Classes have begun, and you’re eager to know what your instructors have in store beyond that cute introductory slide lecture. CULPA expert Owain Evans is here to help, writing Bwog to point out what he thought was a suspicious evaluation. “Was this review written by the grad student himself?” he wonders. Bwog can’t say, but this excerpt was at least somewhat of an outlier among reviews that were vaguely positive but tended to include such tips as “if you put time into this class you can do well but expect to fail the midterms” and “he thinks it is amusing when the majority of the class fails an exam”.
John Baldwin
Mathematics
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Calculus I
27 December 2006
John is a young research mathematician who can check caller ID while
summing Reimann subintervals. His star quality arouses nubile
tittering in the first few rows, then narrowly offset with strategic
downplay. John plants errors in his boardwork to weed out the
booksmarts, so if you’re thinking of getting some in-class doodling
done, think again! Test questions are mildly sadistic, though John
will provide ample crawl opps for those who care enough to botch the
exams. Moreover, since John’s not a generalist, he won’t offer answers
to questions you can figure on your own. But if you have inquiries
which demonstrate genuine intellectual curiosity, John will be
generous with his time and brain power- count on that! Office hours
are busy and often run seminar style, so get in on it early or you
just might miss him.
Workload: Don’t think you’re off the hook as far as homework goes!
Easier problems are culled from the actual assignments, which do have
collaborative appeal…so split up the sets in your study group and
share the answers! Unless you’re feeling rigorous, well, then there’s
just no getting around hard work.
9 Comments
@Anonymous oh c’mon I really want this job! (unless you like doing all the bullshit administrative work). can I be your TA?
@Anonymous Definitely a flattering review…in a seditious way Maybe his TA wrote it to nudge him for a raise.
@Anonymous hey john do you want to come over for dinner sometime?
@john baldwin i am awesome!!
@girl john baldwin is so hot.
@Anonymous One of my undergraduate friends on the Columbia Ultimate team sent me a link to this blog. Rest assured, I did not fabricate this or any other review. While I think that all of this (both the review and the speculation) is pretty hilarious, I don’t even completely understand much of the review: “His star quality arouses nubile tittering in the first few rows, then narrowly offset with strategic downplay.” or: “John is not a generalist”. I don’t know what these things mean. It’s almost as if the entire review was generated by a computer. In anycase, I’m a bit hurt, Owen, that you’d accuse me of such a fabrication. Weren’t you in the Honors Math class I TA’ed for last year? Hurt.
-John
@well Why be hurt by someone you remember so vaguely that you don’t even spell their name correctly?
@Cam It’s been edited since. Even worse now.
@talk about obvious If Mr. Evans took out time to submit that review, then I would guess he never came across this one:
Calculus II
12 November 2006
Cathy O’Neil is awesome!!! PICK HER FOR CALC II!!! She will make you laugh even if the double webworks make you cry. She is probably the most animated math professor in the whole department. Her class is actually interesting. She knows who you are so you feel compelled to show up and pay attention. She will bake you cookies, yell at disgusting problems, and encourage people to solve the problems. Her husband subs for her and her kids are really cute. You will definitely walk out liking Calc II- and tell all your friends to take this course.
Cool facts: Cathy is so cool she actually reads her culpa reviews…she even knows that she can write one herself….hmmm…
Cathy is normal: “This problem took 2 law in order episodes to work out.”
All in all- enjoy.
Workload: HW is 55%. 2 midterms and 1 final 15% a piece. It is good to have one final you know you can bomb. If you spend the necessary 10 hours a week on the HW- you can easily get an A. Since she cannot memorize anything and hates tests, she tries to make them as painless as possible.
http://culpa.info/?root=psearch&process=viewprof&prof=2716&target=o%27neil