| Information | Review |
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Karen Prestegaard
GEOL452 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/11/2023 |
You will learn a lot of extremely useful skills in this course if you are planning on entering a watershed management or hydrological field. Yes, Dr. Prestegaard's lectures can be a bit dry sometimes, and she may overload her slides with lots of graphs or equations that might make you feel overwhelmed. But she is an extremely kind professor, easy grader, and very easy-going. She is very understanding to students who may be going through tough times in college and accepts late work with no penalty. She's very passionate and engages students' learning in a variety of ways - group work, field trips, presentations, problem sets. She is an extremely smart person, but you shouldn't feel intimidated. Although you may not understand what she's saying all the time, she is very approachable, and you should not be afraid to go into office hours. I genuinely believe that she has a much higher IQ than the average professor. I believe she should have a 4.5/5 as a professor, but I'm rating her as a 5 to help boost her grade, because she certainly should have above 3 stars. |
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Karen Prestegaard
GEOL340 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/07/2015 |
I honestly felt like I had zero foundation for a lot of the info we learned. Instead of learning a subject by starting at a fundamental level, learning terms, and building your way up to major concepts/conclusions, you were handed equations that you were told are true. And then, you're told what the result means depending on the number you get out of it. I wasn't learning for the sake of learning the subject - I was only learning so I knew what equations I was going to use on this week's lab. Her class just felt like it was a graduate course dumbed down for undergrads where you're expected to have already heard of the main concepts and how we got there. However, when it was dumbed down for us, it means that we were missing crucial pieces of info and derivations because we didn't see how we got to the conclusions. Most of the info seemed to be taken from papers, and there wasn't a helpful textbook for self-study. Labs are ridiculously easy. You take measurements (usually just with a ruler or from the computer), and then record everything in Excel where you plug in your equations to make tables. At the end, you then have a couple random questions that you're expected to answer despite having very little fundamental grasp of the topic; so you often have no intuition when trying to begin. The labs were graded very generously, and made up most of your grade (other than a midterm, a final, and a couple (2-3) small group "presentations" of your labs for participation credit). Dr. Prestegaard is super nice and very approachable. She clearly knows what she's doing in this subject, but her lectures are dry and the slides are a disorganized mess. If you come in and do your work, it's a fairly easy A, if not a B. But it was just a disappointing class since I was hoping for much more. |
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Karen Prestegaard
GEOL451 Expecting a B Anonymous 03/27/2012 |
Prestegaard was one of the worst professors I have ever had. Nobody learned ANYTHING from her course because she wouldn't give you any foundation for what she was "teaching". The only reason I gave her a 2 was because she grades so easily that even if you don't know anything you can pass her class. Hardly anyone showed up and there was no book for you to teach yourself. |
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Karen Prestegaard
GEOL452 recjra 02/07/2011 |
Dr. Prestegaard is very nice and her courses are fairly interesting. You can tell she is very passionate about her work, but that passion does not carry over well into her lectures. She is a very lenient grader, but you do learn a lot from her class. One complaint I have with her is she took a very long time to submit grades to ELMS and to return work back to students. Other than that, Dr. Prestegaard was a pretty good professor and I did feel like I learned a lot without putting forth tons of effort. |