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Mackin, Thomas

Cumulative GPA: 2.78/4.00 with 9 evaluations
Presents Material Clearly: 2.67
Recognizes Student Difficulties: 3.44

Mechanical Engineering Department, Cal Poly, SLO
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ME 211 Freshman Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 9:49 am, Jun 14, 2012 Report Evaluation		Mackin is a cool guy. He jokes a lot and overall does a pretty decent job at presenting the material. As far as the lectures go, the lecture examples were straight from the book for the most part, and weren't that helpful. The tests are pretty straight forward and were on about the same difficulty as the final. His grading, however, was...sporadic to say the least with a lot of massive points taken away for small stuff sometimes, and othertimes only a few. If you go to talk to him, he really is very helpful and you can tell that he doesn't care so much about grades, but that you actually learn the material. He offered some extra credit problems/practice tests and overall I felt very prepared for the final. The key to this class is to do as many problems as you can from the book and really learn how to do them. The final was cake as long as you had seen similar questions before. Remember, the class isn't meant to be easy, and three 1 hour lectures a week definitely didn't seem like enough to fully portray the material. Overall, I would take mackin again, you just have to deal with a few clarity issues every now and then.

ME 211 Sophomore Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 9:26 pm, Jun 13, 2012 Report Evaluation		Mackin basically doesn't tell you exactly what he wants ever. Lectures should be optional because I have definitely learned more from the textbook than from sitting in his class. People only passed tests if they were over achievers who sat in office hours all day long. Do yourself a favor and take a real professor who can communicate, you know.. with words and stuff.

ME 328 Senior Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 12:17 pm, Dec 8, 2011 Report Evaluation		Professor Mackin is a genuinely good guy who cares about his students. Ultimately he cares that you learn the material, not necessary your grade or fitting people to bell curves and what not. That being said, his class can be sporadic at times. Lab reports had no clear grading rubric and seemed to be based on how much extra work and analysis you could fit into a report. Lectures seemed to cover a different, unrelated topic every day. Maybe its just the class structure, but I felt lost a lot of the time during lecture and relearned the material while doing homework. Despite the negative, he is a very approachable guy, very helpful if you seek him out, and very knowledgeable on the subject. I know this is his first time teaching design, so I think he was working out the kinks this quarter and will get better once he's taught this class a few times.

ME 211 Senior Grade Earned: B Required (Support) 1:01 pm, Mar 19, 2011 Report Evaluation		Mackin is a cool guy, really. He jokes a lot out of the situation, and it is not some lame dirty joke. He is very responsive on emails and helps his students to understand the materials like no others. I am an EE and was taking this course to satisfy the support course requirements, and I had no interest in ME or CE whatsoever because these topics are like gibberish to me. Mackin presented the materials from a very simple and comical approach to make sure the students understand, which most of the people did. There were three exams and daily homework assignments. Yes, that means you are required to turn in homework at every class session! They are for there your own good, though! Just be sure to attend his mini-review the session before the exams, he basically give away the problem(s) that will be on the exam. On our exam 2, the average was only one point below the perfect score. Go figure! Oh, and the common final was seriously a joke, it was not that hard if you study the past exams and attend the final exam review session.

ME 211 Sophomore Grade Earned: C Required (Support) 11:23 am, Jan 7, 2011 Report Evaluation		Mackin is great in office hours and if you have questions about the homework or lecture he can help you out a lot. However, the common final was a joke. His assigned homework problems and things he did in class were simplified compared to the final. I studied for three days for the final looking at all my hw and the notes from lecture, and after walking out of the final I felt like I failed. Most of the people i talked to in my class felt the same, and people I talked to with different teachers said they didn't think it was too bad.

ME 211 Sophomore Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 7:02 pm, Dec 16, 2010 Report Evaluation		Mackin was a decent statics professor. He really cared about making sure that people understood the material...even to the point of stalling for the minority to keep up. I learned the material, but mostly from reading the book, not from lecture. Grading scheme is as follows: 10% HW, 40% Quizzes, 50% Commmon Final. The biggest problem is that most of the in-class problems Mackin did were simple, so when it came to challenging HW problems and the final, most people were stuck. I can\'t say if he\'s better or worse than any other professor, so if you do end up with him, read the book and keep up with the homework.

ME 211 Sophomore Grade Earned: B General Ed 11:14 pm, Dec 13, 2010 Report Evaluation		Mackin is definitely the best professor to take for statics, hands down. He\'s a professor that truly cares about how his students are doing with the material and is willing to do example problems when the majority of the class doesn\'t understand. Very enjoyable lecture even when the material gets a bit dry. The course is not easy, and the some practice problems for the homework may take hours to complete, but at the end, he gets you ready for the final if you do your part. I definitely did not feel ready for the final even though he kept telling us that we\'re ready for it, but after a ridiculously difficult common final, I somehow came out with a B in the class.



ME 212 Senior Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 2:05 pm, Feb 3, 2010 Report Evaluation		I had Mackin for statics and dynamics a year or so ago. Honestly, Mackin is one of the coolest dudes I\'ve ever met. He jokes about Spongebob Squarepants, throws out self-depreciating jokes demonstrating his humility, and is an overall funny guy. Plus he is famous now; he is going to be one of the experts on some discovery channel show. As far as teaching goes, I liked the pace he taught at (slow and steady) although I could see how others could see it as a negative, seeing as how there is a common final. Though slow, his lectures were never boring. I wish Mackin taught every ME course, but it is better to have been Macked than to have never Macked at all.

ME 211 Sophomore Grade Earned: C Required (Major) 11:27 am, Jan 13, 2009 Report Evaluation		Mackin was a very good professor for statics, but I don't know how well he prepared us for the common final - I (and most of the people I knew in the class) passed both of his pseudo-tests with full points and felt like I could do very well on the final, but after 2 hours of hell, I wasn't so sure of my grade anymore. I ended up with a C but I could've easily gotten a B+/A- if I had turned in my incomplete homework assignments.

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