Katharina Maisel | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Katharina Maisel BIOE340 Expecting an A Anonymous 07/29/2024	I am a dedicated student who is willing to work hard to master challenging content. I do not shy away from difficult classes, but I can confidently say this was the worst class I have experienced at UMD. I learned nothing from this class. At best, I can apply some of the modeling techniques to a very limited set of problems. We were not provided with an adequate amount of examples or practice. Our "practice" was 100 point graded, collaborative assignments. The entire class would spend 8-10 hours (I am not exaggerating) trying to solve these problems. The professor had assured us we could complete these pre-exams in 1-2 hours. The questions were poorly worded and there were frequent typos. On both pre-exams there were problems written about concepts we had yet to cover in class. After these exhausting assignments, we would get a discouraging 60% grade. Dr. Maisel would then directly insult us in class by saying things like, "did you guys even take 5 minutes to read the questions?" She refused to answer how to solve these problems and would always say we just needed to think about it harder. There was never a rubric or solutions manual released. These same questions would then appear on the exam and be graded for "mastery" which means no partial credit! I would end up just memorizing my answers to the pre exam questions and then regurgitating it on the exam. Dr. Maisel seemed to find helping her students a burden. When we would email her with questions she would just tell us to read the question prompts again and say "you have everything you need." In class, she would scold students and say "this is just simple arithmetic" while gesturing to long partial differential equations! She offered no office hours and you had to jump out of your seat to catch her before she left after class. I have never felt so hopeless in a class. After realizing at the beginning of the semester, that our professor was incapable of explaining the concepts, I turned hopefully to the textbook to teach myself. To my dismay, the textbook purely focuses on physiology and doesn't help to explain the complex modeling problems we were expected to know. This class made me feel stupid and helpless, and I am not alone in this experience. Dr. Maisel should not be a professor.
Katharina Maisel BIOE340 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 07/18/2024	Dr. Maisel is honestly a good lecturer. Her lectures are captivating and it's obvious she enjoys what she's teaching and is passionate about it which makes the class much more interesting. She can come off as a little harsh at times, but this wasn't a constant thing and even professors have bad days so it's not something that students should take to heart. Exams were kind of hard and the written response questions were graded very hard, but her pre-exam and cheat sheet policy is more than fair and if you just give yourself adequate time to prepare (I didn't and that's why I don't have an A) you should be able to get a good grade. I hear Fisher makes everyone submit lab reports by themselves, but Maisel lets you submit as a group which alleviates a lot of unnecessary stress.
Katharina Maisel BIOE340 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/18/2024	TLDR: Weird grader, Kind of simple content exams, Pre-exam content excruciating thats made only slightly better with having 12+ hours to complete the Pre-exams. Honest and straightforward about questions, which can devolve into annoyance if asked too many repeated questions. Pros: decently interesting and straightforward labs! only 3 required labs and while challenging, were simple to write a report on. Course content is incredibly interesting, Maisel does good job about explaining why things are the way they are in the body and doesn't require you to know exact anatomical terms/functions. When going through the content, seemed very interested and was actually quite helpful learning the physiological systems. Cons: the Pre-exams were some of the most mentally challenging days I'd ever have throughout the semester. Only 2 pre-exams thankfully, and you can get corrections done for half credit, but I would spend upwards of 7-8 hours on 3 problems due to insufficient practice problems to compare to and lack of clarity on details within the problem that I needed (cant ask TA's for help, and when asking Maisel, would give some cryptic clues like we're stealing the declaration of independence). Exams are structured so half the points are legit copying the pre-exam problems and then the other 50% is answering simple physio questions. Gives a one sided sheet for exams, double sided for final. Exams are also graded on mastery for the copied pre-exam problems, so you either earn a 100% (fully right), 80% (conceptually right, but small little errors), or 0% (made concept error). I lost 4 points because I forgot a negative for context (out of 20 point problem, aka 80% mastery). Also, would come off short tempered/impatient if is repeated asked silly questions/questions she wont give more detail on. Dont get me wrong, everyone's human and has bad days, but it was to the point that I was scared to ask questions about the content of the pre-exams because the answer would either be "I cant tell you more" or "read the problem" or something else more annoyed.
Katharina Maisel BIOE340 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/11/2024	Honestly one of the worst professors I've ever had a class with-- acts nice, does meditation exercises each class before throwing us into a very confusing set of content to learn every lecture. The course depends on 2 pre exams and midterms, one final, a couple of quizzes, and 3 labs. The labs are unorganized and there was no helpful direction in what to do for any of it, and as much as teh TAs tried to help, it was basically to no avail. There's a 4th lab (optional), but its so work intensive for a menial amount of extra credit that a lot of people just didn't do it, as it was also way too much to balance with the rest of the course. The 2 midterms have a pre-exam before it-- this is a take home, all-day collaborative set of 3 math questions that she puts on the actual midterm later. While this should be helpful, those pre-exams took HOURS; everyone in the class would be sitting together for 9 hours for each pre-exam, and even then it was so hard to figure it out. On these days, she provided no resources, we weren't allowed to ask for much help from the TAs, and when any student would email for help, she would respond with a very unhelpful email stating "everything you need is on the exam", even though these exams had math problems VERY LOOSELY related to any of the course content we learned. During lectures, while she would show examples of certain problems, she would never actually solve them and go through the proper math-- when asked to, her response was that "it's simple arithmetic." When we asked for any supplmental resources-- practice problems, tests, anything, to help with studying for the exams, she told us to "find material online"-- there's no material online. She's unsupportive of the students in this class, and felt very unprepared for teaching this course; I would not reccommend her to anybody for this class. I wish I could give her a 0 lol.

