Reviews of professor Benjamin Purkis

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
As long as you keep up with the skill mastery and do well on the weekly quizzes, math 110 is a pretty easy course. We met once a week and we were automatically assigned to break-out rooms to work on skills checks. Learning the material had to be done on our own by watching his videos so compared to the difficulty, there was a lot of work to do.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Purkis is an amazing person but he is very very harsh on grading. He would take off points for very minor things. But he is such a nice person and very knowledgable and accessible out of classroom. If you take his class, you will push yourself to do well but might not get the best grades.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
The laziest professor I've ever seen. He spends less than half of the class time teaching the most basic examples and expect you to be able to solve questions that are way beyond the material of difficulty. It's literally impossible to do well in his class.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Do not take CS170 if you dont have coding experience. He is an incredibly harsh grader. You will get a D or C for a functioning program if its not efficient enough. He is accessible outside of class, and he is generally nice, but if you want to learn CS, do it somewhere else. His grading is unclear, and his teaching can be tough to follow.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
To be honest, his class is very fair. I should've kept up with the material instead of cramming a few days before each exam. His tests are reasonable, and I think part of the reason why many people think he is hard is because the course material itself cannot be oversimplified. Multi is a hard concept since it requires decent visual skills.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Dr. Purkis had pretty much prerecorded all of his material, so he just answered questions during class. Class was once a week and we were put in breakout rooms, that he would occasionally check in on us, for majority of the time. Remember, your grade is mostly based on skill mastery so don't wait till the end of the semester to turn in the work.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
THIS ISN'T AN INTRODUCTORY COURSE, THIS IS A WEEDING OUT COURSE. He instructs his students to write code and he grades it by such high standards. He never tells his students what he is looking for, and gets frustrated whenever we ask him questions. A slow grader and he provides feedback on projects that would never be assigned again. JUST AWFUL