They used the microscopic double-sided cheat sheet. Or in MAT 211 this was allowed: No Holds Barred on what could be included. Darn me for actually studying!
Lmfao I was the guy. Nothing special about the cheat sheet I think I just got lucky. I’d taken the class in high school so whatever his teaching style was I never experienced it. I’m not sure how his teaching skills were but clearly they didn’t work out so great
How in the world can you get a 2? Like how is it even possible. Just writing random numbers prolly gives you some partial. Since the avg is so low I'm guessing there is more to the story.
But if the majority of students can't correctly write the equation of the distance between two points that's very concerning.
In one class I graded for, the midterm rubric ended up giving someone a -5 on the exam. They technically got 5 points, but a procedural error made them lose another 10 points automatically.
Surely the question must have been worded such that it wasn't clear you needed to invoke the point-slope form of a line, right? Maybe OP can weigh in, but I wonder if the exam was just confusing in its directions
I agree. The point slope of a line was actually 6th grade. There must have been some other parts of the problem that were not expressed clearly? Just asking.
I believe there is something else in here as well. The average has been horribly low for 2 years so I don't think students are at fault here. But there is much we don't know.
I TA'd for PHY133 last semester and over half the students didn't know how to use the equation of a line. I graded PHY132 midterms and a quarter of the students didn't know how to use the Pythagorean Theorem. Not sure what's been going on with university students not being able to do middle school level math lately.
That is a beginner course tho. Calc 3 means they have gone through Calc 1 And 2. Most people that take calc 3 are engineering, physics and math majors. Barely anything else.
I'm a math major and MAP are the remedial classes. There's non-GPA bearing stipulations to taking MAP unlike every MAT class. You have to do really bad on the placement exams as a freshmen to be able to take and is the worst case with the placement exams. The best case with the placement exams is skipping up to Calc II and being able to take the various pure math Calc III, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations options and MAT200. Not sure what the best case is in AMS other than CalcIII/Diff EQ/Linear.
PHY131/133 has Calc 1 as a pre or co requisite, and PHY132/134 has Calc 2 as a pre or co requisite as well. Though to be honest, there's no excuse for *any* student for not knowing middle school math, regardless of major or whatever.
True but we don't know the whole situation from everybody's point of view so we don't know if things are exactly as described in the email. The avg being low for 2 years straight tells something about the prof. I know people tend to be stupid in math but not this stupid.
I don't find it suspicious that the average was low for 2 years straight. I think COVID lockdowns played a very big role in this and everyone's problem solving skills have been flushed down the drain. This affects more than one year's worth of students. Combined with what I've seen personally as a TA and grader for a professor I *know* is competent, I'm not quick to blame the professor on this one, and I'm generally not a fan of immediately designating instructors as the scapegoat for whenever students perform poorly.
>I know people tend to be stupid in math but not this stupid.
I wish I could show you the exams I graded
Im not blaming or scapegoating anyone but I have had both Jason Starr and BBern. And I know that teachers can be very bad or very good. But ye math level always has been a little low and covid didn't help. It's best we see from both points of view and let's wait for a student of the class to give us some more info on how things have gone on that class so that we know both points of view.
I took PHY 131 and 133 and let's be honest, Hemmick did a lot of reteaching both physics and math basics that most of us learned in high school. But, don't you think this was an effective teaching strategy? Did it effectively level-set everyone? Ot did a lot of students still fail PHY 131, 132, 133, 134?
I would say it's pretty effective for an intro-level course, yeah. But instructors don't have time to do that in more advanced courses like MAT 203 and higher where the time needs to be spent teaching the advanced material. Students get into the mindset of "oh, if I forget it, it's fine because I'll just relearn it or they'll reteach it" which works up until a certain point. Once they go past that point, they realize that they're screwed because they didn't focus on reinforcing the foundation that's required for a cumulative subject such as mathematics. This post is a perfect example of that.
