BMEN E4002

One of the most condescending professors I have come across at Columbia. He doesn't give out answer keys because of a fear of them circulating around after the fact... which does not stop cheating but instead only serves to make everyone confused. The only way to get answers to anything is to (a) go to his office hours, where he will make you feel terrible about yourself. he has a general disdain toward helping students (b) go to the TA office hours... who often are wholly unprepared to answer your questions. He reads directly off slides in class, and does not know how to use bullet points. Good luck to my fellow BMEs who are required to take this class... seriously, I feel for you.

Reading: He assigns a lot of reading and if you want to do really well on quizzes, you need to do your reading (at least read ahead in the slides). However, I found the material covered in the homework and exams drew mostly from his lectures. Some homework questions were not in the slides and needed to be looked up in the textbook (or Google) HW: 6, none dropped. Difficulty varies. Usually 10 T/F questions from textbook and 3~4 questions similar to what was done in class. Some were easy others needed an hour or two of office hours. Each homework is 100 pts Quizzes: Pop quizzes usually one per homework assignment. I think the grading is by point value in the overall HW and Quiz category but I'm not sure. Each quiz is 10 pts Exams: 2 evenly spread out. 20 multiple choice and 2~3 short answer. Question difficulty is similar to that of the average homework problem. Main issue here is time. There is a ridiculous time crunch. If you know everything perfectly, you should breeze through the exam (with probably no time to spare). Thus if you struggle with anything, haha good luck. Final: Similar to the exams in difficulty. Slightly longer--but you have 3 hours instead of 1 so the time to question ratio works out better for the final. Grading: Quizzes & Hwks: 30%, Exam 1: 20%, Exam 2: 20%, Final: 30%. Average curved to B-

Pro: Prof Morrison is an okay lecturer and explains things okay. The lecture experience is pretty average. He uploads slides on Courseworks and assigns readings. I didn't find the textbook too helpful or necessary. Most of his slides borrow heavily from the textbook and the only time the textbook was really necessary was for the homework True / False section. One thing to note is that he gives pop quizzes so you must come to class if you want to perform well on the quiz section of your grade (explained below). You probably have to take this course if you are looking this up. I root for you, BME major. You can complain about this class with your classmates to befriend them. Con: Not sure if this is a con but this class was, at least in my experience, memorization based. If you memorized the homework answers and practice problem answers, it is likely you received a high mark. This may or may not work in your favor. Exams are a huge time crunch. Morrison expects you to have memorized everything when you get to the exam. He expects you to be able to spit out whatever you have memorized and just be done with the exam. If you have to "work through the problem" instead of spitting out what you know, it is likely you ran out of time. That said, the exam difficulty is on par with your average homework question. It was just a time issue. NO ANSWER KEYS FOR ANYTHING. Office hours are obv…

Not too bad, 6 reasonable problem sets, 2 midterms, 1 final. Exam problems were similar to HW, and cheatsheets were allowed. Averages were much higher in QP 1 than QP 2 for my class.

QP 2 was not bad in terms of material or workload. The classes were delivered clearly, if at a slow pace. However, Barclay Morrison is the rudest professor I have ever come across at Columbia. He shows very little respect towards his students, especially through email and during office hours. He is not interested in helping us learn the material. For instance, I emailed him because wanted to discuss my exam, and in his reply, he asked if I had done all the reading and if I could do all of the HW problems cold. If not, he wouldn't waste time discussing my grades. His attitude and demeanor towards his students is totally inappropriate. Additionally, the lack of answer keys for HWs/exams was detrimental to our learning, and did not prevent cheating on exams.

Try to figure out the homework from looking at equations on slides. Not much actual learning

Professor Morrison is one of the worst professors I have experienced in terms of caring that his students learn the material. He is a decent lecturer but makes it difficult for his students to succeed. There are no answer keys for any problem sets, quizzes, midterm exams or even practice exams, because professor wants to prevent cheating (a situation in which an upper year student passes on an answer key). However, this also results in students simply not knowing the correct answer with no way to find out besides office hours. Problem sets are returned with barely more than a score; midterms and quizzes are the same. I understand that the professor is trying to prevent cheating for his exams. Perhaps he can make different exams for different years? Just a thought. He says that we can visit his office hours to ask for some answers. Perhaps he has not considered that students have other classes or part-time jobs and may not be able to make his and the TAs office hours.

Barclay lectures painfully slow. Class is, I think, pointless. The best thing to do is read the notes for quanitative questions and memorize the textbook readings for the multiple choice. Test are really long. It is, in my opinion, more about how fast you can regurgiate simple questions rather than actual problem solving.