| Information | Review |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT440 Expecting an A Anonymous 07/23/2023 |
While his lectures were boring enough to have most of the class ditch immediately after the first couple of lectures, I think it is worth it to still go as he reviews material that will be on the 1 midterm and final. The midterm and final were comprised of homework questions and examples listed out on the slides, so as long as you studied those and wrote them down on your cheat sheet, you could get a high grade on them. Basically as long as you do your homework and go to the boring lectures, you will get a good grade in the class. The midterm was also curved an entire letter grade for those who got way below average, which helped out a lot. The final project was relatively easy as long as you did the homeworks properly as it was combining all the code from the homeworks. You don't really learn much from this class, but it wasn't hard to get a good grade in it. |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT440 Expecting a D+ Anonymous 05/20/2023 |
His lectures are so boring that people stopped going to class. He graded the final project so brutally and so close to the final exam date that everyone’s grades tanked. He stopped responding to emails and doesn’t care about students concerns. He likes the power he has over his students as a professor. He didn’t curve the final exam or the final project. Highly disappointed and I regret taking him. |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT420 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/23/2021 |
My goodness. I certainly hope that Professor Saegusa's performance this semester was just because he was under the stress of the pandemic, but this course was just horrible. The lectures were quite horrid. He spent many weeks on reviewing material from a previous course and spent time complaining on what little time we had left. He spent an excessive amount of time on proofs which never came up again (I would not have minded such proofs if he backed it up with conceptual questions in homeworks/exams that required an understanding of how one proves a particular theorem). One could also expect a typo in his slides in nearly all his lectures. These time-wasting lecture practices lead to the course not covering all the material it planned to cover. The workload for this class is far too much. This is the first semester where most of my classes were 400-level courses, and this course alone consisted of most of my workload in a week. On exams, the professor expects you to answer formally as though you were writing a paper. He insists that you explain each variable that you use despite some variables in statistics being conventional. In addition, the questions on exams were computationally intensive which made the exams very difficult to finish on time and gave you many opportunities to make mistakes. His grading is also quite unforgiving in terms of mistakes made during computation. The professor's native language is not English, and I personally understand the difficulties that come with that. One of these difficulties is determining whether what is said, despite its truth, will come out as rude or condescending. Regardless, the professor said the things he said. He often says that topics are "easy" despite his students not having had the time to process the information. And so, he claims that a topic is easy while his students struggle. After a bad class result on an exam, at least in his perspective (The average was a C-), he said that students should "improve their learning skills." And during the class in which he went over this exam, the professor did not go over a question as it was "too easy." Beyond these examples, he can come off as quite condescending to students. |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT420 Expecting a C- Anonymous 05/18/2021 |
Saegusa does a poor job of explaining the material in class. He assigns long homework's that most of the class doesn't understand and is often unhelpful during office hours. He also threw the whole class off with a final nothing like what we'd seen previously, so much of the class dropped at least a letter grade, myself included. I'm only giving him 2 stars because I passed even though my grade was basically nuked down to a D+ by his insane final. I had a solid B before hand, so it's not like I had been struggling. Also he may curve on one exam but refuses to curve the overall grades in most cases. |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT420 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/04/2021 |
I've been on the fence between one and two stars for a while, but what pushed me over the edge was Professor Saegusa's inconsistent (and quite frankly, insensitive) homework spacing. Professor Saegusa is barely able to communicate any of the material, and when he does, it is often a proof irrelevant to the homework/tests or a theorem riddled with typos. Don't get me wrong, I like math, but I only want to see the underlying theorem if the professor is capable of communicating the material relevant to homework/tests in the remaining time, and he simply isn't. His tests frequently came with a massive time crunch that left the entire class scoring poorly. Despite this, he only curved one of our exams. I am not salty about a poor grade, in fact I am doing well. Rather, this fits into a constant pattern of him being insensitive about the time we need to do things, be it taking or scanning a test, or going from spacing his homeworks once every three weeks to once a week. That last thing really got on my nerves: his homeworks tend to take 5-10 hours, and there were a few weeks where I did not budget time for them, only to find out Tuesday that we had a homework due Friday. This was incredibly inconsiderate of our time; if you want to go from giving homework once every three weeks to once a week, the students need more of a heads up. He isn't necessarily mean, just inconsiderate. Essentially, if you decide to take Professor Saegusa, know that you will be teaching yourself much of the material, that he will assign homework inconsistently but frequently, that his tests are on a huge time crunch, and that his slides are riddled with typos. Do not recommend, though I know (sadly) that both of the STAT420 options aren't good ones. |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT420 Anonymous 09/11/2019 |
His teaching is okay in class. In office hours, he's really condescending and makes you feel stupid for asking him to re explain things from class. |
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Takumi Saegusa
Expecting an A Anonymous 05/26/2019 |
I think he teaches well, but it's very boring at times. His exams are easy, and he spends an enormous amount of time doing review (like convergence in probability/distribution) and examples during lecture. Sometimes I found myself sleeping through ~50% of lecture and waking up with Saegusa still working on the same problem he started during the start of class. I think if you read the textbook, you can probably skip class. Make sure you do the homeworks, since the exams are the same questions with the numbers changed around. Recommend Jian Xu over him, if not for a (slightly) more engaging experience, going over more material |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT420 Expecting a D+ Anonymous 05/23/2019 |
Was a fine lecturer, but STAT 420 is one those classes where it either clicked right away and you did really well, or it just never did and you'll end up doing consistently poorly despite spending hours and hours studying. Maybe I'm just salty because he mentioned at the beginning of class that he would curve all tests so that the average score was an 80, but didn't end up doing that (I would have gotten a C- if he had) |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT401 Expecting an A+ rreviewer 05/22/2019 |
Professor Saegusa is great. He teaches the content in an easily digestible manner and his exams are less nitpicky and more about overall concepts. Definitely recommend taking 401 with him. |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT420 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/12/2019 |
His exams are not very hard. However, I think he spends too much time covering review topics like convergence in distribution and convergence in probability, leaving us no time to cover other topics other than some basics. I think if you want more comprehensive content you should take someone like J. Xu. |
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Takumi Saegusa
STAT420 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/26/2018 |
He's a very quiet and calm professor. His exams are similar to HW problems and he curves assignments. Pretty chill. |