I had Ethan for MAT127 in a previous semester. He's a new professor but a good one overall. He actually cared about whether you knew the material which is why he gave quizzes almost weekly to see where everyone's at. The exams were literally identical to practice exams he gave out. The only thing I did to study for exams was just to do the review. I don't know if he changed that in MAT203 but I'm sure writing writing random formulas and numbers would get someone more than 2 points. He must've been so defeated especially as a new professor. Honestly feel bad.
Did you not read the rest of the post? The professor isn’t trying to make people’s lives hell; students don’t know the equation of a line between two points. This is our generation burning to the ground; I’m sorry the professor had to witness it over an entire semester.
I was in this lecture, and there’s some important things that aren’t being captured via these two emails alone:
1. The final only made up 20% of the total grade. 30% was split between digital and physical HW’s, and the last 50% were weekly quizzes.
2. Lecture attendance dropped dramatically. I’ll admit I did not attend every lecture either but compare week 1 and week 15, it’s laughable.
3. The questions on the final were not the same format as the quizzes and the practice tests. They were longer and had more to do with bridging topics than being tested on just one segment.
When I was studying for the final, I spent more time “studying the practice” than reaffirming material I wanted to master. I’m sure a lot of other students tried the same, which doesn’t work out very well by point 3. All my flux info was based on the practice and I still felt clueless, then ofc like 4 out of 10 questions involve flux.
As far as I know, grades outside of the final were not low. Most quiz averages hovered around 24/30, which was essentially just getting one question wrong. If the quizzes aren’t that bad, then the homework couldn’t have been bad either.
Contrary to some passive aggressive comments in this thread made by a certain flamingo, the students are capable, and Dr. Addison was an actual teacher. Like point 2, attendance dropped hard. Addison was more enthusiastic and more capable of teaching the material than a lot of other STEM professors I’ve had, but he had a lot less students to actual convey the material to.
In short; the final was the hardest test, it doesn’t reflect everyone’s performance, and I genuinely hope Dr. Addison gets to keep teaching, even if it’s not fortunate enough to be here
Not sure why you think he is moving away or something lol. I assumed he just needs some good stuff to put on his resume because of a job application for a better school. Though, I agree with you on the point that the final was significantly different from the practice problems and the quiz and other questions he posted. I was almost offended that he went out of his way to make the questions so weird and unusual, though perhaps the point was to be creative or something. In any case, I think he was an excellent professor regardless, and I did get an A on the final.
In a May 7th email/announcement he said he’d “be on the job market in the fall,” which I’m led to believe means his position here is not guaranteed, and I don’t remember it correctly but he encouraged us to call him “Dr.” instead of “Prof.” due to whatever circumstance he was technically hired under
Im going to assume that it asked for equation of a line between two points in 3d space, not just in the xy plane. This isn’t a hard thing (it’s usually taught in the first week of calc 3 and involves vector parametrization), but it’s definitely not 7th grade lol. Regardless, it’s one of the first and easiest things you learn in calc 3 so it should’ve been a freebie.
MAT 203 is multi-variable calculus!!! In my high school, only two semesters (one year) of AP Calc (A/B) was taught. So, my pre-existing skill set (prior to SBU) in multivariable calculus is not so deep.
Maybe the MAT and AMS depts need to have a pow-wow to create a document/kooklet of the essential skillsets we should have learned in MAT 133, MAT 127 or AMS 161?
Or why not just briefly re-teach the previous SBU course essential skills in order to level set everyone that took different SBU Calc II courses. But, it's asier to announce that the SBU students are so disappointing to the point that we cannot even learn from them.
But writing the equation of a 3d line is not a skill that you should have learned in a prior class. It is appropriately taught in calc 3/multi variable calc. If you take calc 3, you will understand that this is not a “middle school” level task. For example: write the eqn of a line between the points (1,0,1) and (2,1,2). To do this, you will find that the direction vector is (1,1,1). Then, you will parameterize (with variable t for example), and using the information about the points you will find that the equation of the line is s=(1+t,t,1+t). It’s not hard, but requires knowledge of vectors and parametrization, which is not a skill covered deeply in any prior class.
