Slezak, Steven  

although slezak is a nice and funny guy, his lectures are way easier then his tests and homework, making the midterms and final hard. on the other hand he grades on a huge curve. the first midterm i thought i had failed and i ended up with a B. if you actually want to learn i dont recommend taking his class. pretty much your grade depends on how the rest of the class does

He's just an ag teacher who got pushed into the job and doesn't want to be there. It is what it is son...

He's a nice guy, but has NO idea how to teach to someone who doesn't already know the material. I'm still in the class currently, and the only reason I understand anything is because of my tutor; he has had nothing to do with it. I would not recommend him to anyone. Pretty much the only good thing I have to say about him is he is always available for office hours.

I aced his class because I took calc the previous year. He stutters a lot. He doesn't give the reason why we use formulas or solve certain problems. He's very vague about what he wants. On his tests, there are really big curves. He tells you what kinds of problems for each problem on the test! But if you're beginning math in college, don't take him.

i really like professor slezak! he is very into what he is writing on the board which can lead to him forgetting to see if anyone has questions every once in awhile, but he's a really nice guy who cares about his students. i am in his class now and the first midterm is basically just an algebra review and the homework isn't that bad. he also cuts all the crap out and only focuses on things he think will actually be useful for business, which is nice. i'd say take him if you can.

Professor Slezak was a pretty decent teacher. He knew what he was talking about and prepared us for the quizzes and tests pretty well. As long as you did and understood the homework and practice tests, you could easily pass. He's always available for office hours and always answers questions!

Professor slezak is a really cool guy but hes a terrible teacher. His lectures are all over the place and impossible to take notes on. Be ready to learn the material on your own. you have to learn everything from the book. be sure to do the homework because thats the only way you learn it. Even when you go into office hours, he doesn’t explain things very well. Take a different teacher for 310 if you can

Professor Slezak is nice but his class is so hard to follow. First day I quote...\"I am going to teach you 20% of what you need to know in this class.\" His lectures don\'t help you at all. His examples are 1 + 1 = 2 and the homework and tests are square root of 237829 multiplied by infinity to the 1000th power. (I know that\'s not a real problem from the class but it might as well be.) In class, you say okay that makes sense and as soon as you leave and do homework and study and look at the book and you swear you aren\'t in the same class. The only mildly helpful thing he does do is before the midterm and final, he summarizes what each problem will be like. For instance this problem has an ammortized loan over 20 years blah blah blah. So you know what concepts to look over and what kind of problems to practice. BUT it still won\'t prepare you for the 3 paragraph long questions with information in there that is UNNECESSARY so you sit there wondering what kind of math you actually DO need to do. Office hours are MILDLY helpful. He hated our class because he caught people cheating and would have failed us all if we hadn\'t pleaded with him. (I did not cheat and I could kill the people who did.) DO NOT TAKE SLEZAK...EVER. Oh and the class was curved. So I\'m positive I failed but the curve bumped me up to a C. I\'m a good student...this class is designed to change that.

Professor Slezak is not a good teacher. His lectures are confusing and almost impossible to take notes on. Don\'t take professor slezak if you have the choice.

I took credit and finance to fulfil a major requirement. This was a small class of 30ish students and for some reason he felt no need to respond to a single email. He took roll five minutes before class was supposed to start and attendence was required. His only midterm was in the 8th week of the quarter and did not follow the given study guide at all. It was clear he was new to aplia. The aplia quizzes and homeworks did not apply to the material he covered in class nor the homeworks assigned out of the book. He also required homework to be typed, which for credit and finance is ridiculous because the answers were mathematical and usually involved long equations. Even though we had to type the homework, he thought it fit to remove points for not showing our work. After class I would go home feeling confident in the day\'s materials only to find it was completely irrelevant to my homework. It may cound like I am ranting, but I would like other students to know what they are getting into before they sign up, especially because other professors teach this class.

Slezak is a teacher that will teach you if you want to learn. Most people don't like him because he is unclear and his tests are "hard." They aren't. If you do the required work like you are supposed to the class is a breeze. You actually have to study and go to class, you're already paying for the class so why not go? They way he has his class set up is a little confusing, you don't really know where you are standing grade wise the entire quarter, but if you do good on tests and quiz's you are pretty much fine. The day before the final I found out that I had a 64% in the class and the average was 53%. He just does the grades differently. If you have to take this class take it with Slezak and don't be one of those students who just comes to class to get participation points (part of your grade) you actually have to ask questions or be doing the equations with him in class. If you do he will like you a lot more and if you ever has questions he will make sure you understand them and the answer. DO NOT try to get inside his head... Weird to hear something like that but he went on a tangent of how he doesn't even know why he is the way he is. His mind thinks a lot differently than ours and he can put you on the spot and make you feel like a dumbass, but regardless it makes you know the material. The homework can take a while but if you understand how to do it then the tests are easier. He tells you what is going to be on the test so you can prepare for it. But don't wait to the last minute to study for it. Some of the material is pretty confusing and you have to take a bit of time to get it done and understand it for his tests. Your grade is based on one midterm, a final, participation and aplia. I recommend when you are doing the aplia homework to have the online book open, it makes it easier. Just do the work and stop being some lazy AGB student who wants everything handed to them. Not everything is put on the plate in front of you from mommy and daddy.

