Professor
Guani Wu
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2020 - I'm a poli sci major that hates math, but Wu made this fairly painless. He's an incredibly nice, personable, and helpful professor that clearly cares about students succeeding. The content isn't that interesting but Wu teaches in a very clear manner that made it fairly easy. It is easy to get behind, however, so I'd recommend staying on top of lectures and actually reading the textbook (I think I'd space out on a lot of the lectures if I didn't have the textbook's background knowledge). The lab portion of Stats 10 is totally ridiculous, but most TA's walk you through it step by step so it's fine. Wu writes pretty hard exams, as well. The midterm was easy but he used relatively confusing language that lead to the mean score in the class being 73. The final was also hard, with a mean score of a 72... so take studying for the tests seriously. In my class he curved pretty generously (dropped a few low scores and rounded some things up, I believe), but I'm not sure if this is the norm. If you have to take stats 10, Professor Wu is a good person to take it with!
Fall 2020 - I'm a poli sci major that hates math, but Wu made this fairly painless. He's an incredibly nice, personable, and helpful professor that clearly cares about students succeeding. The content isn't that interesting but Wu teaches in a very clear manner that made it fairly easy. It is easy to get behind, however, so I'd recommend staying on top of lectures and actually reading the textbook (I think I'd space out on a lot of the lectures if I didn't have the textbook's background knowledge). The lab portion of Stats 10 is totally ridiculous, but most TA's walk you through it step by step so it's fine. Wu writes pretty hard exams, as well. The midterm was easy but he used relatively confusing language that lead to the mean score in the class being 73. The final was also hard, with a mean score of a 72... so take studying for the tests seriously. In my class he curved pretty generously (dropped a few low scores and rounded some things up, I believe), but I'm not sure if this is the norm. If you have to take stats 10, Professor Wu is a good person to take it with!
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2020 - I want to start off by saying I have never taken a stats class before, at first I was extremely nervous to take this class with this particular professor due to the amount of things the professor did to prevent cheating. Both exams were on respondus and we had to have our phones on zoom with the camera directed on our hands. As someone who already gets anxiety during exams, this policy did not really help ease it, I will say I was much more calm during the final though as I knew it was not as bad as i had initially thought. To break the class down, lecture attendance counted as extra credit (max 1%) and were recorded/uploaded to ccle, at first the professor would only leave the lectures up for 3 days and then we were not allowed to watch them, but for some reason he just removed this restriction after the midterm. Labs/HW were both worth 20% of our grades (so together 40%), the hw's were pretty easy, labs I hated simply because I did not understand the purpose of them, grading will depend heavily on your TA. I personally had Jireh and he was amazing at explaining concepts and was an overall very good TA. The midterm and Final were both worth 30% each, and were both mc. The final was not cumulative and was everything after the midterm, both exams were not focused on calculation, rather they were heavily conceptual. Overall, I think I stressed about this class a lot more than I should have, professor Wu does have a very monotone voice, but he is very good at explaining most concepts and would try to interact with the students during lecture. I definitely think that this class was very fair, after taking this class I appreciate the security measures implemented to prevent cheating, as I think my final grade would have been a lot different if they weren't. In all, the best way to describe my experience with this professor was fair, it was not super easy but if you put in the effort it should have not been extremely hard.
Summer 2020 - I want to start off by saying I have never taken a stats class before, at first I was extremely nervous to take this class with this particular professor due to the amount of things the professor did to prevent cheating. Both exams were on respondus and we had to have our phones on zoom with the camera directed on our hands. As someone who already gets anxiety during exams, this policy did not really help ease it, I will say I was much more calm during the final though as I knew it was not as bad as i had initially thought. To break the class down, lecture attendance counted as extra credit (max 1%) and were recorded/uploaded to ccle, at first the professor would only leave the lectures up for 3 days and then we were not allowed to watch them, but for some reason he just removed this restriction after the midterm. Labs/HW were both worth 20% of our grades (so together 40%), the hw's were pretty easy, labs I hated simply because I did not understand the purpose of them, grading will depend heavily on your TA. I personally had Jireh and he was amazing at explaining concepts and was an overall very good TA. The midterm and Final were both worth 30% each, and were both mc. The final was not cumulative and was everything after the midterm, both exams were not focused on calculation, rather they were heavily conceptual. Overall, I think I stressed about this class a lot more than I should have, professor Wu does have a very monotone voice, but he is very good at explaining most concepts and would try to interact with the students during lecture. I definitely think that this class was very fair, after taking this class I appreciate the security measures implemented to prevent cheating, as I think my final grade would have been a lot different if they weren't. In all, the best way to describe my experience with this professor was fair, it was not super easy but if you put in the effort it should have not been extremely hard.