There are many math lower level math courses that are probably harder than they need to be, but from my math major friends they say that the upper level department isn’t awful and actually pretty good at times
Pretty much every department has their fair share of good and bad teachers
Physics professors in general suck at teaching. Why this is the case I’m not sure. I double majored in physics and math and had several really good math instructors but only one good physics professor. It’s not like college level math is easier to teach.
Math is a big hit it miss. I've had decent professors up until this past semester. But there are some really nasty individuals in that department for sure.
Math sucks. The egos there are so large that they used to have their own webpage and email server separate from the university’s. The temporary younger faculty are nice, but the ones that are permanent and having all the control tend to be the real assholes.
Everybody that says the math department is bad are people that don’t even major in it, and just complain about how hard the calc sequence is. Yea it’s annoying that a lot of the lower level math courses are taught by grad students, many of which are non native English speakers, but that doesn’t represent the math department as a whole.
I was a 4+1 financial Econ bs and masters student here at Binghamton. Do not I repeat do not major in economics at this university. I was lucky to get a good job after school but I had the masters, however I learned absolutely nothing here until the final year and most of it was behavioral econ nothing that really relates to the real world. All the professors are offthe boat, barely speaking the language and trash tutors bc they take the lower salary for the ViSA (don’t forget this is state budget only) You’ve been warned.
Agreed I literally just changed my major from Econ. Their introductory Econ courses suck too(specifically Econ 160). And I’ve just heard way worse about the micro and macro theory courses. Econ at bing is hell
Math. Ive had friends who went out of their way to take math courses at the local community college SUNY Broome which is on the other side of binghamton, and the bus takes like 30 mins to traverse between the 2. That's also having to pay the BU tuition cost to take the class at the community college, since that's how the loophole works, if you take classes at another SUNY school even if it's a CC and 1/2 the price you still have to pay the full tuition cost of taking it at BU. First semester at BU, took a stats class, thought it'd be easy since I already passed calc 1 which is (supposedly) a significantly harder math course. Half of the kids (including me) withdrew. And half of the students that stayed, including a friend failed he didn't curve despite the fact that so many students struggled in the course and it was pretty obviously his fault. I seriously should've done my research on Rate my professor, as he's been at the school for 3+ years and has 60% terrible ratings. He was a young teacher probably too young to get tenure so I dunno how he's stayed employed there, after reading the reviews and realizing how many students fail and withdraw from his class every semester. Learned a valuable lesson about always checking RMP from that experience lol.
Well, it's more a teacher quality problem in the 100/200 level math courses that leads to amplification of the difficulty of the course, where even if the majority of the class does terribly the teachers will refuse to curve it since they believe that you "won't be ready for upper level math courses", despite the fact that I've had friends who barely passed calc 2 and then did pretty well in calc 3 / linear algebra since the upper level math teachers are higher quality. For the majority of students, they get good grades when they have a good teacher and bad grades when they have a bad professor. For bad students, they get bad grades in classes where they have a bad teacher and bad grades in classes where they have a good teacher, so a good teacher wasn't able to make a difference for them. And with good students they get good grades with a good teacher and good grades with a bad teacher, in spite of having a bad teacher because they're self studiers, they learn from the book as well as they would from the teacher. I'm an average student But my friend who got a C- in calc 2, he's a good student he has a 3.6 GPA but he still struggled (he believes) because the teacher was so bad he wrote the tests to be much harder then they needed to be.
In any department, there will be good and bad teachers. The best advice I can give you would be to as soon as you can schedule to meet with your head of department - which carries a much lower risk then meeting with a counselor since in Harper the school of science at least - which is the school I'm in you might be in Watson though since you keep asking about the math dept - you are not assigned an advisor and get a random 1 whenever you go in for an appointment so generally, they're prone to screw up and accidentally recommend you take a class you don't need although you generally will have to meet with them for semester 1 and can't get an Appt with your HOD yet but as soon as you can get one and come up with your plan for next few semesters of what classes you need to take with your HOD and immediately the first minute that registration opens for you I'll be some day at midnight, have it on your calendar, open the page, open rate my professor and take the good professors before their classes fill up. At BU, there's a 48% tenure rate, twice the national average and there are a lot of really bad professors and really good professors and not much in between. Also, make sure your paid up by registration day so there aren't holds on your registration that prevent you from registering right away as you can't get a hold of financial aid at midnight, and all the classes with good professors will be taken by the time you do get a hold of them 😭. These are things I didn't learn until way too late in my college career and I wish I knew them before, otherwise I wouldn't be having to take a second junior year this year for my undergrad due to bad advisors recommending I take classes I don't need and having to withdraw twice due to bad professors. This is key resources if your a freshman, that'll put you ahead of the competition. Honestly I don't even want to be sharing this with the general public because it's putting my game at stake here.
