Birol Emir

Honestly, a terrible professor. He is very unprepared for class every day. I took an 8:40 class that was required for my major, and I feel that he intentionally chose 8AM office hours in the hopes that no one would show up, though of course it is possible that he needed to get to his job right afterward. (But if that is the case, should he really be teaching a course when he can't even provide students with time to ask questions?) He cancelled class a few times due to the snow when I took his course. He also said he would email feedback for the midterm, and never did. My friend and I basically self-learned everything for the class. It seems as though he looked for slides and problem sets online. I found different slides from various sources, so he clearly just found them online and didn't make them. I felt like the problem sets were often unaligned with what he was 'teaching' in class. Don't take if possible.

Professor Emir is awful. I am writing this having (unfortunately, because of requirements) taken two classes with him in the last two semesters. I attended every class both semesters and did well both times (at least from the grades I have so far of Applied Data Mining), so while many people are critical of their professors when they do badly and/or never show up to class - I was there the whole time and really know how bad he is. The only way I was able to do well in these classes was by spending excessive time reading and re-reading the textbook and other materials I found online and going to office hours as often as I possibly could. I learned absolutely nothing from Professor Emir. He comes unprepared to class. Yes, there are lecture slides that he has to pull up on the screen, but he does not prepare any of these himself. The slides consist of either screenshots of the textbook pdf and entire lectures using slides he found online (I've found them online too). When he goes through the lecture slides during class, it is often clear that going through them during class time is the first time he has ever looked at them (because whatever he has on the slides doesn't even make sense to him). For Applied Data Mining, he never graded the midterm. It was a 5-hour take-home on the Thursday after Spring Break (March 26). I am writing this on May 16, after all our final exams are ove…

Professor Emir is actually one of the nicest professors here and is highly unappreciated. The problem sets and project are not bizarre, they just challenge you to think a little. His slides are easily understood and if you do the reading and participate (and actually show up) you'll get allot of out them. He is an expert in using statistics in the real world and focuses on statistics methods that you will actually use. The biggest problem with the class is the students. It was mostly seniors and post-baccs who looked him up on Culpa and picked him because it says the class was easy and it's W1111, which is one step above the lowest intro stats course here. They were all looking for an easy A and only 10% of showed up to lectures. I learned allot from him and did poorly in the class. I found the exams to be challenging (not ones you can cram for) and because he didn't baby sit you and give you home works you had to keep up with the reading (which I didn't do and suffered for). Most of these students had experience using much more advanced statistics in the lab and were whining because they wanted easy 100s on the quizzes. Allot of cheating went on with the homework and some serious ass kissing was going on in the lectures. Most of the people complaining about him here are arrogant seniors and perfectionist post-baccs who never showed up to class except to complain. Im not sure…

[This was my submitted course evaluation] Professor Emir is an affable man, and he does care what his students seem to think of him. What he brings to Columbia, though, ends there. Class after class, he showed a remarkable lack of attention to and involvement in the course. He seemed minimally if at all prepared, and was generally disorganized. He clearly is a good statistician, but he was unable to bring much of his knowledge to the classroom. Some examples: 1) He read verbatim from the stock overheads prepared by the textbook publisher, which just quoted verbatim from the book, thus rendering going to class, or doing the reading, redundant. 2) When asked to introduce an example that wasn't straight from the book or slides, Prof Emir would show how unprepared he was; he once went completely silent for six minutes as he brainstormed an example, finally asking a student for a copy of her book and using something from it. 3) When he did use the board to jot down an example or elucidate a point made in the slides (which happened maybe once per class on average) his writing was small and hard to read, and he was VERY reluctant to actually go through the steps of a problem, or treat multiple parts of a problem. (And don't let me forget the extra credit points he awarded to people who would do problems on the board for him!) 4) Prof Emir several times changed the grading scheme for…

Took it, got an A, learned nothing. This is ideal for people who need to get a requirement out of the way (though this is true for many other profs who teach the same class from what I've heard). On the other hand, I didn't go to class much and didn't put in any effort. He's a very nice and approachable guy. I'm sure that if you're actually interested, he would be a lot of help and possibly a very interesting professor. There is potential to learn a lot...motivation is what's lacking.

