Alice Wang

This professor has taught: HLTH710, MATH246

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Alice Wang Anonymous 11/30/2023	I fought to get into this section because of her high reviews, but they have clearly dropped and for good reason. Her lecturing style is to use fill-in notes, which can often get confusing as she writes very fast and often scrolls away on her ipad before leaving adequate time to copy things down. Lecture is often just a race to write everything down instead of having time to digest what she is saying. We had a substitute prof for the last couple of classes, and he was significantly better because he focused on actual examples and explaining intuition instead of focusing on deriving formulas and scrolling around on the page. I actually knew what was going on, and I wish she had taught this course like that as I felt I had wasted an entire semester with her. She's a very nice person and relatively understanding of circumstances, but I would 100% NOT recommend taking this class with her.
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 11/17/2023	Oh my god, taking this class with her was the biggest mistake ever. I even waitlisted for her for so long and was so happy to find out that I got a place in her section. Man do I have regrets. So first off, she is genuinely a very good teacher and wants us to succeed by giving us a lot of material to study with and study guides to follow for her quizzes. She also drops an exam, around 5 or 6 quizzes, and one matlab assignment. However, her exams! Oh my god, it was nearly impossible to get everything done in the 75 minute time frame. There were quite a few questions, and that too, extremely difficult questions. The difficulty of the exam questions are incomparable to all the questions we have done in class or quizzes. It is pretty obvious that UMD told her to make her curriculum harder, as she was much more generous before and had nearly 5 star ratings before, but this semester things went completely downhill. She also said she is not going to be curving because she usually doesn't curve. Maybe that is because she usually doesn't curve cuz she usually is much easier. And all my friends taking different diff eq professors are having a much easier time. I am giving her 2 stars still since she is such a sweet person has us take good notes and is good at explaining the concepts, but man this course was so dissapointing.
Alice Wang MATH246 Anonymous 11/16/2023	I selected this professor because she had a high rating when I registered for classes, which I now see has (rightfully) dropped. Here's why I think she's a 2/5 stars: 1. Her exams are very long, which may be universal across all of the 246 classes, but her grading on the exams are very difficult. During lecture she'll say that she gives good partial credit as long as you show understanding of the concept, which sounds normal, right? Well, she takes 50% off problems for simply getting the initial values wrong even if the rest of the work (which is a lot of work btw) is 100% correct. Her only reasoning was that "it's important to get the right values" which is true but it seems unfair to say that she'll give a lot of partial credit when she simply doesn't. 2. She always goes overtime in class. I understand that she has less lecture time than other professors, but there are videos that can be watched to catch up on the material. The main thing is that she just never addresses how she'll go over 10 minutes every class, which seems disrespectful of other students' time especially if they have other classes right after. 3. The way that she talks about the concepts. A lot of the time she'll say something is "really easy" or "as you all know" which feels a little condescending, especially since a lot of calculus stuff was done years ago in high school. 4. Lecture style. She writes on an ipad which is not an issue, but she always scrolls away really fast so it's almost impossible to catch everything and try to digest what she's saying. The good things are that she drops a lot of the lowest assignments which is one of the main things that makes this an okay class.
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting a C Anonymous 11/09/2023	A lot of what was said below, emphasis on brutal exams and course being a lot harder with her than other professors.
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting a W theGreat 10/24/2023	DO NOT TAKE ANY CLASS WITH ALICE WANG WITHOUT READING THIS REVIEW If you take this class, don't say I didn't warn you. Wow I have been looking forward to writing this. Let's start with the positives. - There are lots of good practice problems available on the course website - 1/3 of midterms, 1/6 of Matlabs, and 6/16 of quizzes are dropped - As a person, Alice is actually pretty nice - There are very good online lectures. Will they be posted? Probably not. We will get to that later though Sounds pretty enticing right? Well, keep reading. Let's get to the negatives. I am NOT including the following information to brag (this is anonymous anyway) but to provide important context into just how bad this class is. I am a junior at UMD double majoring in CS and math. I have a 3.8+ GPA, have never gotten below a B in any class, and I like to think of myself as a hard-working person. Even with all of this said, I fully dropped this class and took a W so that I can take it next semester with an easy professor. It was absolutely horrible and destroyed me. My friend is in a different section and it is so easy. I looked over their practice exams and never hated myself more for not taking 246 with them. Here is why Alice Wang is so bad. Alice Wang makes both of those professors look like superstars and is the worst professor I have ever had in my entire life. Here's why: - She does not respond to her emails or elms messages. I once emailed and messaged her and it took her a week and a half to respond. This is arguably my biggest problem with her because it really is not hard to answer your email and be there for your students. So many times throughout the semester I tried to contact her for help and it took her days to get back to me - She does not hold office hours and has no TAs. She has "office hours" from 830-930 before class, but you have to get in touch with her beforehand to schedule a meeting during this time. Good luck doing that when she doesn't respond to emails or messages for at least 2 days! - The exams are brutal. You barely have enough time to complete them, the problems are hard, and they are graded very hard. - The matlabs are worse than brutal. They are deceiving because there are only 4 problems, but each problem is going to take you a minimum of 1 hour, and probably more. Also, there are 6 (SIX?? WHY) matlabs. Every other class has like 3 or 4. - Lectures are recorded, but often not posted for days on end, including when you need them to do the weekly quizzes. Once again, good luck getting in contact with her to post the lectures, because I sure wasn't able to! - The class is not curved The only type of person who should be taking this class is someone who absolutely loves to learn and do math and spends all day working on DifEq and matlabs. If you are not that type of person, then plain and simple, do not take 246 with Alice Wang unless your life depends on it. And even then don't do it.
