Spring 2022 Course Evaluations

What aspect(s) of the course or instruction could be improved?

A syllabus is never provided. Professor Wilton is constantly emailing new reading material hours before class begins, making it impossible for evening students to complete all the reading before class. We are provided no materials showing a model answer for final exam purposes, and are graded harshly on the final essay. The review prior to the final is confusing and disorganized. No matter how much material you learn or how much you understand the concepts, it doesn’t matter; the grading for the final is done in a way that punishes the student if they don’t answer in the exact way that the Professor wants. Prof. Wilton heavily relies on the Socratic method, which is widely held to be an ineffective teaching method. Nowhere has that become so apparent than in our CON LAW class. I cannot learn a thing in our classes when it consists of hypotheticals and quizzing students on our reading... I cannot take notes on students best guesses at answers, and Prof. Wilton’s ambiguous responses. I have no idea how anyone could benefit from this teaching style. I made similar complaints in my course evaluation last year, and Prof. Wilton taught in exactly the same as he did last semester. Prof. Wilton puts zero effort into preparing notes or even a syllabus for the class. We receive 2 or three single sheets throughout the semester summarizing a few rules. There is also one sheet providing group assignments to pages, without any context or even topic headings. The book assigned to the class is widely held to be confusing, as even Prof. Wilton admitted. So simply receiving page numbers doesn’t provide any idea what cases we should focus on, what topics we are even learning, or rules or other overarching ideas we should grasp. I cannot help but think Prof. Wilton spends about 2 minutes of his week preparing for this course, and if he is not invested in our learning then a different lecturer should be assigned to this very important course. Sometimes its hard to understand what the reasoning is behind the questions being asked to the people on call. It would be nice to have a PowerPoint during the lecture. The instruction was hard to follow. I think it could be more organized. I also think we talked about the same things with only slightly different examples, and then did not have time to cover other aspects of con law. A written summary of doctrine for each subject would be greatly helpful. It’s easy to miss the doctrine in Professor Wilton’s class. Use of presentation slides during some of the more complex topics could be beneficial. Or, giving a recap of what the main takeaways are after we learn each topic. A syllabus would be helpful, but by second semester in his class you know what to expect. Slideshows or key takeaways for each case as it can get confusing. More of an outline on key topics. I am not a fan of the socratic method. Our class discussions were interesting, but I often left

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