Birol Emir absolutely should not be a professor. After four years of undergraduate classes and one year of graduate school, I can say with confidence that he is the most incompetent professor I have ever had. This is not hyperbole. He fails to be an effective instructor in every way imaginable: - Lecturing: Birol Emir does not know how to teach the material. His Powerpoint slide decks were literally just images of blocks of text copied and pasted from our textbook. Or sometimes, the slides would be taken directly from a company presentation with no alteration whatsoever. (He works at Pfizer. Slides would have the Pfizer logo in the bottom corner.) It was obvious that he did not prepare for the lecture in advance; he would go to a next slide, take a second to read the block of text, then summarize it ineffectively, or just read part of it out loud. Sometimes he would walk through an R program; but instead of doing a full demo, which would have been very helpful, he would just point to different R functions in the program and say completely unhelpful statements like, "this function does this, and that's good because we want it to do this... check out the manual on this library for more information." He would not go into any depth on any particular item or topic. Instead he would just mention something, and then move onto the next topic. I would leave every class feeling like I d…

This was the worst experience I've had with a professor. I tried to ignore the previous reviews and go into this class without a bias, but they're basically all accurate. Professor Emir is a nice person, but he seems to put the absolute minimum amount of effort possible into this course. We never received a syllabus. We never received a rubric or concrete description of our final project, which we spent the entire semester preparing for -- the project requirements, inasmuch as there were any, were changed the up until day before the projects were due. The fact that he is also teaching the applied data mining course next semester is unnerving. It was impossible to get excited about the way Birol taught the material (as evidenced by the fact that by the middle of the semester, 15-20 people would attend regularly) -- and I started the semester eager to learn the material. I attended class basically every session, but I didn't get anything from lectures that I couldn't have gotten from the summary slides he posted -- which themselves were screenshots from other statistics departments or photographs of our textbook. He was also never available to meet outside class besides at 8 am before classes (but was usually late or not there anyways). It was good to get more familiarity with R, although it wasn't formally taught except for a crash course in the first week on (no joke) how to i…

Terrible, terrible experience. Emir is incompetent. His lecture slides are right out of the book, the examples he gives are right out of the book, his explanations are right out of the book. A waste of a teacher. The examples he gives that aren't from the book are generally useless. His problem sets range from five-question packets that take half an hour to forty-problem p-sets that take days. He gets half of his tests and problem sets from outside sources and does not write his own p-sets or tests. He is inconsistent in his expectations. The second midterm was a graduate-level project on statistical analysis and modeling that was actually a lab: totally inappropriate for an intro-level stats class. He handed us the packet and left us to our own devices for one weekend with no guidance whatsoever. The project was nearly impossible and the whole class had to talk with him for an entire class period to clarify his expectations for the project (even then, he did not provide a grading rubric). We had to approach the department head, who agreed that the project was ridiculous (he made us do it anyway). He occasionally takes attendance, which is the only reason anyone really attends class. I haven't finished with the class. It wasn't difficult; mostly inconsistent, confusing, frustrating, and extremely boring. Avoid if at all possible.

The worst, most disorganized class experience I have ever had. He never gave us a syllabus at the beginning of the semester. A syllabus should include: office hours; grade breakdown (how much of your grade will be based on tests and assignments); when the midterm is; when all assignments are due; etc. His syllabus merely had a list of chapters from the textbook that we would be studying and none of the essential items mentioned above. As a result, I have no idea what my grade will be, since I don't know how much of it will be based on assignments and how much of it will be based on exams. The assignments were vague and expectations were never clear. When we would have assignments was also very unpredictable, there was no regular due date and he would often spring them on us a week before they were due, so it was very difficult to budget my time while taking this class. Most professors usually have a regular due date every week for problem sets (psets are due on every Thursday at 5pm, for example) or else the syllabus would include when they were due, but Birol did not do this. The midterm was a complete disaster. He did not tell us when the midterm would be at the beginning of the semester; we found out that the midterm would be on the day of the withdrawal deadline about three weeks before the midterm, so there was no way to withdraw from the class if you did poorly on the mi…

WORST CLASS EVER Highly unorganized I still do not know what he has been trying to teach. Homeworks and project were quite irrlevant to the midterm. And HW were pretty tough. Project? no idea what it was for. Although he states that we do not need to know prior knowledge on R, You need to know how to deal with R. And he posted some of the questions for the final JUST two days before the final, and answers do not explain what it is about. I never ever wrote the review on CULPA. People on Culpa do not recommed taking Prof. Caridi for STAT1211; yes, i do not recommend him too, but compared to prof Emir, prof Caridi is clear, and has specific goal what he wants to teach every lecture. However, prof Emir is nice person and easy grader. I think he just do not really care or does not know how to teach. I have learned nothing from the class. If you want to learn something, I recommend you to study by yourself or take other class.