Reviews of professor Melvin Backstrom

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Melvin's midterm exam trumps any exam I've ever taken in my life (and I'm an engineering major). The average score was like a 38/80. If he told us he was a time traveler from the 60s, I would believe it. This guys knowledge of this era and the Grateful Dead is unparalleled. Beware his exams though

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
I feel like in all the possible realities that exist, we got the one where a literal walking music piece is our teacher. This man's knowledge of music is so encyclopedic it makes me want to look into his brain just to see how little there is in it except for The Grateful Dead. This is a hard class, the hardest midterm I've ever taken. Very advance

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
This class was much more advanced than I was expecting. He is incredibly knowledgeable of all things Grateful Dead and his expectations for the class are very high. Seems like a nice enough guy, but his tests are incredibly difficult.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
I took this class as something fun during spring quarter of my senior year, thinking it'd be easy and I could learn something cool. A huge mistake. Destroyed my GPA. The whole class failed the midterm (had to curve it from /80 to /58) and he has no intention of changing it. I attended every lecture and can not think of one thing I learned.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Essays were manageable but exams were unreasonable in the amount of content that was expected. Study guides were pretty useless and did not cover even a fraction of what was expected. Don't take a class with him.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Lectures were incredibly boring, and most of the class time was spent either playing music we had already listened to or talking about stuff only tangentially related to the Grateful Dead, like communism. The three papers weren't too bad, but the midterm and final were pretty bad - class average for the midterm pre-curve was an F. Definitely avoid.