Katharina Maisel
BIOE340

Expecting an A
Anonymous
07/29/2024

I am a dedicated student who is willing to work hard to master challenging content. I do not shy away from difficult classes, but I can confidently say this was the worst class I have experienced at UMD. I learned nothing from this class. At best, I can apply some of the modeling techniques to a very limited set of problems. We were not provided with an adequate amount of examples or practice. Our "practice" was 100 point graded, collaborative assignments. The entire class would spend 8-10 hours (I am not exaggerating) trying to solve these problems. The professor had assured us we could complete these pre-exams in 1-2 hours. The questions were poorly worded and there were frequent typos. On both pre-exams there were problems written about concepts we had yet to cover in class. After these exhausting assignments, we would get a discouraging 60% grade. Dr. Maisel would then directly insult us in class by saying things like, "did you guys even take 5 minutes to read the questions?" She refused to answer how to solve these problems and would always say we just needed to think about it harder. There was never a rubric or solutions manual released. These same questions would then appear on the exam and be graded for "mastery" which means no partial credit! I would end up just memorizing my answers to the pre exam questions and then regurgitating it on the exam. Dr. Maisel seemed to find helping her students a burden. When we would email her with questions she would just tell us to read the question prompts again and say "you have everything you need." In class, she would scold students and say "this is just simple arithmetic" while gesturing to long partial differential equations! She offered no office hours and you had to jump out of your seat to catch her before she left after class. I have never felt so hopeless in a class. After realizing at the beginning of the semester, that our professor was incapable of explaining the concepts, I turned hopefully to the textbook to teach myself. To my dismay, the textbook purely focuses on physiology and doesn't help to explain the complex modeling problems we were expected to know. This class made me feel stupid and helpless, and I am not alone in this experience. Dr. Maisel should not be a professor.

Katharina Maisel
BIOE340

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
07/18/2024

Dr. Maisel is honestly a good lecturer. Her lectures are captivating and it's obvious she enjoys what she's teaching and is passionate about it which makes the class much more interesting. She can come off as a little harsh at times, but this wasn't a constant thing and even professors have bad days so it's not something that students should take to heart. Exams were kind of hard and the written response questions were graded very hard, but her pre-exam and cheat sheet policy is more than fair and if you just give yourself adequate time to prepare (I didn't and that's why I don't have an A) you should be able to get a good grade. I hear Fisher makes everyone submit lab reports by themselves, but Maisel lets you submit as a group which alleviates a lot of unnecessary stress.

Katharina Maisel
BIOE340

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
05/18/2024

TLDR: Weird grader, Kind of simple content exams, Pre-exam content excruciating thats made only slightly better with having 12+ hours to complete the Pre-exams. Honest and straightforward about questions, which can devolve into annoyance if asked too many repeated questions. Pros: decently interesting and straightforward labs! only 3 required labs and while challenging, were simple to write a report on. Course content is incredibly interesting, Maisel does good job about explaining why things are the way they are in the body and doesn't require you to know exact anatomical terms/functions. When going through the content, seemed very interested and was actually quite helpful learning the physiological systems. Cons: the Pre-exams were some of the most mentally challenging days I'd ever have throughout the semester. Only 2 pre-exams thankfully, and you can get corrections done for half credit, but I would spend upwards of 7-8 hours on 3 problems due to insufficient practice problems to compare to and lack of clarity on details within the problem that I needed (cant ask TA's for help, and when asking Maisel, would give some cryptic clues like we're stealing the declaration of independence). Exams are structured so half the points are legit copying the pre-exam problems and then the other 50% is answering simple physio questions. Gives a one sided sheet for exams, double sided for final. Exams are also graded on mastery for the copied pre-exam problems, so you either earn a 100% (fully right), 80% (conceptually right, but small little errors), or 0% (made concept error). I lost 4 points because I forgot a negative for context (out of 20 point problem, aka 80% mastery). Also, would come off short tempered/impatient if is repeated asked silly questions/questions she wont give more detail on. Dont get me wrong, everyone's human and has bad days, but it was to the point that I was scared to ask questions about the content of the pre-exams because the answer would either be "I cant tell you more" or "read the problem" or something else more annoyed.

Katharina Maisel
BIOE340

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
05/11/2024

Honestly one of the worst professors I've ever had a class with-- acts nice, does meditation exercises each class before throwing us into a very confusing set of content to learn every lecture. The course depends on 2 pre exams and midterms, one final, a couple of quizzes, and 3 labs. The labs are unorganized and there was no helpful direction in what to do for any of it, and as much as teh TAs tried to help, it was basically to no avail. There's a 4th lab (optional), but its so work intensive for a menial amount of extra credit that a lot of people just didn't do it, as it was also way too much to balance with the rest of the course. The 2 midterms have a pre-exam before it-- this is a take home, all-day collaborative set of 3 math questions that she puts on the actual midterm later. While this should be helpful, those pre-exams took HOURS; everyone in the class would be sitting together for 9 hours for each pre-exam, and even then it was so hard to figure it out. On these days, she provided no resources, we weren't allowed to ask for much help from the TAs, and when any student would email for help, she would respond with a very unhelpful email stating "everything you need is on the exam", even though these exams had math problems VERY LOOSELY related to any of the course content we learned. During lectures, while she would show examples of certain problems, she would never actually solve them and go through the proper math-- when asked to, her response was that "it's simple arithmetic." When we asked for any supplmental resources-- practice problems, tests, anything, to help with studying for the exams, she told us to "find material online"-- there's no material online. She's unsupportive of the students in this class, and felt very unprepared for teaching this course; I would not reccommend her to anybody for this class. I wish I could give her a 0 lol.