Marcel Nutz

Run. If he ever teaches this class again, either take another probability course or take it another semester with someone else. Right now since I am taking subsequent courses in the stats department, I realize the Professor never covered many important concepts that are supposed to be taught in Probability Theory, like Chi-square and some other important distributions, Central Limit Theorem, Law of Great Numbers... It's a pain.

Homework would take minimum 8 hours. Expect to have to read the textbook on your own and use other tools to learn the material.

This was the worst class I've taken at Columbia by far. The material was challenging and the professor did little to explain the intuition behind any of the concepts. Copying down proofs from the textbook is useless if you don't know how the proofs are derived. The prerequisites of this course imply that someone with limited math knowledge and no stats background could join, but the material says otherwise. The TAs were so unhelpful, providing no guidance for students that were clearly stressed about the exams because they never followed what was given on the practice. You would think that after having a midterm average of 38% that there would be more attention towards helping students prepare for the final, but instead we covered 3 full chapters in 3 just classes and were given no direction as to what extent we were supposed to understand the material.

Most amazing professor ever!! Very nice, very clean hand writing, helpful lecture content. Professor Nutz answers questions patiently and makes the class very enjoyable.

The problem sets were so effing long that I would spend two hours actually doing a single problem and then resort to googling because there was no way to conscientiously think through that volume of homework. I would often start trying to do a problem, sink an hour or two and hit a dead end, and then google the solution and realize it was on material not covered in class, and that I would never have come to that answer given what I had "learned" from lecture. Exams and homeworks required a lot of outside the box thinking, which would have been fine if we had learned enough material to think about. Abstract and creative angles of material given a barely cursory mention during lectures made the material on the final largely impenetrable, both during the test and in the nightmarish weeks of study beforehand, during which I felt like I was putting my head through the wall with how little I understood and retained from lecture.

This class was the most stressful, unnecessarily infuriating, and meaninglessly difficult course of my Columbia career. Coming from someone who generally enjoys and is good at math, I might as well have been taking the midterms and finals for another class with the amount I understood on those exams. The TAs seem to enjoy letting people freak out on the Ed, which the professor does not know exists, and asking the most basic questions like "will this material be on the test" was like messaging an unhelpful, mean, and often sassy bot. The worst part is, I don't even think I learned that much! The HW was often completely disconnected from lecture materials, leading me to google everything instead of recalling and applying the lecture content. Other reviews have mentioned this, but I cannot stress enough how mind numbing it is to listen to a professor read the textbook aloud while producing scribbles so ineligible that many people just followed along with the textbook while he talked rather than trying to copy down his notes. If I wanted to listen to a probability textbook as an audiobook for some reason, I could do that on my own time. When asked a question, Professor Nutz would scan the book for a moment, and if the question was not answered verbatim on the page right in front of him, he would say "I don't know." The worst part is, I do not think my understanding of probability…

2-3 hours of preparation for each class, then like 10 hour problem sets. Make sure to start early because they suck and OHs are NECESSARY.

BAD BAD BAD BAD BAD. I originally signed up for this because I was looking forward to having a hard class. The problem, however, was not the content, but the professor. Nutz just read off the textbook without ever teaching the content itself and was very dismissive of those who did not understand, saying things like "for the nuckleheads who do not understand...". Very rude IMO. The content itself is not too bad, you just have to be able to piece it together in your head. My advice, save yourself the lecture time (or just use it as review) and instead spent 2-3 hours on each reading instead. Make sure that you understand everything, do problems, and circle back frequently.