Quote:
Originally Posted by n_kissoon
What was so bad about Prof Riller; I mean specifically? He's teaching natural disasters this term, sooo any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks
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It's kind of confusing, and it happened over a year ago, so hopefully I can remember everything. This will probably be very long!
The class itself wasn't hard. He made it hard. I don't know if it's because he had problems with English or if it was just a gigantic mistake - I don't know.
Basically, we had a midterm that made up A LOT of a grade. I don't remember how much exactly, but it was enough that if you failed the midterm, your chances of passing the class weren't very good.
The midterm was 30 multiple choice questions. He did this weird thing where you could pick more than one answer. It wasn't like
What colour is the sky with clouds?
a. blue
b. green
c. white
d. a and c
It was like
What colour is the sky with clouds?
a. blue
b. green
c. white
And you circled in a AND c
So our problem was (which we had the same problems with the online quizzes beforehand) "Which questions have more than one answer?"
He told us "All I can tell you is that it's very obvious which questions have more than one answer and which don't"
There was ONE question on the midterm that said "What colour is the sky with clouds? Multiple answers available" so we all assumed, of course this is the only one with multiple answers.
But it turns out, he just wrote "Multiple answers available" on that question for no reason. There were many other questions that had multiple answers, but we didn't know that. Only one said "Multiple answers available", and he told us it would be very obvious, so why should we think otherwise?
*And yes, some people say in regards to this situation, "If you know the information, you should know the answer" BUT it wasn't that clear. It was like when profs say "Choose the BEST answer", but you don't know if they want the best answer or all answers.
My big personal problem with him is: a LOT of people failed. I think there were 35+ students discussing it on WebCT (in a class of 200, that's quite a few). We all asked him to reconsider the amount it was worth, maybe make our final worth more marks. I personally emailed him saying "I don't want to drop this class because I like it, but the drop date is on Friday, so if you plan on changing around the marks, would you let us know by then?". His response to that was "The point of a test isn't to keep retaking it until everyone is happy with their marks". So I waited and dropped the class on the very last day possible (meaning I didn't get a CENT back of what I paid for the course) - and he ended up changing the marking scheme on the following Monday.
Anyway, the point is - we were tested on whether or not we could figure out his word play rather than our knowledge of the course.