He was kind of hard to follow, but I studied my hardest and got a good grade in the end. If you find a good study partner, and you combine the different pieces of information the two of you are able to pick up in his lectures, you both should do well. He has online quizzes which take the full three hours to accomplish and they can be a daunting task. By the end of the quarter, you have the hang of it and the final seems easier because you have been doing the same thing all quarter; it's cumulative by definition.

Dont even try. this class is impossible

Really nice guy, but very hard to follow. And WHY IN THE WORLD DOES HE ALWAYS CLOSE HIS EYES WHEN HE TALKS TO THE CLASS???

I received an A in Sleez-bags class, just to start off with some credibility for some of the below posted comments. Slezak was honestly the worst professor I have ever had, mainly because I define a professor as someone who teaches the material; inside or outside of class. Fall quarter 2012 he attempted a teaching method called "Flipping" (homework is done in the class, and lectures are posted on YouTube to learn at home) and I would have loved to flip him the bird for implementing a disastrous form of instruction. Slezak is a facilitator paid on a teacher's salary. The videos are not helpful and over-simplified. He is a knowledgeable man, but is completely ineffective at expressing his knowledge to students. I will acknowledge him for his work ethic, but assigning busy work that doesn't aid in student learning is another ineffective teaching method. Also, several students and myself have caught him performing extraneous work, for another company, in our classroom. A TERRIBLE FINANCE PROFESSOR (likely the WORST), TAKE ANYONE ELSE. ANYONE!!!

This class was one of the hardest I have taken at Cal Poly. There is so much busy work every single class that is graded. He does not teach the material and you have to watch youtube videos of his recorded lecture. If you ask a question in class he makes you feel like an idiot because he "knows so much more about finance". The quizzes online are almost impossible. He makes you pay for multiple books adding to around 250$ all said and done. He does not put the grades on polylearn so you basically don't really know what you have in his class until the grades come out. Good luck if you have him, try and avoid it, I wish I did. Terrible.

He is one of those professors who sys "Learn the material at home off of a bunch of facts thrown at you in video lectures that are really confusing" and then you get to class and he throws you into a situation he expects you to know all of a sudden and everyone is lost so he has to run around the classroom answering everyone's questions. He is HORRIBLE for visual learners especially. I want to scream and burst into tears every time we work on problems cause he won't just teach the class as a whole. WORST TEACHER I HAVE HAD MY WHOLE LIFE

Slezak's class is a flipped course, where you learn everything at home and you work on problems in class. He answers questions at the beginning of class, and then afterwards you work on an assignment that is pretty difficult and takes up most the class period. Slezak's class is a lot of homework assignments, a lot of take home quizzes/tests, but the main load of the class is the midterm and final, which he gives a lot of extra credit for on the exam. Overall this class is a lot of work, but as long as you understand the material it's not too difficult to get a B.

I'm not paying to go to cal poly to learn from freaking youtube or Khan Academy. Yes, it is him on the videos, but why doesn't he teach in class? I have never had a more complicated way of doing simple homework. Not a fan.

Professor Slezak is a good professor. However, I wish he made it easier to where you stand in the class. He does not put grades on polylearn and he does not pass back any work. He says you can come into office hours to discuss grades, however, all of his office hours were during other classes for me. The class is not too hard. It is easy math that he gives you the formulas for. The hardest part of the class is the analytical portion, where you need to understand how different adjustments affect the formulas. There is an online book for the course and also a course site some coursework, homework, and quizzes are located. Slezak made it really hard because he did not explain the site well, so after taking a few quizzes or doing some coursework you can finally figure out the site and see how easy it would have been to get a better grade. Explore the site before you submit your work if you have time. I did not like that this class was flipped. At home we had to watch lecture videos on youtube. In the beginning, they were not too bad, they were only about an hour long and they really explained the material a lot better. However, the last half of course has lectures that are about 3-4 hours long and sometimes he would expect you to get it done in two days. We also had to tweet, which was a joke. We had to have 40 tweets by the end of the quarter. The tweets were only statements or questions based off of each video in lecture. There were 60 videos total, so you do not have to do one for each. Overall, Slezak is okay and he does know what he is talking about.