Alice Wang Anonymous 10/24/2023	she talks pretty slow and this class is a lot of work (which is not her fault).
Alice Wang Anonymous 10/19/2023	Talks really slowly and refers to every object as people
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting an A Anonymous 09/12/2023	I highly encourage everyone to take Alice Wang! She has an amazing teaching style and really wants us to succeed. We have a quiz every week, however the quiz is literally take home and there is no time limit on it. You can also rewrite the quizzes for extra credit that goes onto the final grades. Also, she drops 5 quizzes. We also have three midterms but one of them gets dropped. Also we have 5 matlab assignments but again, the lowest one gets dropped. Also midterms can be rewritten like the quizzes, for extra credit. Besides all those benefits she also lectures really well and will answer all of your questions. She is very approachable and nice and you can really tell she wants us to succeed.
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting a D Anonymous 05/22/2023	Excellent instructor, provides all you need to succeed in the course. But she assumes that because a student has access to these tools it is their fault if they cannot succeed. Alice Wang is an overwhelming class with too much work, leading to students getting lost as to what work is important to the class and what work is just what she thinks you should be learning. If you love Differential Equations, take this class. If you want to know the amount you need to succeed in Engineering and not much more, avoid this class.
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 04/18/2022	Alice is amazing! She releases note guide pdfs before lectures so that you aren't taking notes by scratch which allows for material to be covered efficiently. She has a lot of quizzes but has study guides for them, so if you go through them the quizzes are straightforward and will boost your grade. I'm not sure if she does this every semester but for Fall 2021 she gave a good amount of extra credit if you rewrite quizzes and exams after answers are released. This is time-consuming but raises your grade and helps you fully understand problems you may have gotten wrong. Also, Alice hosts review sessions before the exam which is very generous of her and always prepared me for the exams. I've heard valid complaints about no TAs, office hours, or discussion but if you're a student who is okay with learning content from lectures combined with going through practice problems and the answers she provides for them, then this professor is probably a great fit for you. Overall, she gives A LOT of resources to help you succeed so if you are willing to put the time and energy into her class, you will do well.
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 04/07/2022	She's a good professor and very kind. She provides you with a lot of resources to learn the material. We had weekly quizzes (worth 10 points), and accompanying practice quizzes and solutions. These were very helpful for the exams. Additionally, she provided sample exams and solutions, and held ~3 hour review sessions before each exam. She also had recorded lectures, and the notes are structured (packets with outlines; fill them in during class). Unfortunately, I don't think her sections ever have TAs and she doesn't have set office hours. This especially became a problem for the MATLAB projects. You can make an appointment with her, but she sometimes isn't the most responsive to emails. Overall, though, I liked the way she structured her course and she clearly cares about her students. I highly recommend her as a professor.
Alice Wang MATH246 Anonymous 03/17/2022	You can tell that she cares but her class is much like high school. No office hours, no TAs. Just notes that you fill in the blanks for.
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/18/2020	Great Professor! Takes her time and provides you with all the resources necessary to excel in the class. 10/10
Alice Wang MATH246 Expecting an A- Anonymous 08/12/2020	She is really knowledgeable about the course and makes note-taking very easy (printed packets to fill in). She didn't have a discussion section when I had her, but she made up for it by having 2-3 hour long sessions before each exam that you really should go to. Overall, she is nice and cares about all her students.