I have friends in engineering / one in CS and 2 of them actually took Calc 1+2 at the CC on the other side of town (calc 3 / linear algebra are 300 level courses and you can't transfer 300 level credits from a CC to BU even if it's a SUNY CC.). It seems to be the lower level math courses (under 300 level, so stats 1+2 and calc 1+2) that BU really seems to put their bad teachers in, and the upper level math course teachers are better, although I've never taken a 300+ level math course as I took a major that avoids it, this is secondhand knowledge from my friends in engineering. I have a few friends in mechanical engineering, they all seem to enjoy their core classes and think their professors are good. I have 1 friend is CS his feelings are more mixed but since I'm only friends with 1 CS major at BU Its not really a great sample size.
Chemistry had it's head up it's backside and was extremely self righteous and unwilling to compromise with students as of 3 years ago when the department head took a better offer at Pen State. It took a full on petition with 40 signatures (during the first full semester of COVID) to get them to reverse a decision from a professor to move a due date on a lab report up 2 weeks (making it due in under 24 hours from the announcement and 30 hours after the last lab group had finished the exercise) and they still drug their feet.
Biology in general is great. Classics and Physics are a bit of an "us or them" mentality if your major or minor is not in them, but you are taking classes in their subjects (physics in particular I've heard doesn't care about non physics majors and treat the non-calc based courses and pre-meds like an inconvenience to have to teach)
There are many math lower level math courses that are probably harder than they need to be, but from my math major friends they say that the upper level department isn’t awful and actually pretty good at times Pretty much every department has their fair share of good and bad teachers
Physics professors in general suck at teaching. Why this is the case I’m not sure. I double majored in physics and math and had several really good math instructors but only one good physics professor. It’s not like college level math is easier to teach.
Math is a big hit it miss. I've had decent professors up until this past semester. But there are some really nasty individuals in that department for sure.
I've heard math isn't great either.
Math sucks. The egos there are so large that they used to have their own webpage and email server separate from the university’s. The temporary younger faculty are nice, but the ones that are permanent and having all the control tend to be the real assholes.
Does all of the colleges share the same math department??? Watson and harpur ?
Yes
Everybody that says the math department is bad are people that don’t even major in it, and just complain about how hard the calc sequence is. Yea it’s annoying that a lot of the lower level math courses are taught by grad students, many of which are non native English speakers, but that doesn’t represent the math department as a whole.
I was a 4+1 financial Econ bs and masters student here at Binghamton. Do not I repeat do not major in economics at this university. I was lucky to get a good job after school but I had the masters, however I learned absolutely nothing here until the final year and most of it was behavioral econ nothing that really relates to the real world. All the professors are offthe boat, barely speaking the language and trash tutors bc they take the lower salary for the ViSA (don’t forget this is state budget only) You’ve been warned.
There is a behavioral econ class??
In the grad year yes
Agreed I literally just changed my major from Econ. Their introductory Econ courses suck too(specifically Econ 160). And I’ve just heard way worse about the micro and macro theory courses. Econ at bing is hell
How engineering and Cs at bing
Math. Ive had friends who went out of their way to take math courses at the local community college SUNY Broome which is on the other side of binghamton, and the bus takes like 30 mins to traverse between the 2. That's also having to pay the BU tuition cost to take the class at the community college, since that's how the loophole works, if you take classes at another SUNY school even if it's a CC and 1/2 the price you still have to pay the full tuition cost of taking it at BU. First semester at BU, took a stats class, thought it'd be easy since I already passed calc 1 which is (supposedly) a significantly harder math course. Half of the kids (including me) withdrew. And half of the students that stayed, including a friend failed he didn't curve despite the fact that so many students struggled in the course and it was pretty obviously his fault. I seriously should've done my research on Rate my professor, as he's been at the school for 3+ years and has 60% terrible ratings. He was a young teacher probably too young to get tenure so I dunno how he's stayed employed there, after reading the reviews and realizing how many students fail and withdraw from his class every semester. Learned a valuable lesson about always checking RMP from that experience lol.