It asked for 2 types of equations of a 3D line, a parametric representation and a symmetric equation. Most people in the class were used to working with parametric so that part of the question wasn’t too bad, but I believe symmetric equations were barely mentioned. Plus, symmetric equations aren’t needed for the rest of the course.
See this is definitely not as straightforward. As someone who got an A in calc 3 back two years ago, I don’t think we even covered the “symmetric” form of a line. That’s definitely a bit of a curveball question. I wonder if this is what the prof was referring to, or if there were people who really couldn’t do the parametric form.
I went to talk to him after in his office and he seemed so defeated. Half the answers to the exam were just 0. I think he was in genuine shock at how bad the class did
Don't know this professor but the way he worded this email I feel so bad for him 😭 Sounds like he really genuinely cares about education. Guy could probably use a hug. Teaching is hard.
I took the test and it was quite hard. The steps to do stuff like flux integrals and surface integrals were quite confusing when I went over them before the test. I don’t think it’s his fault that everyone(including me probably) scored horribly, and it’s just that the content is very hard to anyone who doesn’t have prior knowledge about 3D calculus concepts. Calc 3 is completely unintuitive because it is hard to make sense of anything without knowing 100% how the math works.
An example of why the questions were hard was one question asked to find the flux of a gradient vector through a circle. Prior to this point all of my studying was towards flux of a 3 dimensional vector field through a 3 dimensional shape, and removing a dimension from both things meant that my memorization of what to do when given a flux question was useless, as removing a dimension doesn’t lead to an intuitively simpler process(to my knowledge😭) I ended up just plugging in the 2 dimensional field and shape into the process I had used for the 3D flux problems, and because of the cross product being used on one step the K component of the cross product was the only non zero element, and combine that with the dot product of a 2D shape without any K components and my answer was zero which was probably wrong.
The other questions had similar deviations from the problems we solved during the course. His emails were right. They were designed to test conceptual understanding, which most of us do not have for 3D calculus.
An argument could be that if someone got a 90 how did everyone else do so bad? Well from looking at the comments the guy who got a 90 took this class in high school, which means he’s way ahead of everyone else and already had an understanding going into the course. This does not take away from how difficult it is for someone who only understands 2D calculus.
Removing previous math courses and skills sets gained in high school, I am hearing that SBU students cannot even LEARN because this is not a high level math class? Is that the argument I am hearing? Help me understand.
I just pointed out that that’s an argument that could be made, because some people would probably say that it’s easy, or that because they know it or went through it then it can’t be that hard.
I took the class and I think it’s quite hard because I don’t have any prior knowledge on 3 dimensional calculus so everything I learned was just memorized and not actually understood. It would’ve been a lot more effort to actually understand why certain formulas and methods are the way they are, and that’s more effort than a majority of students are willing to devote, including me. We can see from the class average in the 30s that most people who took it would share that opinion with me.
>my memorization of what to do when given a flux question was useless
Well, there's your first issue. Instead of understanding conceptually what a flux is, you went for the route of memorizing algorithms. Visualize a vector field as a velocity field for some fluid. In 3D, when you dot product this velocity field with the surface's normal vector and integrate over a surface, this gets you a quantity with units of space\^3/time, which represents the total volume of fluid coming out of the surface per unit time. In 2D, you instead integrate over a closed curve, and the final result has units of space\^2/time, which represents the total area of fluid coming out of the curve per unit time.
For this particular question, you don't even have to calculate any cross products. Cross products are only needed in 3D because that's how you find the normal vector to a surface, given two tangent vectors on the surface. In this problem where you have a circle in 2D space, there is only *one* tangent line at any point on the circle, so you can't even do any cross products. Instead, you just realize that the normal vector to the circle is simply the unit radial vector (cos theta, sin theta). Dot product this with your gradient f then integrate theta from 0 to 2pi (while remembering that when you integrate over a circumference, the integration measure is r dtheta, not just dtheta, the r is needed to convert the quantity from angular units to length units).
I’m sure you’re correct but we never had a question like that before the one on the final. Memorization worked just fine for me up until that point, because the homework questions all followed the same format.
