| Information | Review |
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Pamela Orel
ENGL393 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/02/2024 |
She became our professor halfway through the semester because our original professor took another job. For this course, she was a very generous grader and willing to give extensions on pretty much anything if you ask, no reason necessary. I didn't really learn anything in class and she kind of just rambles about random topics, but you could definitely just skip class and meet with your group for the big group project and still get a good grade. Both we as students and she as the professor were generally confused about what was going on (assignment instructions, due dates, etc.) but I don't think any of us really cared because it was so easy to get an A on assignments. |
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Pamela Orel
ENGL394 Anonymous 02/27/2024 |
Everything in the reviews is 100% spot on. She makes it very hard to perform well and improve when you're basically just thrown into a fire to start writing without any kind of instruction, template, references, examples, etc. Very poorly written assignment descriptions especially for an English course. Grading and feedback is extremely questionable and makes it feel as though she didn't actually read your work. I really regret taking this professor, I feel as though I did not have a chance to learn anything nor grow as a writer. |
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Pamela Orel
ENGL394 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/06/2023 |
Pros: - The way we kept at the same assignment through multiple attempts was helpful for improving grades and understanding content. - The peer evaluations were a great way to see whether you were on the same page as other students, and there was often helpful feedback from other students' reviews. - There was a good balance between small assignments and large assignments, and the time commitment each week was fair. - The leeway in terms of extensions was great. I almost never ask for extensions, but this semester I had a particularly tough workload and needed to move my schedule around fairly often. The instructor was both gracious and generous with extensions. - The extra credit offered in this course is extensive. It gives students a little more comfort about their grades, while still making them put in some work to gain that credit. Cons: The assignment descriptions, the resources offered to students, and the instructor's feedback/grading left a great deal to be desired. - The assignment description were usually many paragraphs of muddled suggestions about what that a given assignment's theoretical purpose was. The fact that I had to reread the descriptions 4+ times for each assignment just to figure out where to start is an indication that it was poorly written/organized. I spoke with other students in the course about this, and they also commented on how confusing, long, and poorly structured each assignment's instructions were. Since this is an English course, I was very disappointed to see that the instructor was not held to the same standard as students when it came to clear, concise writing. - The resources offered were typically just articles or websites that had even more theoretical descriptions of the given assignment. Oftentimes, all a student needs is A) examples of completed works and B) a template. There were a few examples of completed works for larger assignments, which I greatly appreciated. Templates were few and far between, unfortunately. Multiple times, the instructor added this suggestion on the assignment description: "There are some templates available in Word that you can use." This was confusing, because Word has hundreds of templates, most of them very different from each other. I want to be able to focus the quality of my writing, NOT whether I have the correct template. Another way of saying this: this course made the wrong tasks difficult. I would have loved to see one, simple template/outline available for each assignment. - The instructor's feedback was sometimes baffling. She would leave comments that made very little sense; I was genuinely confused by the meaning sometimes. I don't mean that I disagreed with her feedback, I mean that I sometimes had to ignore her suggestions (or take a guess at what she meant), because the comments she left could be interpreted in multiple ways. It is understandable that there is a lot of content coming in that she must grade, and it is probably hard for her to keep up, but I wish she had taken a few extra minutes to make sure that the feedback was more clearly actionable. E.g. "Add more sources here, to support concept X" or "Add more research-backed arguments in this section, similar to what you had in section Y", etc. It is important for the instructor to provide feedback on the ideas and overall feel of each paper, yes, but if her advice is going to be broad then it should be much clearer than it was for most of my assignments. - The instructor's grading was a little questionable. The range for most assignments was roughly 85%-95%, with very little deviation from assignment to assignment. That tells me that this instructor was mostly grading based on the grade range she wanted the course to have, and she was not necessarily giving grades based on what a student actually deserved. While I understand that compassionate professors often give a little leeway to students whose work is subpar, I was very surprised to see how infrequently students were given A+ grades. |
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Pamela Orel
ENGL394 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/01/2019 |
Very nice professor but so much work... :( 5 stars for her personality, 1 star for the unnecessary work |