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I am going to separate the thread into two topics. I don't think it's necessary to make two threads
I am a math major in 3rd year doing an honors degree. My college's honors program doesn't require a thesis, but I am going to do it anyways to challenge the messed up system we have here
Letter
I am wondering if it is okay to ask professors to include the following things in their letter.
1. I go to a fairly small college, undergrad research is there, but limited (not to mention fairly competitive). I unfortunately needed to take summer classes pretty much every year (and next year too), so I will not have any time to do research and this could hurt my application.
Does it sound like an "excuse" (it technically isn't) to ask one of my prof to write this? What happens if more than one prof includes this? Two of my profs are gladly to take me on, but after I informed them about my situation, they understood. I am not sure if they'll both write it and it would be rude to pry.
2. About some terrible performance in 1st year. Is it unnecessary to include things about first years or some courses that were horrendously impossible? One of my writers was a prof who's known to give out dumb down hard exams and I've aced most of hers, so I am darn sure she's going to write something about it,
Algebra
So I recently took a course called "Abstract Algebra" (aka Modern Algebra, but I will refer to it as "Algebra" throughout) and this was single-handedly the worst math class I've taken in my life. It may have something to do with the fact that I was also taking Real Analysis at the same time, but this course was just ridiculous. Let me explain how I am mathematically damaged in this class.
The professor is a nice funny guy (crazily funny, to the point where he acts more like a clown sometimes), but he just absolutely cannot teach. He gives us wrong intuition and methods for doing things. For instance, you know how we are supposed to evaluate compositions of functions from right to left? He does it the other way around and tells us left to right is stupid and the book is wrong. Most lectures consist of him writing a proof, messing it up, rewriting it, messes it up again, and finishes the proof and the class.
Asking questions in class was pretty much hopeless because none of us knew what the prof was doing and sometimes he even doesn't know what he is doing. Getting ahead is even more impossible because we aren't going very linearly. To give you an idea, we somehow did subgroups before did groups and then we did direct products before isomorphisms
The evaluation is the worst. To the point where people are getting undeserving grades. On one midterm he asked us to write out the $D_4$ (dihedral group) table in an hour long exam, yes that was actually a question. In another question, he put a question on a chapter where he specifically said we should skip. The other questions were okay and fair, but the marking was crazy. He pretty much gave you 100% if you attempted something. The guy who sits nexts to me does not even know what the symmetry group (take $S_3$) is and he got over 90% because he told me his strategy was "take the opposite of what he says in class and write whatever definitions that's relevant to the question". While, I on the other hand did the proofs correctly and not write random things and got the same mark as the guy who regurgitated a bunch of definitions and got the same grade I did.
On another midterm, I was bedridden and the health center was closed (conveniently) and I had to write these crazy exams while running out of the exam room to the bathroom a couple of times. Naturally I did horrible.
We had our finals last week and he told us he would give us a practice final and 80% of the practice final would be the same as the real one. The real one came and it was the opposite, 80% was different.
Self-studying was difficult since we didn't use a textbook, but an out of print book the prof used when he was an undergrad.
Reading many forums, it would appear that this is not normal, that is, as someone who is taking Analysis and Algebra together, it would make sense that one would do much better in Algebra than in Analysis and boy is that not for me.
So thanks to this, I am discouraged from Algebra and don't know how to recover. Algebra is an important class for grad school and being fed with wrong concepts and ideas from the get go is damaging my future. Any algebraist could give some advice? I plan to start over and doing everything linearly and get a real textbook. I've stocked up Fraleigh's and Dummit's look decent.
I am a math major in 3rd year doing an honors degree. My college's honors program doesn't require a thesis, but I am going to do it anyways to challenge the messed up system we have here
Letter
I am wondering if it is okay to ask professors to include the following things in their letter.
1. I go to a fairly small college, undergrad research is there, but limited (not to mention fairly competitive). I unfortunately needed to take summer classes pretty much every year (and next year too), so I will not have any time to do research and this could hurt my application.
Does it sound like an "excuse" (it technically isn't) to ask one of my prof to write this? What happens if more than one prof includes this? Two of my profs are gladly to take me on, but after I informed them about my situation, they understood. I am not sure if they'll both write it and it would be rude to pry.
2. About some terrible performance in 1st year. Is it unnecessary to include things about first years or some courses that were horrendously impossible? One of my writers was a prof who's known to give out dumb down hard exams and I've aced most of hers, so I am darn sure she's going to write something about it,
Algebra
So I recently took a course called "Abstract Algebra" (aka Modern Algebra, but I will refer to it as "Algebra" throughout) and this was single-handedly the worst math class I've taken in my life. It may have something to do with the fact that I was also taking Real Analysis at the same time, but this course was just ridiculous. Let me explain how I am mathematically damaged in this class.
The professor is a nice funny guy (crazily funny, to the point where he acts more like a clown sometimes), but he just absolutely cannot teach. He gives us wrong intuition and methods for doing things. For instance, you know how we are supposed to evaluate compositions of functions from right to left? He does it the other way around and tells us left to right is stupid and the book is wrong. Most lectures consist of him writing a proof, messing it up, rewriting it, messes it up again, and finishes the proof and the class.
Asking questions in class was pretty much hopeless because none of us knew what the prof was doing and sometimes he even doesn't know what he is doing. Getting ahead is even more impossible because we aren't going very linearly. To give you an idea, we somehow did subgroups before did groups and then we did direct products before isomorphisms
The evaluation is the worst. To the point where people are getting undeserving grades. On one midterm he asked us to write out the $D_4$ (dihedral group) table in an hour long exam, yes that was actually a question. In another question, he put a question on a chapter where he specifically said we should skip. The other questions were okay and fair, but the marking was crazy. He pretty much gave you 100% if you attempted something. The guy who sits nexts to me does not even know what the symmetry group (take $S_3$) is and he got over 90% because he told me his strategy was "take the opposite of what he says in class and write whatever definitions that's relevant to the question". While, I on the other hand did the proofs correctly and not write random things and got the same mark as the guy who regurgitated a bunch of definitions and got the same grade I did.
On another midterm, I was bedridden and the health center was closed (conveniently) and I had to write these crazy exams while running out of the exam room to the bathroom a couple of times. Naturally I did horrible.
We had our finals last week and he told us he would give us a practice final and 80% of the practice final would be the same as the real one. The real one came and it was the opposite, 80% was different.
Self-studying was difficult since we didn't use a textbook, but an out of print book the prof used when he was an undergrad.
Reading many forums, it would appear that this is not normal, that is, as someone who is taking Analysis and Algebra together, it would make sense that one would do much better in Algebra than in Analysis and boy is that not for me.
So thanks to this, I am discouraged from Algebra and don't know how to recover. Algebra is an important class for grad school and being fed with wrong concepts and ideas from the get go is damaging my future. Any algebraist could give some advice? I plan to start over and doing everything linearly and get a real textbook. I've stocked up Fraleigh's and Dummit's look decent.