Mark Brown

Please dont take this class. he's a fine person, it's just that the stats department at this school is so absurdly bad it's ridiculous.

For the love of god. Do not take this class. Required for the Stat major? Change your major. Do a joint Stat major that doesn't require it. Do Comparative Literature, or Biology, or something. The undergrad Statistics department at Columbia is an enormously practical joke, anyway. Mark Brown seems nice enough as a person. He is, by far and away, the worst teacher I have ever had in my entire educational life. The slides, produced in 2016 (this review is being written for Fall 2018), have several typos per lecture, which professor Brown compensates for by uploading a scan of a hand written piece of paper detailing the typos (in no particular order). When it isn't outright wrong, the content in the slides itself is totally meaningless. Concepts and formulas are introduced with little or no explanation, and are completely irrelevant to the skills you need to answer homework and exam questions. Maybe, you say, you could just be part of the 80% (sometimes 90%) of students that skip lecture altogether, and learn by doing practice midterms and exams from previous semesters. While professor Brown does indeed upload several terms worth of previous exams, they are also practically useless. The solution sets, more hand written, difficult to read documents, contain no explanation of how to solve any problems; answers are usually the final number and nothing else, or a single line of equat…

Professor Brown seems like a nice man with good intentions, but I wouldn't advise taking a class with him if you'd like to actually learn the material. He posts handwritten notes on courseworks and reads from them as they are projected on a screen in class... this is how he teaches math problems. To make matters worse his handwriting is hard to read at times. However, it is definitely possible to get a decent grade from the class. I did not do well on the midterm and did even worse on the final, but somehow received a good grade. So this means that pretty much everyone in the class had no idea what they were doing.

There are few professors at Columbia which every student I have talked to dislikes, at Mark Brown manages to be one of them. This class is not actually very difficult, nor does it move fast, so it is probably best for you to learn from the textbook (which isn't amazing but not horrible) rather than go to class. The best option is to read the textbook and then supplement it with class, but if you do go to class (like I did), you should, at minimum, skim the textbook, or you will be horribly lost. Professor Brown gives little context for what he is doing. He does not tell you what he is trying to prove (which makes following proofs difficult since you have no idea where he is headed) and he rarely explains the conceptual nuance of what is going on. He also spends almost all his time in class proving things whereas, apart from the Extra Credit on the final exam, every exam and homework question is an application question, which means understanding the proofs is of little to no help in tackling the homeworks or exams. Apart from his inability to explain concepts, Mark Brown rarely pays attention to his students. He is 50/50 with being able to understand student questions, he rarely responds to email (and if he does, he is rude), and he doesn't return homework in a timely manner (we got a homework due in October returned on the last day of class). Overall, the material covered in t…

Professor Brown is very helpful. His notes are life safer! the problem sets he gives would clear up most of the confusion you got in class. His lectures can be little dull at times, and sometimes he goes really fast. But the materials in this class is so hard that I really can't see how much better a lecture can get. Bottomland is I know Prof Brown would be there when I have questions, and answer my questions patiently with respect ( unlike some other senior individuals in the faculty). So I'm very satisfied with the education I got from this course.

basics of probability, different distributions.

Never, ever, ever take prof. brown (YES, YOU. take this warning seriously). His definition of teaching is reading handwritten slides that are completely illegible half the time. To add to the immense confusion one feels from the horrible mess of chicken scratch that is his lecture notes and practice problems, his documents often have mistakes that he only amends days after lecture (there is an abundance of pdfs on coursework with amendments/corrections to notes). In line with this, trying to find the docs u need on courseworks is like trying to find a needle in a really really large haystack. His psets and practice problems are near impossible without a group of people with a shit ton of free time to dissect each question's meaning. The only saving grace from this hellhole was our TA, who made the exams more reasonable than Brown's practice problems. Nevertheless, the severe lack of preparation I had for even the 'easier' questions made this class fucking impossible. God I hate columbia's statistics department, and this class made me hate it even more. Note: A lot of these problems stem from the online setting and prof. brown is a really really sweet guy, all things considered. For me, supportive and nice professors typically compensate for difficult content and poor teaching, but this was waaaaaaay past my threshold for that.

Professor Brown is a nice person, but his class is the worst I have ever taken at Columbia. If your major has something to do with STAT, unfortunately you have to take this class with no choice. But definitely go to his office hours, which would restore some of your trust and hope in this course. That said, this class like many offered by the STAT department is really bad in terms of delivery and would require your reading the textbook or lecture notes on your own. He is generous in terms of grades.

He's actually a nice guy if you go to his office hours. On the other hand, he's very strange and hard to digest. His lectures are dense with proofs and unrelated material to the class. For example, he would talk about moment generating functions during most lectures, but they would not appear on a single assignment or test. Further, none of the assignments or tests have a single proof. His lectures had only maybe 20% of the students showing up (I'm not sure why I even attended since it was hard to pay attention). Not recommended, but sometimes he's your only option

4 Homework Assignments. Yes, only 4. They aren't very long. (25%) Midterm Exam. Very Easy (25%) Final Exam. Moderate to Easy. Harder than Midterm. (50%)