Professor
Daniel Mckeown
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2024 - Personally, I disagree with the reviews below this one. McKeown's an interesting, quirky, and cool guy, but his class is interesting (in a bad way). I normally don't write bruinwalk reviews but felt the need for this one because the professor could make a lot of adjustments to make the class even better. Out of all of the physics classes I've taken, his class was the easiest, yet I managed to do the worst in it, which I think this is due to the way the class is taught and ran. His slides are an absolute mess. Slides are supposed to supplement the textbook, summarize the material, and make learning easier for students. His slides are literally just screenshots of every paragraph in the textbook, and the textbook is relatively mediocre at explaining concepts. Screenshots normally don't bother me but when your powerpoints are over 100 slides long just to explain a concept that can be explained in a few bullet points, I have to reconsider. The lack of effort put into these slides is especially annoying during lecture as he just reads off of them. The textbook will occasionally talk about deriving an equation by "adding equation 32.21 and 32.18" and he will just screenshot that and read it word for word during lecture... How are we supposed to know what equation 32.21 and 32.18 are!? It would really help if he wrote his own notes instead of reading off his screenshots from the textbook as he is not that bad at explaining some things. Now, let's talk discussion. I normally go to every discussion for every, single class I take, but this class managed to discourage me from going to discussion. Discussion does not add anything really to McKeown's class. The TA just retypes homework questions in LaTeX and tells us to work on problems. I could see it as helpful if you're not finished with the homework, but if you are, there is really no point in going. It would be nice if new, original problems were written that were a bit more challenging to students rather than something we could just find by scrolling the homework. That way, we would actually be learning some new applications and skills that could help us in our upper divisions. Lastly, I do not like the tests in this class. Tests seem to just be measuring if we can convert units. Seriously, I think some of his questions are pulled from the textbook as they have so little to do with physics and rely more so on unit conversion and plug and chug (this isn't a high-school chemistry test on dimensional analysis). The exams would be a lot better if they were just in terms of variables. Myself, and a lot of other students, have lost many points due to calculator and unit errors, which is pretty dumb as that doesn't test our ability to understand physics but rather out ability to use a calculator and convert units. Tests are also pretty poorly formatted. I don't know why he writes them the way he does, but everything just looks like its screenshotted from the textbook and pasted into a google doc. For example, sometimes he pastes the figure in the middle of the question and his questions usually either give too much room for work, or not enough. He gives designated space for each question which is nice, but I think it would be easier if he just wrote the question at the top of one page, and gave us space underneath it so that one question takes up one page and we wouldn't have to flip back and forth. It would also really help if he used equation editor (not a joke). McKeown's tests are some of the most poorly formatted/ugly exams I have seen; they hurt to look at. Text is unnecessary big and any values or variables given are not typed into equation editor so they look extremely messy and hard to read (ex. m_electron = 9.109x10^-31kg is something you'll have to get used to dealing with and reading). McKeown often also stresses that the average for the class should be around a B-, and his tests get him there but not in the way they should. Instead of making questions difficult and more physics-oriented, the points you lose seem to come from calculation mistakes and incorrect units. I don't think it makes sense if your class average is reached not because the concepts tested were hard but rather because your students made mistakes because the units given on a test were funky. Advice for future students: take McKeown if you want a fair, easygoing professor, but don't expect to learn the concepts as well as students who take it with other professors. I personally regret taking it with McKeown as I feel as if I learned more on my own from videos and from just doing the homework than from the professor himself. Unless he changes his ways, I would recommend to suffer a little more and take a different professor as you'll learn the concepts better.
