So I’ve taken Ternansy for my freshman year last Spring '15, and he was downright awful. Your grade resides in the fate of TWO exams, the averages of which are around 20%!!! A MEAGER 20%!!!
I took him based on a “Rate My Professor” average of 4.2, which was better than Yang’s 3.3. But honestly, how much worse can Yang be?
I’ve read the book religiously for Ternansky, went to all my discussions, (but not office hours – no time between work and all my other classes and studies), but my gosh, his exams reflect absolutely nothing from class and homework. The homework is FAR TOO EASY! And it isn’t only me – about 60% of the class dropped after the first midterm. I have a madly intelligent friend who, if it means anything, had two internships at Harvard in microbiology and expects to attend HU next year for grad school. However, she got the same grades that I got, regardless of how much she studied. Without the curve, her grade would be a D, but after the curve, she got a B. She told me that the level of “foundational teaching” Ternansky supplies us with is completely obscene: even med-school does not require that much bullshit. Plus, he is ruuuuude and scary as shit.
I know that Yang is a fast lecturer and he is stingy in his explanations. But hey, Ternansky makes you feel like a complete idiot and demotivates you. Yang is also pretty much the textbook I heard, whereas Ternansky tries to turn his first year organic chem students into mad scientist ON THE EXAM. However Ternansky requires for you to score only half of all points in the class for you to pass. But I really don’t want a fucking C for something I studied to get an A on.
If you took Yang, what did you get in his class? What were his test averages? Why should I take him or why not? And why is he rated so low on RMP?
Come on people, talk dirty to me. Convince me about Yang, or not.
I never took either professor, so this is all hearsay.
I heard that Ternansky is one of those professors who is really difficult but if you really put in the effort, you leave really knowing your stuff. I’ve known some students who chose him specifically because they really wanted to learn the material and be challenged, and some students who loved him. He pushes hard, and his exams are very hard (I heard that he only expects you to know 50% of the stuff on the exam, and the rest is to see if you can go above and beyond, to challenge your ability to think and apply knowledge in new ways that you haven’t seen before). It’s a style of teaching that not everyone likes, but clearly some people do.
To be honest, I haven’t heard anything about Yang. I don’t know if he was teaching o-chem when I was in school.
What I would recommend is to not take Ternansky again. You’ve already tried him, and you clearly don’t like his teaching or how he runs his classes. It is not going to get better if you take him again. He is not going to change. Take someone else.
Have you thought about trying to waitlist for O’Connor or Perrin? Both are fantastic professors. O’Connor always gets rave reviews (there’s a reason he’s full even though his class is at 8AM). I had Perrin and he was great (and allows you a cheatsheet which is fantastic =D). You can still attend Ternansky or Yang (whichever one you would take if you can’t get off the waitlist) for the first couple of weeks before the end of the add period. Then you could switch without having missed anything, just in case you don’t get off the waitlist. It’s a pain, but a great professor can make all the difference in o-chem.
Welcome to college. The vast majority of my classes had the grade solely determined by a midterm and final exam. The prevalence of this will depend somewhat on my major, but it’s pretty commonplace.