Professor
Marcus Roper
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2025 - TLDR: Roper graded much harsher than expected for a lower division math course and he is not very transparent about grading. Typically, you see an average of B or maybe B+, but he intentionally set his at a B- following the math department guidelines. Alot of work for a class that you still might get a B+- in. Don't recommend, if you can take Marsden she is much better, don't take Roper. His class goes something like: flipped classroom, so you get to watch around 4 lecture videos averaging like 35 minutes of watch time before each class(He does post the notes for these videos and typically for me reading through them was perfectly fine for understanding the days lecture/worksheet), and then for each class you would get a worksheet, and he would go review some topics learned through the video, and then go through as much of the worksheet. He hosts quizzes every week that are pass/fail, if you get above a 75% or around that score you would get full credit for that quiz, and you needed to get 8 passes out of 9 quizzes to get full 24% of your grade. His lectures are ok, they aren't usually very insightful. If you do go, you will see he tries to get participation out of as many people as possible by asking menial questions, and having like quick finger polls in class about the worksheet, and more. He also grills most of the class for only showing up for quizzes, with around 10 students showing up just for quizzes, but the vast difference between quiz days and non quiz days was very evident on the value of his lecture that most people took( and maybe that his lecture was at 9am in Bunche) His homework was posted after every lecture, and was on Pearson. If you have ever used Pearson for math or physics you might know how dumb that site is for homework purposes. Even though he was posting homework after every lecture, Each set would have an average of 10 questions, albeit some of the times they didn't take much actual work and maybe like 20 minutes to complete the homework, some sets were extremely tedious and taking just brute force/equation plug and chug took upwards of an hour and a half. In return for having to watch the flipped class room lecture videos, he removed discussion sections, and instead he chose to have optional 1-1( usually 3 people could sign up for one time slot of thirty minutes) office hour meetings with the TAs during the time that there would be discussion, Our TAs were wonderful. Both were helpful in explaining homework and the content gone over in class. I personally couldn't bother them with the Midterm or the final because I think the way Roper has them, they do more work overall than a typical discussion section would be( but thats just me). His exams are stupid hard, with our midterm having an median of 25, and 4 points above and below being upper and lower quartiles. This in itself was not a great sign since his grading scheme made it so if you "failed" the midterm, the final would come and cover the 22% that the midterm made up. However, basically 75% of the class got below 70% on the midterm given that distribution which in itself is a terrible average for a lower division math course. (What is this, an honor course?) ( And note my class had around 140 people taking the class, which means this 75% is 105 students.) His grading for this exam was also not made clear after the fact. He didn't curve, but instead chose to grade by mastery of questions, grading questions individually, and then perhaps weighting based off difficulty in the class, but this "mastery" grade was not shown to anyone, and was told to the students who went up him during office hours and specifically asked. This made knowing how well you were doing in the class difficult/ impossible. The final was a similar deal, He achieved a BARELY higher mean/median of 64.59/66.5 with a std of 19 out of 106. He also this time sent a message about the grading scheme 2 weeks after the final was taken( well into summer break). And this message was not taken well even while being sent 2 weeks into breaks, many students on Piazza expressed some confusion, and outrage against the transparency and harsh grading. He states that his grading scheme is a "mastery based" grading scheme which consisted of grading each question as I wrote above. But, if you think about this, there is no mastery being tested, losing one or two or three points on a question to not explicitly writing an equation, or not doing the math right, isn't a failure to master the content its just a simple mistake. I did one of the questions on the final and got 3/10 points. It was for a second order differential equation. I did it an alternate way, but did my math wrong and lost all my points through not going the way he intended, and on top of that getting my math wrong lead to the wrong answer of course losing me points. But surely I did my method right, but he doesn't care to grade you enough partial. So from his grading scheme I "failed to master" this section of the content, yet my methods were all right. This question specifically was one which we had to spend hours on homework bashing through the 15 questions given on Pearson, and yet one mistake on my part led to a failure of mastery in his eyes. Absolute bull. Now my stats were that I did every homework completely except for 1(which I forgot) and got a 29/42 on the midterm and a 75/106 on the final, and got 9 passes for the quizzes, and that got me a B. There have been people sharing stats on piazza, who got much higher scores and barely got higher grades than me, one such example, a student got a 34/42, and 93/106, and only 7 passes on quizzes got a B+ both raw and final( tough luck, I think that 8 passes might have gotten you an A). All these numbers and Roper, for his final trick, curved the average to a B-, which means that were dependent on a curve were given some shitty curve to a B-. I didn't feel this curve, and it didn't feel like a curve at all. There was no 20% increase in the average for me it felt like maybe 4 %
