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Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

alexandercoward.com

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Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#171

Post by studentrob »

moron4hire wrote: post #168
studentrob wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the value in that. Funds are fungible, as Colbert so aptly pointed out in his exposé of state lotteries

Not donations. The university will either have to accept the terms or refuse the gift. I've given restricted gifts specifically imposing that the money be used on pizza for the programming team.

Right but presumably some of the money in the existing budget for said thing can be moved around. So, say you donate $10 to Professor X's classroom and his existing budget is $50. You bumped it to $60. They can just take $10 from the existing budget and put it elsewhere. Your $10 still goes to that class, and the total goes back to $50. What you really want to know is whether the budget has increased by the amount you and others earmarked, year over year. I doubt that level of reporting is given by schools or even requested by donors. We just trust or assume that "earmarked" means the budget increased.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#172

Post by NickHaflinger »

Alexander Coward: 'My student evaluations for the two classes I had completed were the highest on record in the Mathematics Department'

Berkeley Mathematics Department: ".. I hope and expect that you will be able to align more with our standards for the remainder of this semester and during the next academic year."

Translation: Your students are doing significiently better than ours and therefore showing up our mediocre teaching performance and for that reason - you're fired ..

http://alexandercoward.com/BlowingTheWhistleOnUCBerkeleyMath...

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#173

Post by kriro »

principal0 wrote: post #136

This is ludicrous - I was taught by Professor Ogus, and he had an excellent grasp of didactic techniques. He dedicated a large amount of time to having me come in during office hours so I could do a mock lecture before it was actually delivered, and I could compare notes when he delivered his. Yes, he was exacting and demanding, but it made me a better student. The fact that a lecturer with low standards happens to b…

"""If you're too weak to excel in an environment filled with the world's top researchers""" What kind of attitude is this? Seems pretty cruel and horribly antisocial. If you're too weak...what is this the animal kingdom?

And I'd think that it would be way more interesting if a Fields medalist would be freed up to teach more courses about his/her specialty instead of the intro to calculus stuff (or arguably not teach at all but I disagree with that position).

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#174

Post by redwood »

solveforall wrote: post #66

If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he negl…

I wonder if we had the same guy, Russian, with his own formalism and his own textbook published online? I remember thinking it may well have had merit but since most of us in there were applying the subject matter in our respective fields which stuck to the traditional formalism. .. it was a challenge.

I think it was a special form of multi variable, forget what he called it. Lecture was in mining. Honestly I went to lecture too rarely to give fair judgement

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#175

Post by moron4hire »

studentrob wrote: post #171
moron4hire wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not donations. The university will either have to accept the terms or refuse the gift. I've given restricted gifts specifically imposing that the money be used on pizza for the programming team.

Right but presumably some of the money in the existing budget for said thing can be moved around. So, say you donate $10 to Professor X's classroom and his existing budget is $50. You bumped it to $60. They can just take $10 from the existing budget and put it elsewhere. Your $10 still goes to that class, and the total goes back to $50. What you really want to know is whether the budget has increased by the amount yo…

That's a very good question. I will have to ask my mother, as that is literally her business, to know such things.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#176

Post by sweezyjeezy »

rootlocus wrote: post #133
berkmathstudent wrote: post #97

I took his Math 1A class (1st semester of calculus) in Fall 2013, which was his first semester here. Pros: 1)He made calculus engaging, exciting, and worth going to for an 8AM class. I never felt like it wasn't worth it. 2)Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math. 3)He genuinely cares and spend an enormous amount of time working 1-on-1 with students to help everyone. He freely gives out his cel…

"The midterms don't count if you don't want them to, which means 100% of your grade can be the final." And that's your choice. How is it his fault for giving you a choice? "Most of it is literally just memorizing a proof." Proofs are more important than memorizing a formula and forgetting it after a couple of month. "Convinced me to be a math major by inciting my passion for math." That's way more important than stuf…

"Proofs are more important than memorizing a formula and forgetting it after a couple of month."

I didn't go to Berkeley, but I had exams like this - you could pass them without actually understanding the material by memorising everything in sight. Quoting a proof doesn't show that you have any in-depth grasp of the concepts, that you can actually apply them to a problem you haven't seen before.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#177

Post by madcaptenor »

squirrel wrote: post #90

I was a grad student and teaching assistant in Berkeley maths 1998-99. I observed that the department intentionally admitted many more grad students than it could possibly put through the full PhD, and had a well-tuned system for weeding them out after a year or two - chiefly a "preliminary exam" that was notoriously tough and (in my view and that of many others) unfair. A charitable view would be that the department…

I chose not to be a grad student in Berkeley's math department for exactly this reason. I went to a smaller school that didn't have this sort of weeding out.

(I started my PhD in 2005, and it's possible that this was not the situation at the time and I was acting on outdated information. I don't regret it, though.)

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#178

Post by j2kun »

TruePath wrote: post #149
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a very strange system to me. Where I graduated (and I believe in most of Europe) the university has to have allocated the full funding for the entire PhD for a student before that student is admitted. So the university cannot afford to run a scheme like you describe, which is good since that sounds to me like a borderline predatory system.

Teaching positions for grad students aren't predatory. They are really a form of financial assistance. In return for teaching 3 hours a week 2 hours sitting in your office with the occasional student visitor (with say 5 hours of prep work that could be done during office hours and 3 12 hour days grading exams). That's 8 hours of work a week which works out to a pretty decent hourly salary. It's hardly luxury and when…

I've got six hours of teaching a week plus 2 hours of office hours plus meetings related to teaching plus prep plus grading.

Plus classes, homework, exams, plus research meetings, plus doing research, plus seminars, plus commute.

My university's administration has a rule that our department can't pay us more than a fixed amount, and that amount happens to be lower than the living wage in the city I live in. In other words, by the university's own admission they don't pay us enough to live off of.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#179

Post by baldfat »

solveforall wrote: post #66

If what he Dr. Coward says is true, and I have no reason to doubt him, this makes me sad as a Berkeley alum. I remember taking Math 53 with an awful professor who could barely speak English and refused to cover the material, asking us to just read the material ourselves and ask him questions. This professor had been there for many years despite repeatedly getting in trouble for failing too many students (that he negl…

Professors are never required to have a single teaching class. They themselves are not taught how to actually teach students. This is why so many professors are just smart but can't teach to save their lives.

They are ill prepared by their degree and can have huge communication or social issues that stand between them and their students.

Administrators usually push to give good grades for colleges with open enrollment. So the classes are easy and the test are easy. Make me sad and is part fo the reason I left working at a University.

Re: Blowing the Whistle on the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department

#180

Post by j2kun »

kirsebaer wrote: post #155
Natsu wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I knew some good fix to split up research and lecturing. The teaching should be done by people who are good at it and the research by people who are good at that. I suppose there might be some areas where there are just too few people qualified to teach something at the proper level, but I somehow doubt that's true at the undergraduate level. I remember distinctly which professors of mine were effective at con…

The National Science Foundation (or other group) should produce high-quality video lectures for all courses.

If this caught on all mathematics departments would lose funding and no longer be able to fund research. It's a strange conflict of interests.
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