Reviews of professor Stephen Schaf

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Stephen is an awful teacher. Each assignment has often unnecessary extra criteria that overcomplicate the process. The textbooks required were unhelpful being mostly pictures. The lectures and demos were excruciatingly long. His grading scale is overblown. His feedback is confusing and contradicting. Avoid Stephen if you don't like lots of work.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Dude is absolutely out of his mind. Insane amount of work in very small time frames. Only way you could possibly pass his class is if you have no other studio classes or life obligations outside of school. Fell slightly behind within the first week and never caught up. Extremely overwhelming workload and horribly confusing use of canvas.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Stephen was very unprofessional. He would skip out on class without mentioning anything or canceling class until 15-30 mins afterwards which can be extremely frustrating for an 8am. Every time I reached out for helped he seemed aggravated. He had a short temper, brought up his personal life/beliefs.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Stephen is not the most organized, but incredibly well versed in both design theory and in industry experience. This experience was highly valuable to me. You will have to work hard in his classes and he doesn't make the canvas experience user friendly at all, but the rate of improvement I saw in his class spoke for itself and makes up for the bad.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Stephen's classes have a lot of work and the classes are mostly long lectures. However, the lectures tend to have good information and he gives great tutorials of the programs you'll use. It can be hard to keep up with the amount of work each project takes, but he does give a decent amount of work time and he's really flexible with late work.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Schaf was a good instructor, but not always. He was not always accessible, and he told me things that I found disrespectful, which made me feel embarrassed to myself. Not all students are the same (different backgrounds, personalities, and weaknesses) and it seems that he completely forgot that.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Stephen is such a nice guy! He really cares about his students and the work they do. His projects can be very intensive and he really makes you work for it, but he is more than fair in his grading and feedback.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Stephen is the best instructor I have EVER had. BUT heaviest workload out of any studio I've taken. He's extremely well versed and experienced in design. I came away from the class with an insane amount of improvement and my best work for my portfolio. He gives very detailed and helpful critique but be prepared to devote A LOT of time to this class