Reviews of professor Kai Zhu

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Was not expecting this from an Environmental Studies teacher... does not seem passionate at all, reads straight off the slides (which are written directly out of the textbook) so lectures are basically useless because he posts them on Canvas anyways. Interesting material but boring lectures and felt unprepared for all tests so far.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
One of the worst professors at UCSC. This is by far the worst ENVS class I've taken at UCSC. His lectures are useless, yet attendance is required. The tests are fairly difficult and are worded so there are multiple correct answers in many cases. Take BIO20C if you need to fulfill this requirement. Total waste of time and generally frustrating.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
I took this class online and I think Professor Zhu made it work well. The lectures were interesting and I just paused to write stuff down. The textbook was boring but manageable. The midterms weren't too bad, I studied for a few hours and got a good grade. He has been part of some cool ecological studies too.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
please take BIO E20C if you can. The lectures for this class are so long, and on top of that, you also have to read the textbook very closely. And I mean CLOSELY. questions on the tests would be from specific experiments in the textbook that almost no one could remember. Prof also does not take student feedback into consideration. avoid this class

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
The class was so confused about the formulas that it wasn't until the review day - the class before the second midterm, that many people actually realized that for the formulas which were badly explained and over complicated - that they did't actually need to plug in numbers, just understand them. Incredibly unclear midterm. Random questions.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Gives very boring and monotone lectures, and doesn't make sure the class understands the material before moving on to new material. There is little to no help when it comes to preparation for midterms, as the TAs aren't that much help either, if you need to take this as a prerequisite for ENVS, you might as well take BIOE 20C

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
I took Kai's ENVS 24 class for 2020 fall quarter and it was pretty good considering it being online. He's seemed to have chilled out a lot since the negative reviews in my opinion. Class is fairly straight forward and easy to pass.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Lectures are very confusing and read almost exactly from the textbook. Test heavy with very little help in class preparing for tests. Questions on tests are meant to confuse you and sometimes have no correlation to material learned in class. Highly recommend waiting to take this class if it's taught by another professor.