Shelby Kimmel

This is already a very difficult course, and in my experience, the way it was taught made it significantly harder than it needed to be. I often felt that I learned more efficiently by teaching myself the material outside of class than by listening to the lectures. The biggest issue is the lack of clear and concise explanations. Relatively simple concepts can take an unnecessarily long time to explain, and the explanation often becomes more confusing instead of more helpful. In a course where the material is already challenging, this makes the learning experience extremely frustrating. The professor clearly puts effort into the course, but effort alone does not make the teaching effective. Strong subject knowledge and strong teaching ability are not the same thing, and I do not think the lectures consistently demonstrate the ability to communicate difficult ideas in a clear, structured, and understandable way. If you are considering taking this course, be prepared to do a large amount of independent learning. This is not a class where I would recommend relying primarily on the lectures to understand the material.

This is already a very difficult course, and in my experience, the way it was taught made it significantly harder than it needed to be. I often felt that I learned more efficiently by teaching myself the material outside of class than by listening to the lectures. The biggest issue is the lack of clear and concise explanations. Relat …Read more

This class had a lot of things at many levels of hardship. It is really important that you not only pay attention in class but also make use of the office hours, since it gets harder and harder to remember things. But the problem sets are useful.

Professor Kimmel follows an objectives based grading system which is very forgiving and allows for reattempts on skills. Lectures are very foundational but often leave out a lot of intuition which usually needs to be supplemented with office hours or external learning in some manner.