Rihal, Satwant  

A great teacher, very mellow, very clear. However his tests are hard, one must understand what is happening.

complete waste of my time. rambled on and on about calcutta for two hours each class period. handed out a 10 page syllabus in which 2 were his own, the other 8 written by our lovely friend tom fowler in the arch dept, who decided to push his nasty hands into the arce department and arce 316. it was basically a fowler studio project, a bunch of the same information presented in various ways, along with models of unrealistic, practical buildings that really didnt have to do with arce in the first place. sat is his little puppet. sat also, on occasion, "lectured", aka, talked about calcutta and random other things that somewhat sounded arce-ish, but then again i'm not quite sure because i sat there staring at the wall or my desk for two hours because it was a huge waste of my life.

Professor Rihal is very knowledgable about the subject, however although he explains subjects clearly in class, his tests are hard to understand what he is asking for.

Ok, so what to say about Rihal. simply, this guys sucks, hes by far the worst professor i've had since starting calpoly. He's always late to class, never explains what is really going on with the subject, expects you to have the knowledge of a damn civil engineer...and his tests and projects are HARD; they dont reflect material taught in class. Furthermore, when you ask him questions he not only looks at you like you are stupid, but he never gives you a decent answer, just beats around the bush. I really dont think he even pays attention when you ask him questions. in short, this guy has made my life a nightmare. If you find yourself registered for his class, i highly reccomend you drop him if there is any way possible.

Wow, this was an "interesting" class - was it concrete construction? Im not sure since 1 - the teacher came at least 5 min late every day 2 - he is confusing in what he tries to explain even though he knows the material well 3 - THE WORST THING OF ALL you have no idea what your grade is even remotely close to because nothing is graded EVER! His tests are extremely hard and not too connected to the material from lecture. He seems to expect you to know things that he never taught. I guess I just don't have the ARCE 6th sense.

Let's see...this class was a waste of my time! The only thing I learned the whole quarter was how to design a pan joist system...and I could have figured this out by simply looking at the specifications. I am sure that Sat has a thorough understanding of the subject but he defintely does not care to explain it to his students. Like already stated, he is always late to class and sometimes he will leave after he lectures to go to his office. The class consisted of a few little assignments and one big project. For the project, everyone was given the same floor plan and told to design the structural system. There wasnt much direction and he didnt get the assignments back to us till the end of the quarter so I had no idea how I was doing in the class until I recived my grade. If you actually want to learn something from this class I would recommend that you take it from someone else if at all possible.

Professor Rihal is very frusterating to have. In our department, you can't really choose most of the time anyway, so this is probably just what you're gonna have to deal with. He's usually 15+ minutes late for class, never says sorry about it. He doesn't really teach, shows some videos, boring lecture, etc. He gives a fair amount of homework, a lot of it was Matlab stuff but he doesn't know how to code Matlab, so he just looks at your charts (which I find really irritating). He's just really, really old, very unclear, and makes a class that could be interesting very frusterating. Oh yeah, and he has you buy a book that is more like a reference book, you never actually open it. So don't buy it if you don't have the money or don't want it.

Dr. Rihal has very low motivation to teach or involve himself in his courses, is detached and disinterested in his students. From what I understand, this topic is constantly evolving, and his lectures don't seem to have been updated in years. They're even all given with overhead slides that have faded to yellow, they're so old and crispy. He comes late to class every time, 20 minutes late to the final, and carries himself in as though he's royalty and we shall wait as long as he wants us to. I have watched friends take this class from motivated teachers, and they learned weeks of material that I never even heard of in Rihal's class. In addition, he uses very non-informative movies, seemingly to fill up the class hour. He looks lazy. Maybe it's something else, but I am not impressed.