Professor
Daniel Mckeown
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2025 - **FOR 5C** At the beginning of the quarter, I thought McKeown's strengths included his willingness to listen to student feedback and his accommodating nature. However, I soon realized his weaknesses were significant. His slides were unhelpful, and they were not published until after the lectures at first, which made it difficult to follow along during class. I disliked how his slides were often just copied and pasted from the textbook and contained whole paragraphs without highlighting the key points we needed to focus on. Since he read directly from the slides, attending his lectures didn't contribute much to my learning. I appreciated it when he wrote on the board, but his writing was often too small and messy to read clearly. Additionally, his slides were disorganized, making it challenging to identify the problems he presented. I wish he provided more resources or practice worksheets, as I found his files to be unorganized, and the modules tab could be organized better. I think it'd be more effective for my learning if he could just write and project it on the projector. I have mixed feelings about Kudu, the site for our homework and textbook. While I appreciate that there is an AI assistant to help with homework, I still encounter numerous errors in the questions. Furthermore, the Kudu text sometimes includes extra information that is not relevant to our tests. I was also bothered by his comment about making his tests harder and including challenge problems involving advanced calculus at the beginning of the quarter. He stated that he received feedback suggesting his class was "too easy," which made him feel like he wasn't a "real" professor. As a student, I find that very discouraging to hear. If his goal is to teach effectively, then he shouldn't make things "harder" in such an indirect way. It seemed a little tone-deaf when he said these challenge problems would "only be 15%" of the test. Since I wasn't clear on his expectations for what we should know as students, this just made it overwhelming to me. Even though I went to his office hours, I still don't feel like I've learned much from him. At this point, I think time could be better spent just grinding out practice problems or watching YouTube videos. I do feel like tests can be straightforward at times, but not enough room is given on the paper to show all our work. I appreciate that he put more consideration into the time it takes to do each problem, but I wish he provided more practice tests. I often felt like I needed more time on the tests, which I think is a common sentiment. Overall, he has some likable qualities, but the class is very disorganized, which can be overwhelming and negatively impacts my experience as a student. I understand that physics is mostly self-taught (as he emphasized), but I feel that the lectures aren't helpful enough, and I wish we had more resources available. However, he offers some extra credit and is willing to curve in a way where the class average would be a B, but he said it'd be more difficult to get an A since too many people got an A in his class in the previous years and the department didn't like that -_- I think I just unlucky with his class this year with it being a lot harder
Fall 2025 - **FOR 5C** At the beginning of the quarter, I thought McKeown's strengths included his willingness to listen to student feedback and his accommodating nature. However, I soon realized his weaknesses were significant. His slides were unhelpful, and they were not published until after the lectures at first, which made it difficult to follow along during class. I disliked how his slides were often just copied and pasted from the textbook and contained whole paragraphs without highlighting the key points we needed to focus on. Since he read directly from the slides, attending his lectures didn't contribute much to my learning. I appreciated it when he wrote on the board, but his writing was often too small and messy to read clearly. Additionally, his slides were disorganized, making it challenging to identify the problems he presented. I wish he provided more resources or practice worksheets, as I found his files to be unorganized, and the modules tab could be organized better. I think it'd be more effective for my learning if he could just write and project it on the projector. I have mixed feelings about Kudu, the site for our homework and textbook. While I appreciate that there is an AI assistant to help with homework, I still encounter numerous errors in the questions. Furthermore, the Kudu text sometimes includes extra information that is not relevant to our tests. I was also bothered by his comment about making his tests harder and including challenge problems involving advanced calculus at the beginning of the quarter. He stated that he received feedback suggesting his class was "too easy," which made him feel like he wasn't a "real" professor. As a student, I find that very discouraging to hear. If his goal is to teach effectively, then he shouldn't make things "harder" in such an indirect way. It seemed a little tone-deaf when he said these challenge problems would "only be 15%" of the test. Since I wasn't clear on his expectations for what we should know as students, this just made it overwhelming to me. Even though I went to his office hours, I still don't feel like I've learned much from him. At this point, I think time could be better spent just grinding out practice problems or watching YouTube videos. I do feel like tests can be straightforward at times, but not enough room is given on the paper to show all our work. I appreciate that he put more consideration into the time it takes to do each problem, but I wish he provided more practice tests. I often felt like I needed more time on the tests, which I think is a common sentiment. Overall, he has some likable qualities, but the class is very disorganized, which can be overwhelming and negatively impacts my experience as a student. I understand that physics is mostly self-taught (as he emphasized), but I feel that the lectures aren't helpful enough, and I wish we had more resources available. However, he offers some extra credit and is willing to curve in a way where the class average would be a B, but he said it'd be more difficult to get an A since too many people got an A in his class in the previous years and the department didn't like that -_- I think I just unlucky with his class this year with it being a lot harder
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2024 - I had Dr. McKeown for Physics 5A (for some reason not listed here), and going into the course, I was concerned that we would be learning a lot of irrelevant, technical physics that wasn't related to my career path as a pre-med student. However, this wasn't the case, as Dr. McKeown correctly designed this course to be relevant to pre-med students by including topics and concepts that are actually relevant to biology and medicine. Because of this, I was interested in the topics of this course and found what we had to learn to be intriguing rather than tedious. Additionally, Dr. McKeown's lectures were helpful, on-task, and weren't boring. He always stopped to take questions from students and clarified everything thoroughly, which not all professors do. I felt that our quizzes and tests were very reasonable and had nothing unexpected/surprising that strayed from the lectures/homework. I also appreciated how he gave us unlimited attempts/graded the homework on completion, rather than correctness, so we could actually use it as a learning source and not an assessment. Overall, I would highly recommend taking a course with Dr. McKeown as he is passionate about Physics, and teaching his students in an effective and legitimate manner. You definitely won't regret taking a class with him.
Summer 2024 - I had Dr. McKeown for Physics 5A (for some reason not listed here), and going into the course, I was concerned that we would be learning a lot of irrelevant, technical physics that wasn't related to my career path as a pre-med student. However, this wasn't the case, as Dr. McKeown correctly designed this course to be relevant to pre-med students by including topics and concepts that are actually relevant to biology and medicine. Because of this, I was interested in the topics of this course and found what we had to learn to be intriguing rather than tedious. Additionally, Dr. McKeown's lectures were helpful, on-task, and weren't boring. He always stopped to take questions from students and clarified everything thoroughly, which not all professors do. I felt that our quizzes and tests were very reasonable and had nothing unexpected/surprising that strayed from the lectures/homework. I also appreciated how he gave us unlimited attempts/graded the homework on completion, rather than correctness, so we could actually use it as a learning source and not an assessment. Overall, I would highly recommend taking a course with Dr. McKeown as he is passionate about Physics, and teaching his students in an effective and legitimate manner. You definitely won't regret taking a class with him.
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