Slezak needs to open his eyes, both literally, as he lectures, and figuratively to his students concerns and confusions. The format for this class is absolute garbage full of busy work (example of this is that you are required to tweet 40 times about his class). Required out of class video lectures, a couple hours a week, on top of lectures in class. Overall, to any that are ready this, DO NOT TAKE HIS CLASS.

Honestly Slezak isn't a bad teacher at all. All lectures are posted so you are able to go at your own pace. He's always helpful with questions and encourages you to figure it out on your own which is the best way to learn. It's not an impossible class.

Professor Slezak designs this class heavily around Cal Poly's "Learn By Doing" mantra. The students who whine and complain about him "not teaching" or the class being "a waste of time" are simply not following the course guidelines and instructions. The class is flipped, you watch his videos online, go to class and do work on excel. You have to tweet about the videos, which is seriously so painless, you can just copy and paste something he said from the powerpoint slides. The in-class work can be frustrating, but you can go to his office hours and he will help you. Slezak may seem like an asshole or useless instructor in-class because he isn't "teaching" you directly. But his videos are seriously so cut, dry, to the point and he is beyond helpful during office hours. Just don't be a lazy son-of-a-gun AGB student for like five minutes and do the shit you're told and you will breeze by this class.

Most of the reviews on Slezak are just plain wrong. I have taken a few classes with him and found him to be helpful and fair. Before every test he spends an entire class period going over exactly what will be on the test. If you do the readings and the homework you will do great but do not expect to get an A for showing up.

Professor Slezak, well..... he paced the entire time he was lecturing, making me really dizzy and unable to focus on his class. He jumped around a lot. He wanted us to print a million slides, which is a waste of paper and time (why couldn't he just have a booklet that we should buy?), he put us down if we had a mere suggestion that went against something he said (which restrained me from visiting his office hours). PLUS, the book was really hard to understand and didn't have the same equation setup as he had on his "cheatsheet" or in class. Did I mention that I'm a B average student and I had never come close to having an F before IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!

Slezak was relatively nice but very quarky. He is new and came from the MBA program at John Hopkins so he deffinetely knows his shit. He basically does the same thing as Ramezani (same slides) but HW is not due all at once as 1 giant packet but every class or two. This kept me from being a procrastenator. Dont be fooled by his easy lectures the HW and tests are relatively difficult. Overall on a 1 to 10, Gorman is an 11, Ramezani is a 7, Slezak is a 6, and everyone else is a 3.

Go to his office hours a lot because he does not teach the material you need to know for the homework and tests during class. He is very intelligent and willing to help but you have to put a lot of time into this class if you want to pass.

Keep up on the work, don\'t wait tell the end of the quarter. Throughout the quarter go see him and get advice. I did not do any of these and it ended up being the most stressfull class I have taken so far. You will have no idea what your grade is until grades come out. I was afraid of failing this class and ended up getting a B (stressful). Pick a company that will be easy to understand and have contact with.

Professor Slezak is the worst teacher I have had at Cal Poly. He assigns material that does not relate to the project, and rarely hands back the assignments. He is condescending and it is clear he does not want his students to succeed. Much of the material is not taught until the last two weeks of the quarter, so it is very difficult to even get started on the project during the quarter. If ANY other teacher is available, take him or her!!!!

This is probably the most difficult class you will take in AGB. Not because the material is difficult but because you are expected to know what you haven\'t been taught. I would recommend looking at the list of sources he posts around the 2nd week go to the library find those books the ratios you will need and start researching to find out the trends in your market. Try to do a family business or a franchise company there is more information available. Also, its good to have personal interviews of people in the business to refer back to in your report. I seriously had nightmares about this project and it is hell on earth compacted into a course.

Slezak's teaching methods prepare his students for the REAL WORLD. He doesn't sugar coat anything and that's a respecatble trait in a professor. Students who become overwhelmed in his class are usually immature, lazy and dont take college seriously. His methods prepare and teach you how to respond in the workplace when shit hits the fan! AND IT WILL

This class was the hardest class I've taken at Cal Poly only because no one knew what the hell was going on the entire time. Slezak lectures for 8 weeks straight about the same thing and leaves you the final two weeks to pull together your project. His expectations are absurd and unreasonable. When the whole class asked him for help, he cancelled class three sessions in a row so he didn't have to sit down with the groups and help us. No doubt he's a smart guy, just horrible when it comes to teaching. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid. If there's no other option, start your project early and try to track him down and make him help you. Goodluck!