Professor
Jesse Rissman
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - Avoid taking this class with this professor if you can. He relies on a bunch of readings, his lectures don't really do much to help you digest the readings. Attendance is graded and midterm and final are most of your grade which is based on the readings. His lectures are boring and its easy to fall asleep to them sometimes. I had to drop the class after the midterm. I thought it was me who couldn't understand or learn the topics. A year later I took it again with a different professor and all I have to say that it was not me it was definitely the Professor. The class is hard and has lots of different topics to learn and digest. But this professor does not make that any easier, he was off on conferences some days and the TA had to substitute. My advice if your not a reader take it with anyone but him.
Fall 2023 - Avoid taking this class with this professor if you can. He relies on a bunch of readings, his lectures don't really do much to help you digest the readings. Attendance is graded and midterm and final are most of your grade which is based on the readings. His lectures are boring and its easy to fall asleep to them sometimes. I had to drop the class after the midterm. I thought it was me who couldn't understand or learn the topics. A year later I took it again with a different professor and all I have to say that it was not me it was definitely the Professor. The class is hard and has lots of different topics to learn and digest. But this professor does not make that any easier, he was off on conferences some days and the TA had to substitute. My advice if your not a reader take it with anyone but him.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2022 - Rissman needs to learn to narrow down topics to the essential material he would like his students to learn, but instead, he dumps so much information in his lectures in order to test you on it all. He takes every minute of the lecture to do this, down to the last second. In the last lecture, he wanted to introduce a final concept to us and took the last 4-5 minutes to say what was on the slides, and said he expects to know it for the final. That is not real teaching or lecturing, imo. The workload includes "ZAPS" which are low stake modules, weekly 10-question lecture quizzes, iClicker polls for participation, discussion attendance, a term paper, the midterm, and the final. He made SONA extra credit more challenging by assigning 0.5 credits/1 hour instead of the usual 1 credit/1 hour, with the excuse that it will help researchers. Still, if he was really supportive of grad student researchers, he could take other action items that other professors have taken in support of their current UAW strike. He claimed to be sympathetic to the challenging midterm seeing many of us got low scores, so he gave everyone 5 points. For MC he likes to give 3 choices added with A & B and B&C, so it can be confusing.
Fall 2022 - Rissman needs to learn to narrow down topics to the essential material he would like his students to learn, but instead, he dumps so much information in his lectures in order to test you on it all. He takes every minute of the lecture to do this, down to the last second. In the last lecture, he wanted to introduce a final concept to us and took the last 4-5 minutes to say what was on the slides, and said he expects to know it for the final. That is not real teaching or lecturing, imo. The workload includes "ZAPS" which are low stake modules, weekly 10-question lecture quizzes, iClicker polls for participation, discussion attendance, a term paper, the midterm, and the final. He made SONA extra credit more challenging by assigning 0.5 credits/1 hour instead of the usual 1 credit/1 hour, with the excuse that it will help researchers. Still, if he was really supportive of grad student researchers, he could take other action items that other professors have taken in support of their current UAW strike. He claimed to be sympathetic to the challenging midterm seeing many of us got low scores, so he gave everyone 5 points. For MC he likes to give 3 choices added with A & B and B&C, so it can be confusing.
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