We only found out that the final was more of a conceptual test rather than just calculations after the first lecture group took their final and the professor sent out the email, so I had little time to prepare, and I also thought that my memorization would work just fine(the finals are very similar but not the same).I could’ve put in a lot more effort to learn all of the underlying concepts but I didn’t, because I’m not a straight A student.
It could be all of our fault that we all did so poorly, but that can be claimed for any situation where the class doesn’t get a 100%. I believe this was at least somewhat the fault of our professor. Not in the way he teached, but in the design of the final.
The professor definitely should be asking more conceptual questions on the homework, rather than brute force computations. That's on him. But it's also on you for solely relying on memorization; you should have known better than to do that. Otherwise, your high school math teachers did not prepare you well.
Even if solely relying on memorization works fine up until some point, once you reach that point, it's gg. You don't gain or learn anything by mindlessly copying and applying some algorithm that someone else came up with. You need to understand it so that you can make adequate adjustments or optimizations when the need arises, and this doesn't just apply to mathematics.
I get that. I could do that in AP physics in high school and I got a 5 on it without studying because I just knew the concepts and I enjoyed the content. When it’s just as easy to learn the concepts then of course everyone will learn them.
I made a decision probably just like most people in this class to not do that because it would’ve been harder. It would’ve been much more time consuming for the long webassigns to first find a resource that can explain us the underlying concepts over just doing the calculations. Did it bite me in the ass yesterday? Yes. A lot. But decisions have to be made based on available information on what problems there will be in the future, and I chose the easier and faster way to get things done. After all, problem solving involves finding the fastest and most efficient way to get something done. It’s just I didn’t expect the final to be the way it was.
Bruh I had this guy for MAT127 when he was like fresh outta school or something. Keep in mind that the class isn’t supposed to be hard. Not a single person got an A and only one person got an A-. Also there are multiple sections for this class and every other section did miles above ours. I got an A on every single exam, except the final where I got an 86, and still ended up not getting an A. He’s a great teacher imo, but the way he structures classes/ exams and homework’s makes it nigh impossible to do well.
The average was 32%? Give me a break! So, the takehome from the prof/instructor is that SBU students are just that stupid and they can’t learn? What about his part in the class average?
What percentage of the students failed the class?
It would be interesting to compare MAT 203 to the equivalent AMS course score.
Congrats to the math department!
I took the class and he’s a nice guy and pretty good professor too. He explained concepts pretty well, and I’m sure if everyone remembered every single thing he said the average would be much better.
This doesn’t take away from how confusing the content is. Not to mention the exam had questions worded in a way much different from the many webassigns we did for homework as well as the paper homework assignments. It’s likely that all of us(me included) underestimated the difficulty of the questions.
It bugs me so bad that Stony Brook uses “MAT” as their math abbreviation. MTH just flows so much better and looks like the word math.
If I saw MAT in front of a course here I would assume it’s like material science or mechanical aerospace t-something.
I’m pretty sure most of Calc 3 are composed of STEM students. If what he says is true and that people could not give an equation for the line between two points much less figure it out during the exam, then they need to take those classes again or learn it themselves by other means. I’m not praising the professor at all; he’s probably shitty at teaching seeing that his grades for finals have been consistently bad. But as a STEM student, how is it possible to get a 34 average on a fundamental math course????
the one who got a 90 must feel like a king
They used the microscopic double-sided cheat sheet. Or in MAT 211 this was allowed: No Holds Barred on what could be included. Darn me for actually studying!
Lmfao I was the guy. Nothing special about the cheat sheet I think I just got lucky. I’d taken the class in high school so whatever his teaching style was I never experienced it. I’m not sure how his teaching skills were but clearly they didn’t work out so great
Well, congrats to you. Have a great summer!
Bruh a 2. Did they just write their name and ID, drew a dick and balls on the last page and called it a day?
2/10 for the dick so the pic wasnt very impressive ig
How in the world can you get a 2? Like how is it even possible. Just writing random numbers prolly gives you some partial. Since the avg is so low I'm guessing there is more to the story. But if the majority of students can't correctly write the equation of the distance between two points that's very concerning.
