OLDFall 2022 Law School Course Evaluations

teaching upperclassmen because she does not have the patience required for 1Ls and students who are new to law school The professor appeared to always be in a bad mood. If you greeted the professor in the hallway, she would simply look down and not greet you back. Came off as unapproachable and intimidating. While it is clear she is intelligent, it is also clear she cannot teach 1L students. She seems to lack patience and when questions are posed she often responsed that she cannot answer that question because it is out of the scope of our course. This was a frequent excuse and then would exclaim that this is only a 3 credit course and if it was more, things would make more sense, but since its not then just deal with me teaching it overly complicated. It also appears she tried to influence the course evalations by mentioning prior to the students taking it that course evaluations are biased towards white men and against women. While this may or may not be true (only a few studies support this), it implied that if you wrote poor things in your feedback that you are being sexist, which might have prevented some students from fully expressing their feedback. During the second to last class meeting of Civil Procedure, Professor Burstein made a comment about how she does not believe in class evaluations and how she feels they are biased towards white men. Now, that might be true, however, the context in which she told us about this felt very inappropriate. It made me disappointed to hear this because all of my other professors stressed the importance of course evaluations and how much they appreciate us doing them. In addition to my reflections above, I wanted to reflect on an incident that occured in November 29th ' s Zoom lecture. As our class wound down, Professor Burstein decided to end class early in order for students to complete course evaluations. However, before doing so, Professor Burstein proceeded to tell the class that student course evaluations have been proven to be highly ineffective because they are designed to favor white men. She also told us that student feedback is generally biased, and that students should think about their own biases when assessing professors ' competence. Lastly, she said that she was open to constructive feedback, but that it essentially didn ' t matter because she holds a tenured position. This incident was inappropriate and extrememly unprofessional. While Professor Burstein is obviously allowed to have reservations about evaluations, the proper venue for sharing these reservations is with fellow faculty and superiors in the law school ' s administration, not with her students as she is sending them off to write her course evaluation. Rather, Professor Burstein ' s conduct came across as an attempt to pressure students into leaving positive evaluations on her course, or none at all. In the future, I hope that Professor Burstein takes accountability for the positive, negative, and neutral feedback she receives from students so that she can enhance their experience in her classroom, instead of blaming it on bias or more. For this and all of the reasons shared above, I do not believe that Professor Burstein should teach 1L courses. Her teaching style and conduct towards her students was a disappoining introduction to Suffolk Law

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