VanderKelen, Barry  

Barry is a nice guy, but his class is very frustrating. He will give grades arbitrarily and will not give any justification for it. His final case presentation is unnecessarily challenging and he expects way too much for it. Overall he is not a very difficult teacher, but he makes things more time consuming than necessary, and assigns a lot of busy work.

Super easy class, memorize the terms for the tests and know the multiple parts of each of the terms. Go into his office hours for your project and he will tell you exactly what he wants to see changed or fixed.

Midterm and Final. One group project. Midterm was cake, just memorize terms from slides. Literally word for word and fill in the blanks on the test. Group project is going smooth. Pretty much turn in the work and it's a guaranteed 100%, the presentation and final project paper (4-5 pages with project group) will be evaluated at the end. Final will also be online. VanderKellen is very approachable and funny. Class is super laid back and easy to follow. Highly recommend if you're looking for a class to keep on the side while taking other classes in the same quarter. He is peez.

Professor Barry VanderKelen's class is straightforward and is not overly demanding. There are three group projects that don't take a terrible amount of time to complete, and there are also three exams based on the textbook chapters he assigns. I found it difficult to achieve an A in the class based on the somewhat ambiguous test questions he asked, despite all of my studying. The third exam is the take home final, which is nice. The third project is a 20 minute group presentation on how to address a threat or opportunity facing a large, publicly-traded corporation. He's a nice guy, loves his old stories, is very knowledgeable, and wants his students to succeed. I'd recommend him.

VanderKelen is excellent. He is very constructive and helpful. He is willing to listen to and work with his students to help them understand and do their best. Participation in this class is critical, however, it is not a drag to do so. VanderKelen gives interesting topics to debate in order to keep students engaged.

VanderKelen is a good professor and I recommend taking him. He presents the material clearly and keeps the class engaged. My only complaint is that his midterms were very misleading. I thought I aced the first midterm no issue but got a D instead because I didn’t answer the short answers questions the way he wanted to and those were worth the most points. I did better on the second midterm but still got docked the most points on the short answer questions. To study: make sure to read the chapters it’s very easy material to understand, pay attention to key vocabulary words and practice answering what you’d write as answers for the learning objectives for each chapter as those were basically the short answer questions unless otherwise noted by Barry. He told you exactly what and how to study. The 2 group papers he assigned weren’t hard at all as the work is split between 4-5 people and he explains exactly what he’s looking for in the papers. The final test was take home and easy. The final presentation was also pretty easy as no essay was required and was a similar structure to the essays. Got As on everything except the midterms.

Honestly, I have no idea why this professor has such high polyratings. In fact, I REGRET looking at polyratings and choosing him as my professor for BUS 401 and I really should have taken someone else- ANYBODY else. First and foremost, this professor's exams are EXTREMELY difficult and some of the material isn't even covered in lectures. You MUST read the book and memorize it in order to ace his exams. Not only that, but his exams are so free response heavy and if you don't answer it the way HE wants, you will barely get any partial credit for it. Shouldn't a professor realize that his exams are TOO difficult when the class average is literally 53%??? He acts like his exams are so "fair" and claims that he tells you everything you need to study, but trust me, he DOESN'T. I've never been so happy to receive a C in an exam until now. Also, Barry is NOT a nice guy. The dude claims that we should treat everyone with respect, as if they are a "future business partner." He is so disrespectful to me and I cannot wait for this quarter to end because I've never experienced such a terrible classroom environment.

I decided to take his class in the spring quarter of 2019 based off of his overall polyratings. That was a big mistake. I agree with most of the other reviews stating the difficulties of his exams. He provided a take home final that was especially difficult. Despite studying before the final, and referring to my notes during the final, it was still quite hard. I managed to get an A- because of the group projects, but got really lucky by having some decent teammates. If you get a bad group, you're screwed. He also said some really questionable things during lectures that made me question his credibility. There were at least three instances where he ranted on how Elon Musk is a bad CEO. One particular case was how Elon took a single puff of weed on a Joe Rogan podcast which somehow invalidates all of Elon's past achievements. Smoking weed on a podcast is probably not the best PR move for a CEO, but I just feel like the professor has some serious bias and outdated thinking.