Brian Rakitin

If you have to take this course, it's fine to take it with Professor Rakitin. It will not be a fascinating course that makes you want to learn more psych, but it also won't be the bane of your existence. He basically reads off slides that follow the book (with some slight modifications) and that are posted online beforehand. He can sometimes make funny comments that keep you awake but mostly goes through the material. The bright side is that the course is very organized with clear expectations. Since the slides are posted in full, there is not much of a need to always attend lecture either.

i had rakitin for both science of psych and statistics for behavioral scientists. science of psych is an easy class if you go to class. you won't have to do any hw except two short papers (very easy) and you can cram-read the textbook (just focus on terms; it's all term-based) before the midterms and final. it's a really interesting class and he's a very good lecturer. stats with him is different. his lectures are confusing. fortunately, the book he uses (levin & fox) is the most amazing statistics textbook or resource i have ever ever EVER experienced. it is incredibly clear and the only stats-book-video-resource-anything that focuses on conceptual learning one thing about him is that his tests are usually poorly/confusingly-written. if you know the material well you should still be able to get a/a-, but you're leaving a little something up to chance

If you're gonna take this class, take it with Rakitin. You can get an A without ever going (35% of the class gets an A- and up). Although he'll tell you that you need to go to lectures because not everything on the test will come out of the textbook, he's lying. Read the textbook sections 2-3 times, look over the slides, and get an A. Don't waste time attending class, use that time to read the textbook, do other work or take a nap. His lectures (the one I went to at least) are boring and unnecessary. If you can learn out of a textbook and you're looking for an easy A, I would recommend this class. While the readings are tedious and time-consuming, they are not difficult and the tests are extremely straightforward, essentially testing your ability to memorize the book.

What a miserable man. Pompous, boring, and completely useless. He's so invested in making statistics seem REALLY HARD (and therefore making himself seem REALLY IMPORTANT) that all of his lectures needlessly obfuscate the actual. concepts and ideas that we need to learn. Midterm and final are easy if you do the homework, but going to lecture and asking him questions usually confused me much more than just looking at the textbook. Ask the TAs questions if you have to - Rakitin is useless. Attendance isn't mandatory for this class (not to lecture, at least), so you can pull a good grade and learn a lot of useful statistical knowledge without having to deal with this guy.

I love psychology and Prof. Rakitin's class is a good introduction to the subject. There are, however, a number of issues with his teaching style: (1) his lectures tend to be too focused on the topics HE wants to discuss; (2) they seem like a vinyl record played at the wrong speed (i.e. way too fast for any intelligible information to get through without you laughing at the "funny voices" coming from the phonograph), and (3) they provide little opportunity for those really interested in the subject to explore it further. With this said, he is not the worst professor on Earth. He motivates you just enough to keep you interested and the occasional errors during lecture are more due to his delivery speed than lack of knowledge of the subject matter. He knows his stuff, for sure. He does deliver on a series of fronts and if you go to his lectures, you will do fine. It is true most exam questions can be answered after just reading the textbook, but the second part relies heavily on Prof. Rakitin's actual lectures. Attending them may well mean the difference between a B+ or A- and an A. His scaling formula for exams is okay, although he never explained how it works. (See below for a critique on his "normalization" of WA scores). Read the textbook and attend lecture, even if it is to take a good nap. One day, perhaps, you will be able to catch something useful from Prof. Rakitin's mo…

Brain Rakitin is obviously a smart guy to have gotten where he is right now, but in no way can he be associated "passable" or even "competent" as a teacher. He may be very familiar with the material he's teaching, but he has no clue how to convey information. He tends to explain simple, straightforward concepts in the most convoluted way possible, making the material seem difficult at first, but anyone who has taken any sort of stats would know that this class only covers the easy basics. He is also unnecessarily mean as a person, doesn't allow absences, food or lateness in his class, and talks to us as if we were totally incompetent as people to learn the greatness that he is teaching. This class is tolerable because the material is easy, I've gone to class three times and regretted all of them. He has a weird way of making the exams excruciatingly long; very little people were able to finish the midterm, and there were a lot of short answer questions without proper instructions, so people tended to write everything they knew and he would claim that those weren't the things he was looking for. I am a junior in neuroscience and premed, and from all the professors I've had at Columbia, I tend to think Brain Rakitin definitely brings down our quality of education. Don't get me wrong, I got an A, but taking this class put a damper on my semester, and I was taking orgo and neurobi…

