Kolesnik, Alex  

Honestly he was the WORST professor that I have ever had; including high school! First off, class is a waste of time so don't even bother going. He will go online and make you look at scientific journals, which have nothing to do with stats! Secondly, all qtr we had to use Minitab wich is like an excel for math. But we aren't allowed to use it for our tests. It was basically an excuse for him to not do any problems in class and fucked all the students bc we did not know how to do any problems by hand when it came down to the tests. Not to mention the tests are extremely hard and worded so unclearly that you want to kill yourself by the 2nd page. The final takes 3 hours min and is about 7 pages.It took him about 2 and a half weeks to return the midterms. He was completely unavailable to help his students, he went on vacation the weekend before finals! However he does give a lot of partial credit and you get points just for attempting the homework which definitely helps. But overall I can not give any lower of a rating to him because the class basically had to teach themselves stats. He was useless.

All right, I am the first one to comment on Kolesnik, and my comments should be the only review you will have to read in order to get a sense of this professor, as I plan on laying it out very thoroughly and honestly. If you are a student who can get an A in a class no matter what the teacher; if you are someone who can take the initiative to read the book and teach yourself the material that you don't understand from class; if you are someone who isn't going to let a bad teacher stop you from getting a good grade, by all means take Kolesnik. I did, and based on the reasons mentioned above and the relative easiness of the concepts and material gone over in the class, I was able to get an A. The lectures are boring and repetitive; he will spend one whole class period (50 minutes) on a topic that could have been covered in 5 minutes, and he spends valuable time talking about stuff that isn't relavent to the current material or statistics. The sample problems he does in class (and he only does one) are hard to follow along with, so when it comes time to do the HW, you rarely know what you are doing or how to do it. When you ask a question or give an answer in class, he makes you feel very uncomfortable by either answering your question 5 times and wording it differently like you are a three year old and cannot understand English, or telling you your answer is wrong or irrelevant in ways that make you not want to answer again. He gives two midterms and a final that make up 80% of your grade, so you really have to know what you are doing in order to get a good grade, and plain and simple, he does a horrible job making sure you do. I learned more from my stat workshop class by going over the concepts and then drilling the steps and formulas into my head (with sample problems on a worksheet that I could take home) then I did from the actual class. I probably could have missed all the lectures for that class, just gone to my stat workshop class, and read the book and still gotten an A. For the final, which I am confident I got an A on (though I haven't gotten my grade), I didn't even study my notes from class; I only studied my stat workshop notes and problems, as well as the book. Overall, Stat 251 is not that hard of a class, but it would be a whole lot easier if you had a better teacher than Kolesnik. But if you do, just take a stat workshop, take the extra time to do read the book, and you should be fine. I mean, look at the brightside; if you take Kolesnik, you probably don't even have to go to class except to turn in the assignments, as the classes aren't helpful and he doesn't take role. Kolesnik is at the very least a nice guy, who smiles all the time in class and seems to generally enjoy teaching statistics. It's just too bad he is no good at it. The biggest plus of this class: One sheet of notes per midterm, and three sheets for the final.

Although I hear that his class has gotten a little better, this has definitely been by far my least favorite class at Cal Poly so far. His powerpoint presentations did not correlate to the homework in the book at all, and most of his examples about probability were about poker or roulette, but those examples did not help with homework or tests. Most of the class stopped coming since class was so pointless and the average for tests was usually in the 60's. Students tried to ask questions in class but his answers were usually vague and did not help at all. I took STAT 252 from Daly and enjoyed it immensely. I would definitely recommend taking it from someone else, it makes for a much better experience.

i was surprised to the low grades for kolesnik. I took this guy three years ago, so i dont know if he is still around but he was a good professor. he presented material clearly and tried very hard to keep the class interested.

BOYCOTT!!!