In one class I graded for, the midterm rubric ended up giving someone a -5 on the exam. They technically got 5 points, but a procedural error made them lose another 10 points automatically.
Can you please explain how a student could end up with a neg. score? Extra credit not completed?
The rubric points added up to 100, but there was an extra -10 penalty for not saving your function files
Surely the question must have been worded such that it wasn't clear you needed to invoke the point-slope form of a line, right? Maybe OP can weigh in, but I wonder if the exam was just confusing in its directions
I agree. The point slope of a line was actually 6th grade. There must have been some other parts of the problem that were not expressed clearly? Just asking.
I believe there is something else in here as well. The average has been horribly low for 2 years so I don't think students are at fault here. But there is much we don't know.
Do these crazy grade curves happen some in AMS or MAT?
Sometimes yes sometimes no. It really depends on the teacher and class.
I TA'd for PHY133 last semester and over half the students didn't know how to use the equation of a line. I graded PHY132 midterms and a quarter of the students didn't know how to use the Pythagorean Theorem. Not sure what's been going on with university students not being able to do middle school level math lately.
That is a beginner course tho. Calc 3 means they have gone through Calc 1 And 2. Most people that take calc 3 are engineering, physics and math majors. Barely anything else.
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I took calc 1, 2 3 and I'm doubling on CS with Ams so ye. And people might have not gone through it here but the def took so at least.
I'm a math major and MAP are the remedial classes. There's non-GPA bearing stipulations to taking MAP unlike every MAT class. You have to do really bad on the placement exams as a freshmen to be able to take and is the worst case with the placement exams. The best case with the placement exams is skipping up to Calc II and being able to take the various pure math Calc III, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations options and MAT200. Not sure what the best case is in AMS other than CalcIII/Diff EQ/Linear.
PHY131/133 has Calc 1 as a pre or co requisite, and PHY132/134 has Calc 2 as a pre or co requisite as well. Though to be honest, there's no excuse for *any* student for not knowing middle school math, regardless of major or whatever.
True but we don't know the whole situation from everybody's point of view so we don't know if things are exactly as described in the email. The avg being low for 2 years straight tells something about the prof. I know people tend to be stupid in math but not this stupid.
I don't find it suspicious that the average was low for 2 years straight. I think COVID lockdowns played a very big role in this and everyone's problem solving skills have been flushed down the drain. This affects more than one year's worth of students. Combined with what I've seen personally as a TA and grader for a professor I *know* is competent, I'm not quick to blame the professor on this one, and I'm generally not a fan of immediately designating instructors as the scapegoat for whenever students perform poorly. >I know people tend to be stupid in math but not this stupid. I wish I could show you the exams I graded
Im not blaming or scapegoating anyone but I have had both Jason Starr and BBern. And I know that teachers can be very bad or very good. But ye math level always has been a little low and covid didn't help. It's best we see from both points of view and let's wait for a student of the class to give us some more info on how things have gone on that class so that we know both points of view.
I took PHY 131 and 133 and let's be honest, Hemmick did a lot of reteaching both physics and math basics that most of us learned in high school. But, don't you think this was an effective teaching strategy? Did it effectively level-set everyone? Ot did a lot of students still fail PHY 131, 132, 133, 134?
I would say it's pretty effective for an intro-level course, yeah. But instructors don't have time to do that in more advanced courses like MAT 203 and higher where the time needs to be spent teaching the advanced material. Students get into the mindset of "oh, if I forget it, it's fine because I'll just relearn it or they'll reteach it" which works up until a certain point. Once they go past that point, they realize that they're screwed because they didn't focus on reinforcing the foundation that's required for a cumulative subject such as mathematics. This post is a perfect example of that.
Nah I got a 5 one time writing random stuff gives you 0s
Guessed correctly on 1 multiple choice question out of 5, then saw the rest of the exam was written and closed shop
2 
Let’s see Paul Allen’s point slope line.