Spring 2025 - TLDR: Roper graded much harsher than expected for a lower division math course and he is not very transparent about grading. Typically, you see an average of B or maybe B+, but he intentionally set his at a B- following the math department guidelines. Alot of work for a class that you still might get a B+- in. Don't recommend, if you can take Marsden she is much better, don't take Roper. His class goes something like: flipped classroom, so you get to watch around 4 lecture videos averaging like 35 minutes of watch time before each class(He does post the notes for these videos and typically for me reading through them was perfectly fine for understanding the days lecture/worksheet), and then for each class you would get a worksheet, and he would go review some topics learned through the video, and then go through as much of the worksheet. He hosts quizzes every week that are pass/fail, if you get above a 75% or around that score you would get full credit for that quiz, and you needed to get 8 passes out of 9 quizzes to get full 24% of your grade. His lectures are ok, they aren't usually very insightful. If you do go, you will see he tries to get participation out of as many people as possible by asking menial questions, and having like quick finger polls in class about the worksheet, and more. He also grills most of the class for only showing up for quizzes, with around 10 students showing up just for quizzes, but the vast difference between quiz days and non quiz days was very evident on the value of his lecture that most people took( and maybe that his lecture was at 9am in Bunche) His homework was posted after every lecture, and was on Pearson. If you have ever used Pearson for math or physics you might know how dumb that site is for homework purposes. Even though he was posting homework after every lecture, Each set would have an average of 10 questions, albeit some of the times they didn't take much actual work and maybe like 20 minutes to complete the homework, some sets were extremely tedious and taking just brute force/equation plug and chug took upwards of an hour and a half. In return for having to watch the flipped class room lecture videos, he removed discussion sections, and instead he chose to have optional 1-1( usually 3 people could sign up for one time slot of thirty minutes) office hour meetings with the TAs during the time that there would be discussion, Our TAs were wonderful. Both were helpful in explaining homework and the content gone over in class. I personally couldn't bother them with the Midterm or the final because I think the way Roper has them, they do more work overall than a typical discussion section would be( but thats just me). His exams are stupid hard, with our midterm having an median of 25, and 4 points above and below being upper and lower quartiles. This in itself was not a great sign since his grading scheme made it so if you "failed" the midterm, the final would come and cover the 22% that the midterm made up. However, basically 75% of the class got below 70% on the midterm given that distribution which in itself is a terrible average for a lower division math course. (What is this, an honor course?) ( And note my class had around 140 people taking the class, which means this 75% is 105 students.) His grading for this exam was also not made clear after the fact. He didn't curve, but instead chose to grade by mastery of questions, grading questions individually, and then perhaps weighting based off difficulty in the class, but this "mastery" grade was not shown to anyone, and was told to the students who went up him during office hours and specifically asked. This made knowing how well you were doing in the class difficult/ impossible. The final was a similar deal, He achieved a BARELY higher mean/median of 64.59/66.5 with a std of 19 out of 106. He also this time sent a message about the grading scheme 2 weeks after the final was taken( well into summer break). And this message was not taken well even while being sent 2 weeks into breaks, many students on Piazza expressed some confusion, and outrage against the transparency and harsh grading. He states that his grading scheme is a "mastery based" grading scheme which consisted of grading each question as I wrote above. But, if you think about this, there is no mastery being tested, losing one or two or three points on a question to not explicitly writing an equation, or not doing the math right, isn't a failure to master the content its just a simple mistake. I did one of the questions on the final and got 3/10 points. It was for a second order differential equation. I did it an alternate way, but did my math wrong and lost all my points through not going the way he intended, and on top of that getting my math wrong lead to the wrong answer of course losing me points. But surely I did my method right, but he doesn't care to grade you enough partial. So from his grading scheme I "failed to master" this section of the content, yet my methods were all right. This question specifically was one which we had to spend hours on homework bashing through the 15 questions given on Pearson, and yet one mistake on my part led to a failure of mastery in his eyes. Absolute bull. Now my stats were that I did every homework completely except for 1(which I forgot) and got a 29/42 on the midterm and a 75/106 on the final, and got 9 passes for the quizzes, and that got me a B. There have been people sharing stats on piazza, who got much higher scores and barely got higher grades than me, one such example, a student got a 34/42, and 93/106, and only 7 passes on quizzes got a B+ both raw and final( tough luck, I think that 8 passes might have gotten you an A). All these numbers and Roper, for his final trick, curved the average to a B-, which means that were dependent on a curve were given some shitty curve to a B-. I didn't feel this curve, and it didn't feel like a curve at all. There was no 20% increase in the average for me it felt like maybe 4 %
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