Michelle Levine

Weekly 2 discussion posts (each ~300 words), 3 assignments and one semester long project in groups of 2-3. many hours a week on the project

I wish I had checked culpa reviews before taking this class. The reviews on here are old , but they're all true. Prof. Levine is the worst professor I've had at Columbia by far. She is not empathetic and assumes the worst intentions in all her students. On top of that, she does not know how to give constructive feedback, or just even any feedback at all. She will criticize the work you turn in by literally saying "I don't even know where to begin with how bad this is" and then continues to not even outline what the problem is. When we meet with her outside of class to go over her feedback, she is still extremely vague as to what she wants. This class in theory and in content is simple, but pleasing Prof. Levine felt like an impossible task the entire semester. She is condescending and not once have I felt like a professor didn't want their students to succeed. If you want to do well its going to be emotionally draining and physically time consuming. Even though my group ended up with a good grade in the class, I would seriously not take this if I could go back in time.

She is the worst "professor" I've ever encountered at Barnard. She should be fired. When I graduate in a few years, I intend upon writing a letter outlining the various reasons why she's a bad instructor and how she ruins the lab experience. She's the kind of professor that makes me not want to donate to this school, ever. She is not clear. She does not explain anything well, and expects her students to magically figure out what she was TRYING to say. Not only that, she is crazy, mean, and unfair. The only way you're going to do well in this class is if you are a gifted academic, a senior, a psych major, or a total suck up - with emphasis on the latter. An example: this semester, she randomly broke out in a yelling fit because she felt not enough people were participating during the mental rotation lab. She literally made a girl cry. Keep in mind that this lab class is full of people who don't know psychology well (no less understand the complexities of MENTAL ROTATION) and are just trying to fill the requirement. Most don't have anything insightful to say, and if they did, they wouldn't know when or how to say it because she is so unbelievably unclear. Oh and by the way, she'll try and dock points off of your grade in any way she can. If she doesn't like you (she picks and chooses random people to not like), you're screwed. The bottom line is you should stay far away from her…

Weekly discussion posts, 3 assignments, group project. Extremely hard to figure out what she wanted for the group project. No assignment had a rubric, so you could pretty much receive any grade.

Do not, and I mean DO NOT, take a class with this professor. Not only is she a bad teacher, but I don't think I've ever taken a course where I felt like the professor truly did not want to see us succeed. Prof Levine spent an entire semester individually threatening to fail everyone. She would constantly be aggressive, rude, and degrading in all interactions that students would have with her. She would also frequently forget things she’d said and then penalize students for it. I’m not sure why and how this professor is still able to teach, but if you want to spend a semester pandering to someone whose goal is to give you a hard time, take this class.

3 homework assignments (10% each) the first one was a literature review that was graded the most harshly (but opportunity for a redo if you did bad). Weekly Online Discussion Board (1-3 topics posted by classmates per week, have to read article and then answer question prompts and write response for full credit each week. Final project that includes doing a "big data" research project mostly groups of two but a few groups of three and a few people worked alone. You got to pick your topic and she helped with group forming. Presented at the end and most of the topics were pretty interesting and creative. Grading got done within a week for almost everything which was nice.

This course covers "big data" including research methods in traditional lab based research and how it translates to scraping data from the web. Had some interesting conversations about ethics. Class lectures were moderately interesting, but you could also do other stuff if needed because there are no tests and slides get posted. Overall mid class, could be very helpful if you want to do research teaches a lot about methods and how to conduct studies using big data, forming hypothesis, some basic stats, presenting your findings ect. Professor was pretty open to meeting outside of class to help with project.