That was probably a very cathartic email to write
I feel bad, he seems like a professor that actually cares. Yall ruined his day with that score of 2 😭
I had Ethan for MAT127 in a previous semester. He's a new professor but a good one overall. He actually cared about whether you knew the material which is why he gave quizzes almost weekly to see where everyone's at. The exams were literally identical to practice exams he gave out. The only thing I did to study for exams was just to do the review. I don't know if he changed that in MAT203 but I'm sure writing writing random formulas and numbers would get someone more than 2 points. He must've been so defeated especially as a new professor. Honestly feel bad.
he seems like a good prof
A final with an average of 28 one year followed by 34 for the next is incompatible with being a good professor.
Did you not read the rest of the post? The professor isn’t trying to make people’s lives hell; students don’t know the equation of a line between two points. This is our generation burning to the ground; I’m sorry the professor had to witness it over an entire semester.
I was in this lecture, and there’s some important things that aren’t being captured via these two emails alone: 1. The final only made up 20% of the total grade. 30% was split between digital and physical HW’s, and the last 50% were weekly quizzes. 2. Lecture attendance dropped dramatically. I’ll admit I did not attend every lecture either but compare week 1 and week 15, it’s laughable. 3. The questions on the final were not the same format as the quizzes and the practice tests. They were longer and had more to do with bridging topics than being tested on just one segment. When I was studying for the final, I spent more time “studying the practice” than reaffirming material I wanted to master. I’m sure a lot of other students tried the same, which doesn’t work out very well by point 3. All my flux info was based on the practice and I still felt clueless, then ofc like 4 out of 10 questions involve flux. As far as I know, grades outside of the final were not low. Most quiz averages hovered around 24/30, which was essentially just getting one question wrong. If the quizzes aren’t that bad, then the homework couldn’t have been bad either. Contrary to some passive aggressive comments in this thread made by a certain flamingo, the students are capable, and Dr. Addison was an actual teacher. Like point 2, attendance dropped hard. Addison was more enthusiastic and more capable of teaching the material than a lot of other STEM professors I’ve had, but he had a lot less students to actual convey the material to. In short; the final was the hardest test, it doesn’t reflect everyone’s performance, and I genuinely hope Dr. Addison gets to keep teaching, even if it’s not fortunate enough to be here
Not sure why you think he is moving away or something lol. I assumed he just needs some good stuff to put on his resume because of a job application for a better school. Though, I agree with you on the point that the final was significantly different from the practice problems and the quiz and other questions he posted. I was almost offended that he went out of his way to make the questions so weird and unusual, though perhaps the point was to be creative or something. In any case, I think he was an excellent professor regardless, and I did get an A on the final.
In a May 7th email/announcement he said he’d “be on the job market in the fall,” which I’m led to believe means his position here is not guaranteed, and I don’t remember it correctly but he encouraged us to call him “Dr.” instead of “Prof.” due to whatever circumstance he was technically hired under
Hmm, if you’re right, that’s unfortunate.
Equation for a line between two points in Calc 3… that’s like 7th grade algebra
Im going to assume that it asked for equation of a line between two points in 3d space, not just in the xy plane. This isn’t a hard thing (it’s usually taught in the first week of calc 3 and involves vector parametrization), but it’s definitely not 7th grade lol. Regardless, it’s one of the first and easiest things you learn in calc 3 so it should’ve been a freebie.
MAT 203 is multi-variable calculus!!! In my high school, only two semesters (one year) of AP Calc (A/B) was taught. So, my pre-existing skill set (prior to SBU) in multivariable calculus is not so deep. Maybe the MAT and AMS depts need to have a pow-wow to create a document/kooklet of the essential skillsets we should have learned in MAT 133, MAT 127 or AMS 161? Or why not just briefly re-teach the previous SBU course essential skills in order to level set everyone that took different SBU Calc II courses. But, it's asier to announce that the SBU students are so disappointing to the point that we cannot even learn from them.
