Michael A. Goldman

Dr. Goldman is a good teacher, although a lot of people seem to disagree with this statement. He is well organized and follows the lectures that are available in his lecture guide. The exams were hard, but not impossible, and if you attend every class and actually study for the exams you will receive a good grade. There are no extra credit assignments, so be sure to really put your time into preparing for the exams. Genetics is not an easy subject to begin with, and many are eager to blame the teacher for that.

this teacher is not very nice to minority students and doesn't teach too well. what u can expect is just listening the boring lectures he gives every lesson and he never explain clearly and his lectures doesn't refer much to the assigned texts also, his office is not enough and he's never there i would definitely not recommend this teacher to others

Do everything you can to avoid taking Dr. Goldman in Genetics (or any other class). I'm comming out of this class feeling that the little I learned needs to be credited to myself for reading the text book. I went to almost all the lextures, and I must say they were nice afternoon naps.... Unless you have taken this class before or studied a chapter ahead (which we all wished we did) you have no clue of what he is talking about... It seem like he thinks this is really easy, and therefore aims a little bit over our heads with the information. Also, he sells these overhead notes.... DON'T BUY THEM! Total waste of money... They are out of order...and he doesn't care to tell us where to find the overheads during lecture, so instead 30 persons are flipping pages (it get's quite annoying) for 5min until they find the overhead he just had on. Then they star all over again since he switched overhead.

Dr. Goldman does deserve points for being approachable, and basically prepared to teach his class with a positive presence and sense of humor - however, I don't feel like my 3 units worth of time was spent effectively following his curriculum and attending his lectures. Lectures were somewhat disjointed, and difficult to follow in the purchased overhead reprints that he advises. (I wouldn't buy them if I had the choice to make again - it made more sense to me when I just worked from a fresh sheet of paper.) The tests are only moderately related to the lecture, generally details of the lecture that were not emphasized much in class. Homework sets are long and don't count for credit toward the class - they also don't relate much to the tests, but they are where I learned the most about useful principals of genetics. Office hours were extremely frustrating since many questions were discounted as being irrelevant to the test, and best not to worry about - rather than addressed and explained. The textbook for this class is also a bit quirky. Many of the end of the chapter questions were on material that wasn't addressed in the text. The answers will be found and explained in the solutions manual. That's a pretty sneaky way to handle material, if you ask me. All in all, I'd choose another teacher for this potentially very fun, very interesting subject.

Dr. Goldman is very hard to follow in class. You must purchase his lecture notes from previous years, which he does not neccessarily follow in this class. He gives questions on the test which are not covered in either lecture or in the text or in the info package. He says that after a test that you can talk to him about any problems, but that is all he does - listen to your problem and then tell you his opinion - which is the only one that counts. His tests are confusing because you can go to every lecture and read the text and still feel like you had attended another class altogether.

Goldman is a really nice guy. Friendly. The problem is he doesn't teach very effectively. He just ambles over a huge stack of notes that you have to buy (for $18)some of which is handwritten and really messy and disjointed. He isn't really prepared for class, and you can see it in how he skips over stuff and then goes back to it in lecture. His tests are sometimes so unrelated to class that you feel frustrated and angry. He doesn't explain well one on one in office hours, either. I guess one thing that could help is going over the types of problems that could be, and making lists of what he thinks is important and making definitions of possible key words, since he always asks for definintions. Other than that, there isn't much you can do. His problems are so unrelated to the book. You could do them, but they wouldn't help. He is not clear during lecture and not clear in office hours, but go anyway, becasue it's better than struggling over it in the test. All in all, I'd recommend taking anyone else instead. Nice guys do not good teachers make.