OLDFall 2022 Law School Course Evaluations

The best way to improve this course is for it to be taught by someone who actually wants to teach it. I don ' t think a single cold call "went well". Every time Professor Burstein would call on someone, it was just the same thing of the person struggling to come up with answers. This was due to her inability to ask precise questions. For example, she would take two minutes to formulate a question that nobody understood which would lose everyone in the process. Then they would ask the question again which would end up wasting more time, so this was a very inefficient way of "learning". I also found her to be inappropriate and unprofessional in cases where she would berate other attorney ' s work on the projector. I understand that attorneys have different "styles", but as someone who always told the class to "be kind" I thought her behavior in those instances were "cringe worthy" and made many people uncomfortable. Professor Burstein wasn ' t always a very helpful and nice professor. Sometimes didn ' t want to answer people ' s questions, would get upset if people had too many questions during class, and also visibly got frustrated with the class. Refused to give us practice problems, hypos, or really any information about the exam. I had a hard time grasping the concepts of this class in the beginning because the lectures would often approach straight forward topics in abstract ways. The discussions that would follow the lectures would get off topic and be allowed to go on for a lengthy amount of time. These discussions would often add to the confusion. ' - the book used was very dense and not quite helpful - a better overview of what was learned in the class prior so instead of saying last class we learned about two class actions and know what they are. I would prefer for a professor to say the two we learned are this and that and briefly this means this (just so that i can make sure my notes are correct) - in depth slideshows. I enjoyed the one class where we learned about subject matter jurisdiction and she had different states on the board (because of a case we were reading) so that helped me to apply what I was learned. I’m a visual learner so simply looking at a slide with a picture isn’t helpful. An extra step would be to break down in the slide shows the concepts or things we should know - I wish the speakers we had were a bit more diverse. It felt as though some in particular were speaking from a place of privilege which caused me to not be interested in what they were saying A more clear and organized structure of the class. We went all over the place and discussions ran too off track and it was hard to stay engaged and focused. I found myself having to go to the TA to learn and understand the main concepts of the course. Prof. Burstein does not explain things very well and I have found some of her comments to be quite contradictory. She is often hard to follow. I think her slides, could be used to help the class understand the key takeaway from the subject being discussed. Currently, her slides were mostly just pictures of patent drawings. Or the slides would be massive amounts of text that the class would try to copy and not pay attention

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