Rakitin is a terrible, terrible professor. DO NOT TAKE HIS CLASS IF YOU CAN AVOID IT. I went to every lecture until halfway through the semester and was unable to stay awake during even one. His lectures are boring and taken exactly out of the textbook, so as long as you keep up with the reading and study the lecture slides before the exams you'll be fine. He leaves all the dirty work to his TAs- they grade your papers and exams, and he doesn't even show up on exam days. He is often rude to students who come in a few minutes late and shuts down questions when he doesn't want to answer them. I have since stopped going to lectures because I really get nothing out of them. I also came into the semester thinking about a potential psych major, and Rakitin has totally dissuaded me from his line of work. Bottom line: if you want a class that is pretty easy and you can basically teach yourself the material, then go ahead and take this class. If you want an intellectually stimulating introduction to psychology, find someone else-- Rakitin is definitely NOT your guy.

Um, why does this man have a silver nugget? I took both Professor Rakitin's Science of Psych and his Statistics for Behavioral Scientists class and I have two words for this man: dry and arrogant. SCIENCE OF PSYCHOLOGY I remember sitting through his first lecture and thinking "Maybe I'm only bored because this is the introductory stuff. Maybe it will get better." It doesn't. Like me, 2/3 of our class realized this and the room went from being overfilled on the first day to having maybe 1/3 of the chairs filled during lectures. For the portion of the lectures I did attend, I believe I fell asleep for around half of them. The most interesting day was when the TA taught in Rakitin's place. Rakitin is also terrible at explaining things. When he attempted to explain to us how the eye worked, he managed to confuse the class even more --he messed up on the first try, corrected himself on the second time explaining (a separate day), and again corrected something he said on the second day during a third time of explaining (yet another day). Do not ask this man a question unless you want to get throughly confused and/or talked down at. He feels the need to go through every little detail when answering questions and ends up answering in such a winding fashion that you forget what you initially asked. The only good thing about this class was the textbook, which was fantastic and probably…

AVOID THIS TEACHER!!!! He is basically an arrogant guy with lots of issues. He is cocky and tries to intimidate the students. He should be teaching in high school! He treats the students like monkeys and uses the class to feel good about himself. The guy needs some theraphy! He may know a lot about Parkinson's but he should study a little bit of biology, too! I got an A but I REAAAAAALLY REGRET having signed/paid for this class, and I WANT TO BE A PSYCH MAJOR!!!!

Although this teacher is an ok guy, his lectures are confusing and it makes you suffer through the semester. He uses different terms than the book so after having 5 variables called sigma your brain will start to spin. He always mixes up terms and aknowledges it but I think he should pay more attention to this because it gets annoying.His slides are somewhat helpful but they are sloppy and have a lot of errors in them. When you review them you have to guess how he solved the problems because he skips steps and abbreviates a lot of terms so you have to go back to the TA or the book in order to study from there. The lab section is good if you have a good TA but at the end they have to guess what the teacher might ask in the exam,so the anxiety level rises inside of you as the semester continues. He gives a few Behavioral examples here and there but nothing that makes you think that a normal Statistics course would not give you . Even the book is just a huge Stats book, not much about Psychology mentioned. This class lacks passion and didactic methods so it makes the dry topic even dryer. Personally, I did not enjoy this class. The midterm was unfair because he only gave a limited ammount of time to solve it and many did not finish it. It had also a lot of theoretic questions although the TAs had only prepared us for solving numeric problems. The final was almost only math and so…