Gold
SilverW4150 Probability and Statistics
Departments: Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Professors: Guillermo Gallego
Gallego gets a bad rap. This is a course in theoretical mathematics, not AP statistics, and he makes that perfectly clear on the first day---if you don't want rigor, take the 3000-level version of this class. Lectures are about theorems and their proofs, and that's the way it should be. Gallego himself is clear, concise, gives reasonable exams (too easy, if anything; a 98 on the midterm was an A-) and assigns (mostly) useful homework. The only complaints I have are that his lecture notes are absolutely unreadable (he writes them down on his computer, and his handwriting is atrocious), and that more than the one or two theoretical homework problems he assigns (rather than number-crunching problems from the book) would be useful.
The students are the real problem in this class. Evidently it's a requirement for OR, FE and econ, so it's made up mostly of students who obsess constantly about their grades but who are breathtakingly uninterested in the material (or, for that matter, in anything other than being rich). Highlights included gasps of outrage at the aforementioned midterm curve, and a large puddle of saliva on the floor after a sample problem involving a financial instrument.
10 psets -- I started most of them the night before they were due and had no trouble.
1 midterm, 1 final -- if you do better on the final, he drops your midterm completely
No psets dropped, but a generous helping of late days.
Gallego assumes that you know a lot more than you do to begin wtih. Of course, this is an advanced class and the students know basic statistical methods. However, he presents his information in proofs that are confusing and difficult to understand. However, if I look the same information up in the textbook or elsewhere, I realize that what Gallego was trying to teach is something relatively simple, or at least understandable when presented more simply. Basically, he unecessarily complicates theories and equations. The textbook was excellent, however, so that helped when I had to teach myself material. The fact that he did not prepare us well was apparent when most of the students scored between about 20-30 points on the 100 point midterm; he was forced to give a makeup midterm.
weekly problem sets, usually not too taxing; very difficult midterm and final
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