (those who had Esperanza), and NONE of them could recognize it. Forget everything you learn about linear algebra for the first 2 months of the class, because the second 2 turn this class into an electrical engineering elective. It's literally just controller designs all day long, that never get fully explained. Yes, he has examples in his lecture slides. Yes, he also tries to articulate the conceptual meaning behind them, but none of that matters if you have NOTHING pertaining to the level of content one might find on the homework, or on midterms. If you did not go to the TA directly and get homework help, you were screwed. Prepare for many sleepless nights scrambling with your friends to find other friends who might have an idea where to start, if you don't go to the TA. And guess what? The TAs don't have a SINGLE clue what to do until they look at the answer key, because THAT'S how foreign the material for this class was. Had Dr. Koh stuck to the content covered by Esperanza, we'd have no real excuse to complain other than the fact that this is an already difficult class. But by putting his own twists and spending an entire half of the semester on material that had NOTHING to do with matrices, eigenvectors, eigenvalues, and normal linear algebra, he destined the entire class for failure. I cannot even begin to express how thankful, no, how *grateful* I feel for having passed this class, knowing that half of the class either (1) withdrew midsemester or (2) failed the final and had to retake it. You can tell how many students failed this time around because next semester's BIOE371 is already booked to the brim for BOTH sections. There's even a waitlist for one of them! I don't think I could ever handle this class ever again. My deepest condolences to my fallen brethren. Please mentally prepare yourself for an ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING elective, NOT a BIOENGINEERING LINEAR SYSTEMS class. I'll end this review with a direct quote from one of the TA's, when I had asked where on the internet I may find extra resources to practice controller systems before the final exam: "I have no idea, in fact, I tried looking for myself, and couldn't find anything." |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/26/2022 |
Here is a complete, and hopefully detailed review about his professor. 1. This class is all Matlab. I did have previous Matlab experience from Math 241 and I took Intro to Matlab course as well, so I had a brief background about the program. It does take a bit of time to get the hang of using the program but once you do its fine. Although this class is full Matlab, they really do go to the understanding of basic stuff of Matlab (literally understanding the interface of Matlab, doing basic code such as for loops and assigning variables to stuff). So even if you don't have that great of a background its okay because they start off SUPER basic level. 2. Although some people did not like the him as much, I did not mind the professor. He does read off the slides but the slides are SUPER important and have a lot of the answers to the questions of the hw. He does make sense but I can see where people didn't like him because sometimes he would go on tangents that were low key unrelated. 3. Homeworks can sometimes be really easy but sometimes they were SUPER hard. But don't worry the TA's were super clutch and I literally owe my TA everything. He was super helpful and so nice and didn't make you feel embarrassed for not knowing. He patiently explained everything so def go to discussion if you don't know how to do hw. Otherwise skip bc sometimes its not needed if you already finished the hw. There's a lot of resources online about certain parts of Matlab and make friends in the class so you can help each other on the hw bc it is allowed! 4. Mid term was nice because we had the whole day to do it and it was open note obviously. You could also ask the professor for help but sometimes his answers were very vague and not helpful. But you have to be super persistent and he will give hints. Final was a project which is hard a little bit. You have a group and literally got a decent grade bc of them. Just make sure to have a really good group and you will be fine. Don't put it to the last min bc you'll be studying for finals and doing that project will take you A LONG TIME! Also, he kinda graded the final harshly compared to the other exam and hw. 5. I cant speak for him for other classes he teaches but hes not a bad professor for BIOE 241. Its not a hard class if you put time and effort. Go to office hours and ask TA for help and you will be good to go. Hope this helps :) |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/23/2022 |
The grading was lenient if not only because it was done by the amazing TAs. I had a great TA so I learned everything from him, the professor was of no help and his lectures were absolutely pointless. He just wants to do work in his lab and would probably not be teaching this class if he could help it. Stinks for the bioe kids that he's the only professor for this class but try to make friends in your class and do homework with them. This guy is of no use, |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/15/2022 |
The only thing that really helped me in this class was the TA and working with classmates. Dr. Koh himself doesn't really teach well, and when asked questions his answers usually add in more confusion. The only reason I was able to understand what was going on and actually completing the homework assignments was once again, the TA. I would've skipped the lectures but he started giving pop quizzes whenever he realized a couple of people were missing in class. That being said, the class overall is easy: an online midterm and a final group project were are only major grades throughout the semester, you just have to deal with the fact that you won't learn much from the professor himself. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/13/2022 |
Easy professor: take-home midterm, no final (just final project), very few quizzes. Awful teacher: you will never have any idea what this man is talking about. Good Luck. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Anonymous 12/13/2022 |
This guy absolutely makes zero sense in lecture. HWs are extremely hard and exams are terrible. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Anonymous 12/12/2022 |
So bad. I mean BIOE371 is not easy but it should not be this painful. This guy just points at the board and doesn't explain shit. He just points at letters and expects us to understand. "this guy then goes here and then that happens" like bruh, don't teach the class if you can't explain the material well. Also apparently Helim sucks too but he makes the final optional??? Koh does not |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Anonymous 12/08/2022 |
Awful teacher for 371. Nice guy |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Anonymous 12/06/2022 |
Omfg the whole class is screwed for the final |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/03/2022 |
The guy is great when you get to know him, but man he cannot teach. Nobody takes this class seriously -- half the time, majority of the students are on their phones/laptops not giving a damn about the course. The weekly homework is insanely hard -- going to the TA office hours for help on the homework is a MUST; otherwise, there is no surviving the course. The TAs in this class are for real the goat. I would not survive without them. With all of that being said, the one midterm is extremely fair. But other than that, good luck if you take his class. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE371 Anonymous 11/29/2022 |
I really gave this guy many chances. He is probably one of the worst professors I’ve had yet. The WHOLE CLASS never understands what he’s talking about and the TAs are even like “wtf are you learning?” Let’s get this class clear. This is not linear algebra—it is a controls class written IN linear algebra. Linear algebra is not a pre req. Taking linear algebra won’t really help you much in the grand scheme of things. The second week, he told us “i hope you guys have taken linear algebra” and that the reason we don’t understand the content is because we’re not Ivy League students. He seems like a sweet guy but he really can’t teach! He reads the slides and mumbles nonsense. At one point I kid you not only 6 people attended class. That changed when he made attendance mandatory…. Going to class is a waste of time. The only way people learn is from the TAs going over how to do the hw from the answer key. Exams are ridiculously hard. |
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Kyung Koh
BIOE241 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/14/2022 |
*Mid semester review: Dr. Koh's lectures are not exciting and if you look away for 30 seconds you can be lost, but it doesn't matter because the slides are posted and that is all you need to succeed based on lecture. The rest of the class is working with your peers to try and figure out the homework because he allows you to work together. My TA was soooo helpful and nice. He does not curve but I have an A+ right now and I have never used Matlab before. The first 2 weeks are the scariest because wrapping your head around how to work MATLAB for the first time is tough, but I promise it gets better. He occasionally has pop quizzes in class but they are not hard. Overall, this class isn't fun but compared to other classes, it isn't bad at all because the grading is so lenient. |