<p>According to the reviews on BruinWalk, both seem horrible. However, I couldn't care less which professor is easier. Though Cheng might be easier than Pires, I don't want to take a professor whose tests are so easy that everyone does so well on them, i.e., the curve is thrown off, and the distribution of grades is skewed.</p>
<p>So does anyone know which professor has a fairer grading system?? I want to take a professor whose exams actually test one's knowledge and understanding of the material, even if his or her exams are harder.</p>
<p>I also want to avoid the professor whose exams are ridiculously easy but contain few questions worth a ridiculous amount of points so that the your grade in the end isn't based off of mastery of the material, but pure luck. (I'm talking about Halpin.)</p>
<ol>
<li><p>She has no curve in the class- it’s straight grading (unless the final class average is under 75 which it never is).</p></li>
<li><p>Her tests are all multiple choice, so there aren’t any questions that are worth a ridiculous amount of points. </p></li>
<li><p>That being said, her tests are still hard and they don’t in any way test your mastery of the material. She has the most BS questions with the most BS answers. I asked her about why a certain answer was the right answer for a few questions and she kinda stuttered and had a hard time explaining. Her explanations were weak, and it seemed kinda hard for her to defend how a certain answer was right as opposed to another answer choice. Also, there are some flat out dumb questions for which it would be ridiculous to expect someone to know the answer. </p></li>
<li><p>Long story short, her tests test memorization skills as opposed to mastery of concepts and material. If you master the material and understand it, you will still do bad unless you can memorize a ton of stuff as well.</p></li>
<li><p>I’d recommend you don’t take her.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I’m sure people have had good experiences with Pires, but I chose to take the other lecture for LS3 this past spring given the choice. I didn’t get to talk with anyone who was taking her LS3 class, but yes, she’s known to assign lots of work in addition to studying for exams. My given choices didn’t seem all that great either, but I say go for the one that entails less work on your part. I’m all for learning, and LS3 is pretty awesome itself, but you’re probably going to be taking other stressful classes and try to make it easy on yourself if you can. Go for the lesser evil, I guess.</p>
<p>ETA: I noticed that her lecture for LS3 Spring 2011 was still open for a considerable amount of time while the one I signed up for got filled up very quickly. That sort of gave me the idea that there was a certain opinion about her…</p>