Spring 2024 - Personally, I disagree with the reviews below this one. McKeown's an interesting, quirky, and cool guy, but his class is interesting (in a bad way). I normally don't write bruinwalk reviews but felt the need for this one because the professor could make a lot of adjustments to make the class even better. Out of all of the physics classes I've taken, his class was the easiest, yet I managed to do the worst in it, which I think this is due to the way the class is taught and ran. His slides are an absolute mess. Slides are supposed to supplement the textbook, summarize the material, and make learning easier for students. His slides are literally just screenshots of every paragraph in the textbook, and the textbook is relatively mediocre at explaining concepts. Screenshots normally don't bother me but when your powerpoints are over 100 slides long just to explain a concept that can be explained in a few bullet points, I have to reconsider. The lack of effort put into these slides is especially annoying during lecture as he just reads off of them. The textbook will occasionally talk about deriving an equation by "adding equation 32.21 and 32.18" and he will just screenshot that and read it word for word during lecture... How are we supposed to know what equation 32.21 and 32.18 are!? It would really help if he wrote his own notes instead of reading off his screenshots from the textbook as he is not that bad at explaining some things. Now, let's talk discussion. I normally go to every discussion for every, single class I take, but this class managed to discourage me from going to discussion. Discussion does not add anything really to McKeown's class. The TA just retypes homework questions in LaTeX and tells us to work on problems. I could see it as helpful if you're not finished with the homework, but if you are, there is really no point in going. It would be nice if new, original problems were written that were a bit more challenging to students rather than something we could just find by scrolling the homework. That way, we would actually be learning some new applications and skills that could help us in our upper divisions. Lastly, I do not like the tests in this class. Tests seem to just be measuring if we can convert units. Seriously, I think some of his questions are pulled from the textbook as they have so little to do with physics and rely more so on unit conversion and plug and chug (this isn't a high-school chemistry test on dimensional analysis). The exams would be a lot better if they were just in terms of variables. Myself, and a lot of other students, have lost many points due to calculator and unit errors, which is pretty dumb as that doesn't test our ability to understand physics but rather out ability to use a calculator and convert units. Tests are also pretty poorly formatted. I don't know why he writes them the way he does, but everything just looks like its screenshotted from the textbook and pasted into a google doc. For example, sometimes he pastes the figure in the middle of the question and his questions usually either give too much room for work, or not enough. He gives designated space for each question which is nice, but I think it would be easier if he just wrote the question at the top of one page, and gave us space underneath it so that one question takes up one page and we wouldn't have to flip back and forth. It would also really help if he used equation editor (not a joke). McKeown's tests are some of the most poorly formatted/ugly exams I have seen; they hurt to look at. Text is unnecessary big and any values or variables given are not typed into equation editor so they look extremely messy and hard to read (ex. m_electron = 9.109x10^-31kg is something you'll have to get used to dealing with and reading). McKeown often also stresses that the average for the class should be around a B-, and his tests get him there but not in the way they should. Instead of making questions difficult and more physics-oriented, the points you lose seem to come from calculation mistakes and incorrect units. I don't think it makes sense if your class average is reached not because the concepts tested were hard but rather because your students made mistakes because the units given on a test were funky. Advice for future students: take McKeown if you want a fair, easygoing professor, but don't expect to learn the concepts as well as students who take it with other professors. I personally regret taking it with McKeown as I feel as if I learned more on my own from videos and from just doing the homework than from the professor himself. Unless he changes his ways, I would recommend to suffer a little more and take a different professor as you'll learn the concepts better.
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2024 - I had Dr. McKeown for Physics 5A (for some reason not listed here), and going into the course, I was concerned that we would be learning a lot of irrelevant, technical physics that wasn't related to my career path as a pre-med student. However, this wasn't the case, as Dr. McKeown correctly designed this course to be relevant to pre-med students by including topics and concepts that are actually relevant to biology and medicine. Because of this, I was interested in the topics of this course and found what we had to learn to be intriguing rather than tedious. Additionally, Dr. McKeown's lectures were helpful, on-task, and weren't boring. He always stopped to take questions from students and clarified everything thoroughly, which not all professors do. I felt that our quizzes and tests were very reasonable and had nothing unexpected/surprising that strayed from the lectures/homework. I also appreciated how he gave us unlimited attempts/graded the homework on completion, rather than correctness, so we could actually use it as a learning source and not an assessment. Overall, I would highly recommend taking a course with Dr. McKeown as he is passionate about Physics, and teaching his students in an effective and legitimate manner. You definitely won't regret taking a class with him.
Summer 2024 - I had Dr. McKeown for Physics 5A (for some reason not listed here), and going into the course, I was concerned that we would be learning a lot of irrelevant, technical physics that wasn't related to my career path as a pre-med student. However, this wasn't the case, as Dr. McKeown correctly designed this course to be relevant to pre-med students by including topics and concepts that are actually relevant to biology and medicine. Because of this, I was interested in the topics of this course and found what we had to learn to be intriguing rather than tedious. Additionally, Dr. McKeown's lectures were helpful, on-task, and weren't boring. He always stopped to take questions from students and clarified everything thoroughly, which not all professors do. I felt that our quizzes and tests were very reasonable and had nothing unexpected/surprising that strayed from the lectures/homework. I also appreciated how he gave us unlimited attempts/graded the homework on completion, rather than correctness, so we could actually use it as a learning source and not an assessment. Overall, I would highly recommend taking a course with Dr. McKeown as he is passionate about Physics, and teaching his students in an effective and legitimate manner. You definitely won't regret taking a class with him.
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