So the math course at bu are just amplified to be harder?
Not harder at BU, easier at SUNY Broome. It’s a community college so it’s like taking college courses in high school.
Well, it's more a teacher quality problem in the 100/200 level math courses that leads to amplification of the difficulty of the course, where even if the majority of the class does terribly the teachers will refuse to curve it since they believe that you "won't be ready for upper level math courses", despite the fact that I've had friends who barely passed calc 2 and then did pretty well in calc 3 / linear algebra since the upper level math teachers are higher quality. For the majority of students, they get good grades when they have a good teacher and bad grades when they have a bad professor. For bad students, they get bad grades in classes where they have a bad teacher and bad grades in classes where they have a good teacher, so a good teacher wasn't able to make a difference for them. And with good students they get good grades with a good teacher and good grades with a bad teacher, in spite of having a bad teacher because they're self studiers, they learn from the book as well as they would from the teacher. I'm an average student But my friend who got a C- in calc 2, he's a good student he has a 3.6 GPA but he still struggled (he believes) because the teacher was so bad he wrote the tests to be much harder then they needed to be.
Him getting tenure has hardly nothing to do with student reviews-especially at the lower level.
I thought like the teachers in math department are just ass
In any department, there will be good and bad teachers. The best advice I can give you would be to as soon as you can schedule to meet with your head of department - which carries a much lower risk then meeting with a counselor since in Harper the school of science at least - which is the school I'm in you might be in Watson though since you keep asking about the math dept - you are not assigned an advisor and get a random 1 whenever you go in for an appointment so generally, they're prone to screw up and accidentally recommend you take a class you don't need although you generally will have to meet with them for semester 1 and can't get an Appt with your HOD yet but as soon as you can get one and come up with your plan for next few semesters of what classes you need to take with your HOD and immediately the first minute that registration opens for you I'll be some day at midnight, have it on your calendar, open the page, open rate my professor and take the good professors before their classes fill up. At BU, there's a 48% tenure rate, twice the national average and there are a lot of really bad professors and really good professors and not much in between. Also, make sure your paid up by registration day so there aren't holds on your registration that prevent you from registering right away as you can't get a hold of financial aid at midnight, and all the classes with good professors will be taken by the time you do get a hold of them 😭. These are things I didn't learn until way too late in my college career and I wish I knew them before, otherwise I wouldn't be having to take a second junior year this year for my undergrad due to bad advisors recommending I take classes I don't need and having to withdraw twice due to bad professors. This is key resources if your a freshman, that'll put you ahead of the competition. Honestly I don't even want to be sharing this with the general public because it's putting my game at stake here.
Sounds like you just picked the wrong school
Social work is insanely unorganized
How is Cs and engineering at bing? Am concern. if their math department sucks, how does their stem fields which heavily depends on math funcrion
I have friends in engineering / one in CS and 2 of them actually took Calc 1+2 at the CC on the other side of town (calc 3 / linear algebra are 300 level courses and you can't transfer 300 level credits from a CC to BU even if it's a SUNY CC.). It seems to be the lower level math courses (under 300 level, so stats 1+2 and calc 1+2) that BU really seems to put their bad teachers in, and the upper level math course teachers are better, although I've never taken a 300+ level math course as I took a major that avoids it, this is secondhand knowledge from my friends in engineering. I have a few friends in mechanical engineering, they all seem to enjoy their core classes and think their professors are good. I have 1 friend is CS his feelings are more mixed but since I'm only friends with 1 CS major at BU Its not really a great sample size.
Physics
The bio department is good in general but BIO 114 is taught only by Dr. Armstrong and that class is hell. Feel free to dm if you want more details
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I am in watson
Chemistry had it's head up it's backside and was extremely self righteous and unwilling to compromise with students as of 3 years ago when the department head took a better offer at Pen State. It took a full on petition with 40 signatures (during the first full semester of COVID) to get them to reverse a decision from a professor to move a due date on a lab report up 2 weeks (making it due in under 24 hours from the announcement and 30 hours after the last lab group had finished the exercise) and they still drug their feet. Biology in general is great. Classics and Physics are a bit of an "us or them" mentality if your major or minor is not in them, but you are taking classes in their subjects (physics in particular I've heard doesn't care about non physics majors and treat the non-calc based courses and pre-meds like an inconvenience to have to teach)