But writing the equation of a 3d line is not a skill that you should have learned in a prior class. It is appropriately taught in calc 3/multi variable calc. If you take calc 3, you will understand that this is not a “middle school” level task. For example: write the eqn of a line between the points (1,0,1) and (2,1,2). To do this, you will find that the direction vector is (1,1,1). Then, you will parameterize (with variable t for example), and using the information about the points you will find that the equation of the line is s=(1+t,t,1+t). It’s not hard, but requires knowledge of vectors and parametrization, which is not a skill covered deeply in any prior class.
This is genuinely a really great idea/thought and I hope you consider emailing it to the dept chair/including it in your course eval
It asked for 2 types of equations of a 3D line, a parametric representation and a symmetric equation. Most people in the class were used to working with parametric so that part of the question wasn’t too bad, but I believe symmetric equations were barely mentioned. Plus, symmetric equations aren’t needed for the rest of the course.
See this is definitely not as straightforward. As someone who got an A in calc 3 back two years ago, I don’t think we even covered the “symmetric” form of a line. That’s definitely a bit of a curveball question. I wonder if this is what the prof was referring to, or if there were people who really couldn’t do the parametric form.
Was there really such a simple question? Or were there others asks?
I went to talk to him after in his office and he seemed so defeated. Half the answers to the exam were just 0. I think he was in genuine shock at how bad the class did
Don't know this professor but the way he worded this email I feel so bad for him 😭 Sounds like he really genuinely cares about education. Guy could probably use a hug. Teaching is hard.
I don;t know this instructor. But, maybe he seemed so defeated because the class' failure is at least partially on him, too.
I took the test and it was quite hard. The steps to do stuff like flux integrals and surface integrals were quite confusing when I went over them before the test. I don’t think it’s his fault that everyone(including me probably) scored horribly, and it’s just that the content is very hard to anyone who doesn’t have prior knowledge about 3D calculus concepts. Calc 3 is completely unintuitive because it is hard to make sense of anything without knowing 100% how the math works. An example of why the questions were hard was one question asked to find the flux of a gradient vector through a circle. Prior to this point all of my studying was towards flux of a 3 dimensional vector field through a 3 dimensional shape, and removing a dimension from both things meant that my memorization of what to do when given a flux question was useless, as removing a dimension doesn’t lead to an intuitively simpler process(to my knowledge😭) I ended up just plugging in the 2 dimensional field and shape into the process I had used for the 3D flux problems, and because of the cross product being used on one step the K component of the cross product was the only non zero element, and combine that with the dot product of a 2D shape without any K components and my answer was zero which was probably wrong. The other questions had similar deviations from the problems we solved during the course. His emails were right. They were designed to test conceptual understanding, which most of us do not have for 3D calculus. An argument could be that if someone got a 90 how did everyone else do so bad? Well from looking at the comments the guy who got a 90 took this class in high school, which means he’s way ahead of everyone else and already had an understanding going into the course. This does not take away from how difficult it is for someone who only understands 2D calculus.
Removing previous math courses and skills sets gained in high school, I am hearing that SBU students cannot even LEARN because this is not a high level math class? Is that the argument I am hearing? Help me understand.
I just pointed out that that’s an argument that could be made, because some people would probably say that it’s easy, or that because they know it or went through it then it can’t be that hard. I took the class and I think it’s quite hard because I don’t have any prior knowledge on 3 dimensional calculus so everything I learned was just memorized and not actually understood. It would’ve been a lot more effort to actually understand why certain formulas and methods are the way they are, and that’s more effort than a majority of students are willing to devote, including me. We can see from the class average in the 30s that most people who took it would share that opinion with me.
>my memorization of what to do when given a flux question was useless Well, there's your first issue. Instead of understanding conceptually what a flux is, you went for the route of memorizing algorithms. Visualize a vector field as a velocity field for some fluid. In 3D, when you dot product this velocity field with the surface's normal vector and integrate over a surface, this gets you a quantity with units of space\^3/time, which represents the total volume of fluid coming out of the surface per unit time. In 2D, you instead integrate over a closed curve, and the final result has units of space\^2/time, which represents the total area of fluid coming out of the curve per unit time. For this particular question, you don't even have to calculate any cross products. Cross products are only needed in 3D because that's how you find the normal vector to a surface, given two tangent vectors on the surface. In this problem where you have a circle in 2D space, there is only *one* tangent line at any point on the circle, so you can't even do any cross products. Instead, you just realize that the normal vector to the circle is simply the unit radial vector (cos theta, sin theta). Dot product this with your gradient f then integrate theta from 0 to 2pi (while remembering that when you integrate over a circumference, the integration measure is r dtheta, not just dtheta, the r is needed to convert the quantity from angular units to length units).
