Larry Wright

The content in this class is amazing, but Wright is a pretty bad lecturer. He tends to just read off pdf files containing his poorly handwritten notes. And so, lectures can be rather dull. Nonetheless, this was definitely my favorite class this semester. Also, sometimes he randomly gives extra credit if you can do a homework problem on the board in class. He also talks a lot about his experience working with IBM and teaching at University of Arizona.

The worst professor I have ever encountered. PLEASE AVOID HIM AT ALL COSTS. He is a terrible lecturer and doesn't even know how to copy down the formulae from his notes on the blackboard. To study for the test, you need to go through his terribly scanned hand-written pdf, and the textbook which doesn't cover some of the stuff he goes over. Course material is not hard if you read the textbook and try to understand what's going on, but it is just too painful to sit through his lectures. It is really a disaster that everyone who wishes to pursue the glorious financial engineering as their major has to go through this course. Seriously, this course (more like this professor) is one of the major reasons that made me consider changing my major. I seriously advise students to take other alternatives for the statistics requirement for their major.

Terrible, terrible teacher. It's people like this that make me really furious. Why in the damned world do we have to pay 50 thousand dollars a year to come to this school and have a completely useless teacher? This guy seriously just went over the book, verbatim (although he did crop some few things out). the review below this one explains exactly how dumb/annoying those often unreadable PDFs are, since they are just a copy of the pages of the book (I'll give him credit though, he did change the names of the people in a few of the problems in the first chapters). I worked really hard in this crap only to do average. Review MGFs and Max Likelihood Estimators!

People hate on Wright too much. I mean, yes, I had a tough time sitting through the lectures for this class. And yes, it sucks to get all your homework assignments in the form of all-caps Courseworks emails that you can't find anywhere else. But, I mean, whatever, the lectures are pretty thorough, the homework is remarkably comprehensive, and he puts the effort in. I don't know about these curve rumors... I had a D average or something and got a B in the course.

Disorganized and boring - these are two words that define this man. His lectures are boring and the information he presents does not have much to do with financial engineering. I mean I am not complaining that the class was easy. But I am complaining because this class was slightly more complex than Intro. to Accounting and Finance. So, do not expect to learn anything interesting such as options and futures. He briefly touched on options and it was not much for a 4000 level FE course. Homeworks and exams were easy at the beginning but they got more tedious (not necessarily diffucult, just stupid calculations) towards the end. As one person noted the worst thing about this guy is his inefficiency. Instead of posting homework solutions as pdf files on a webpage he simply sends out useless emails that only have the result of the problems. Most of the time he does not even bother to show the calculation for more diffucult problems and just writes "messy calculation". But dude we are taking this class to learn the messy calculations. His grading is also not very fair. There is almost no partial credit. However, considering the difficulty level of the class, there is no reason that an average student can't get an A in this class

Professor Wright is definitley a breath of fresh air around Columbia as far as professors are concerned. His lectures are fairly interesting if you find his anecdotes and sense of humor funny, all of which are hilarious. He brings his own work experiences into the class to help explain the material. He uses a great book, so you can just read the book and you will understand it all. If not, his lectures will suffice in learning the material. As far as the "harsh" (as the previous reviewer put it) grading policy, it really is not bad. There is no curve whatsoever in this class and 85% is an A, 75% is a B, and so on. The reason why there is virtually no partial credit on any of his exams is because the exams are easy and not complicated. The two midterms were very easy, both allowed calculators, a formula sheet, and OPEN BOOK. Many of the questions were directly from the book, which is why we were required to bring it to the exams). The final was cumulative and harder than expected. Im sure that was because he didnt want to give out so many A's. No partial credit does seem harsh, but if you make a mistake in the reasoning on such straightforward questions, then you deserve to get penalized. Mathematical errors get partial credit, and if there was an error in the process, you get squat. So if you have the opportunity to take the class with him, do so! You will learn the material w…

Larry Wright is OK as a lecturer, but his class is a wreck. No syllabus, no info on courseworks, nowhere to get information on what you're supposed to do and when you're supposed to do it, except through his messy last-minute emails, and no TA that I was aware of. All this would be fine if he was approachable, but he's snippy and barky and gets annoyed easily. And even all this would be OK if it wasn't for his barbaric grading policy - NO CURVE, and NO PARTIAL CREDIT. The material on the midterms was pretty easy, but make the most minute of mistakes, for which most teachers would take off 1 or 2 points, and watch your grade plummet by 15 points. Such is A. W. Wright, crusader against grade inflation.

Weekly hw set containing 5 questions of varying difficult, 2 midterms (easier than hw), 1 final (way harder than midterm; more comprable to hw problems)

Weekly problem set (5 problems), two midterms (fair, but ridiculously formatted), one final.

This course and professor are very frustrating. This course teaches a lot of very useful material, and the material is covered in a logical, orderly fashion. However, the textbook is a mess. The software, an integral part of the text, only runs on Windows 32-bit systems and was designed for DOS. Also, the text is full of frustrating errors. Then there's Prof Wright. He's a very nice guy, though not all that politically correct. He likest to talk about AZ and his family. He does his own recitation sessions on Fridays, and he often picks out students to praise or challenge or question or mock. This makes the course a lot more personal. However, he teaches from hand-written PDF notes, which don't scroll properly since they're scanned in at such high resolution and can't be redrawn properly by a low-powered system. They're also fairly hard to read. Worst of all, they generally just rehash the content and the examples from the text; although it is a subset that is more likely to show up on an exam. However, if you go excruciatingly slowly through the dense text and use Wright's PDFs to review before exams, you should be fine. Despite this, class is pure agony. Not only do you have to wait for his notes to scroll, but Professor Wright mumbles incomprehensibly, trails off, writes too lightly, dismisses or forgets students' questions, and erases his work before anyone has a chance to…