Reviews of professor Nathaniel Laywine

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Worst prof I have ever had in 4 years at Ryerson. Took this class because I needed an upper liberal but I highly suggest you find another prof. He marks extremely hard on the final essay and group project he docs marks for going over time. Final was much harder than the midterm. Visited him in office hours for essay help and was very condescending.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Interesting lectures. Good and engaging speaker. But assignment instructions are usually unclear.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
He's very personable and caring. I enjoyed attending all his lectures since they were very interesting especially with class discussions. Wish there were class activities. However, final assignment and exam were marked extremely and unnecessarily hard which was unfortunate. He calls out those who are disrupting class which is understandable.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
Most of his information is from his slides, and a 100$ textbook!! So please buy the textbook because you won't do good without it! Also, he is good at what he teaches and he has participation marks for 10%, where he takes attendance in random classes... usually all the classes I missed were the days he took attendance lol :(

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Nathaniel is very caring and genuinely wants the best for his students! Didn't love the inclusion of a group project worth 30% during a semester when we were all already getting used to the transition to online classes, but he marked fairly and provided a ton of useful feedback. Do watch your formatting on Q&A participation quizzes - he's picky.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Probably the worst professor at Ryerson. Marks extremely hard on essays and gives awful feedback that is rude and unhelpful. Need to show up to class for participation marks and read the textbook because the tests are mainly on that. His slides are not very helpful when studying. Avoid at all costs

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
He was okay. I found that there was little guidance on how to properly do the group presentations and he docs a lot of points if you go over 10-12 mins. I also found that he read word-for-word from the textbook during lectures most of the time, so it was quite annoying having to show up for participation marks. Midterm was easy, final was harder.