Statistics · Columbia University
weekly in class quizzes, a midterm, a final, weekly hw(2-3 hours).
His 8:40 was brutal to attend but his quirky teaching style made it kinda funny (plus he rememebers those who attends his lectures due to the small turnouts). He focuses a lot on statistical concept and students are expected to know how to apply them to problems which requires students to actively do all the homework and review lecture materials. Overall, not a bad class if you have even the littlest amount of stat background.
Regression, chi squared test, data analysis
8 Homework Assignments (graded based on effort & completion), 12+ Quizzes (1 quiz per week, only 2-3 questions long), 3 Projects, 1 Midterm, 1 Final. Lowest homework and quiz grades are dropped. Uses a generous curve to grade; he said in class once that around the top 45% of students get A's, the bottom 5% of students get C's through F's (which is nearly impossible), and everyone in between gets B's.
Nothing. I barely understand what is happening in the class even though I go back and try to teach myself from the textbook.
Like previous reviews say, Alexander is an interesting professor. During lectures, he's not the most energetic and is pretty monotone. However, while his lectures aren't totally engaging, they are still very useful for understanding the class material, for he mainly uses them to go over example problems, demonstrate how to use formulas, and shows how to use certain applications for projects (ex: Google Sheets, Excel, Python). He also does make a clear attempt to be funny, although sometimes his comedic timing may be off. With that being said, I personally learned the class material best by going to Alexander's office hours. In these sessions, he does a much better job at explaining the more abstract concepts of the course and is very helpful when seeking support for class projects. Moreover, throughout this past semester, he gave my class extra office hours on multiple weeks! Definitely use these sessions to your advantage if you find his lectures too abstract. Overall, Alexander is a very chill, laid back guy. With his generous curve system and with how much time he dedicates for office hours, it's clear that he wants his students to succeed in his course.
To be transparent as possible, this course barely teaches you anything. It is a very surfaced level statistic class– even though it is an introductory course. The slides covered in lectures are often abstract and not direct to what is covered in the textbook. I didn't learn much. This was more focused on python and computer science majors, not for pre-med track.
There were 12 quizzes, 8 homework assignments, 2 exams, and three projects. The homework was graded on completion, the quizzes are alright as he drops the worst ones. The projects are extra busy work, and one of them was assigned during finals. The exams have nothing to do with the lectures, homework, or projects and the only saving grace is that the class is graded on a curve
I learned mostly the fundamentals of statistics and a little bit of how to conduct relevant tests in python.
Did not learn a lot from his lectures, and they often had very little to do with the homework and even less to do with the exams. He speaks broadly but does not explain the equations very well.