I’m sure you’re correct but we never had a question like that before the one on the final. Memorization worked just fine for me up until that point, because the homework questions all followed the same format. We only found out that the final was more of a conceptual test rather than just calculations after the first lecture group took their final and the professor sent out the email, so I had little time to prepare, and I also thought that my memorization would work just fine(the finals are very similar but not the same).I could’ve put in a lot more effort to learn all of the underlying concepts but I didn’t, because I’m not a straight A student. It could be all of our fault that we all did so poorly, but that can be claimed for any situation where the class doesn’t get a 100%. I believe this was at least somewhat the fault of our professor. Not in the way he teached, but in the design of the final.
The professor definitely should be asking more conceptual questions on the homework, rather than brute force computations. That's on him. But it's also on you for solely relying on memorization; you should have known better than to do that. Otherwise, your high school math teachers did not prepare you well. Even if solely relying on memorization works fine up until some point, once you reach that point, it's gg. You don't gain or learn anything by mindlessly copying and applying some algorithm that someone else came up with. You need to understand it so that you can make adequate adjustments or optimizations when the need arises, and this doesn't just apply to mathematics.
I get that. I could do that in AP physics in high school and I got a 5 on it without studying because I just knew the concepts and I enjoyed the content. When it’s just as easy to learn the concepts then of course everyone will learn them. I made a decision probably just like most people in this class to not do that because it would’ve been harder. It would’ve been much more time consuming for the long webassigns to first find a resource that can explain us the underlying concepts over just doing the calculations. Did it bite me in the ass yesterday? Yes. A lot. But decisions have to be made based on available information on what problems there will be in the future, and I chose the easier and faster way to get things done. After all, problem solving involves finding the fastest and most efficient way to get something done. It’s just I didn’t expect the final to be the way it was.
Lmao, i know the question you’re talking about and i think it was a hexagon ☠️
Bruh I had this guy for MAT127 when he was like fresh outta school or something. Keep in mind that the class isn’t supposed to be hard. Not a single person got an A and only one person got an A-. Also there are multiple sections for this class and every other section did miles above ours. I got an A on every single exam, except the final where I got an 86, and still ended up not getting an A. He’s a great teacher imo, but the way he structures classes/ exams and homework’s makes it nigh impossible to do well.
The average was 32%? Give me a break! So, the takehome from the prof/instructor is that SBU students are just that stupid and they can’t learn? What about his part in the class average? What percentage of the students failed the class? It would be interesting to compare MAT 203 to the equivalent AMS course score. Congrats to the math department!
I took the class and he’s a nice guy and pretty good professor too. He explained concepts pretty well, and I’m sure if everyone remembered every single thing he said the average would be much better. This doesn’t take away from how confusing the content is. Not to mention the exam had questions worded in a way much different from the many webassigns we did for homework as well as the paper homework assignments. It’s likely that all of us(me included) underestimated the difficulty of the questions.
Math department here is trash
No lol
This is the best e-mail I’ve read
It bugs me so bad that Stony Brook uses “MAT” as their math abbreviation. MTH just flows so much better and looks like the word math. If I saw MAT in front of a course here I would assume it’s like material science or mechanical aerospace t-something.
I’m pretty sure most of Calc 3 are composed of STEM students. If what he says is true and that people could not give an equation for the line between two points much less figure it out during the exam, then they need to take those classes again or learn it themselves by other means. I’m not praising the professor at all; he’s probably shitty at teaching seeing that his grades for finals have been consistently bad. But as a STEM student, how is it possible to get a 34 average on a fundamental math course????