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Chen, Katherine

Cumulative GPA: 2.33/4.00 with 21 evaluations
Presents Material Clearly: 2.52
Recognizes Student Difficulties: 2.33

Materials Engineering Department, Cal Poly, SLO
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MATE 232 Sophomore Grade Earned: C Required (Major) 1:11 am, Apr 4, 2013 Report Evaluation		never seems impressed with what we do and is kinda condescending. Midterms are hard. the average was a 55 on one of them

MATE 215 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Support) 7:41 pm, Mar 10, 2012 Report Evaluation		Chen's a good teacher for lab. There is a verbal lab quiz before each lab, but as long as you read the lab you'll do fine. In mate 215, every group does a different lab from each other. I have no clue how she grades the labs, but I think she's pretty lenient. I'm not a MATE major, so I didn't really find interest in this class, but she tried to help us understand it. Sometimes though, when you ask her a question, she'll ask you a question about your question and avoid answering it. There's no final. There are only 8 labs, so you get out a week early.

MATE 215 Sophomore Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 1:14 am, Apr 22, 2011 Report Evaluation		Prof Chen communicates what is expected very clearly and makes the lab interesting and fun! I would retake her again if I get the opportunity!

MATE 232 Sophomore Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 11:55 pm, Apr 20, 2011 Report Evaluation		I spent more time studying for these tests than for any other tests that I've ever taken in my life, and got lower scores on these tests than I've gotten on any other tests in my life. Somehow ended up with an A... god knows that curve must have been pretty ridiculous at the end. This class was pretty much a mix of 1000000 completely unrelated topics. I guess you could say it was fun? The homework was due weekly and was 2-4 different 1-2 page long reports on some articles about nanotechnology. This was one of the few classes that I have ever taken here in which I did not look forward to attending

MATE 232 Sophomore Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 1:18 pm, Mar 18, 2011 Report Evaluation		Chen. Expect to lose points for everything, whether it be relevant or irrelevant. Preparing for her tests are more of figuring out the exact wording she wants for a question, inserting as many buzz words as possible. She will warn against "shotgunning," or saying everything you can think of, yet she will grade you down for not enough information. In short, even if you know every little detail about all of the concepts in class, you will not get an A on any of the tests.

MATE 232 Sophomore Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 1:28 pm, Mar 17, 2011 Report Evaluation		Chen knows a lot about materials and is knowledgable in the field. She's very open to discussion during class and office hours. In order to get a good grade in her classes, you need to think outside the box and write more than the average answer on her midterms. That being said, she is a harsh grader on midterms and lab reports. She stated that she's one of the reviewers for peer reviewed articles, and I feel that she uses those articles as a basis for grading. It's hard to fight for points back and she grades based on what other people right. She'll take off points for putting the correct description but not naming the process. Her lectures are dry and she expects you to know detailed descriptions of slides gone over in a few minutes. This class barely covers ethics and history of materials. It's more on nanotechnology, alloys, and steel. Be prepared to do a lot of reading and studying and a good amount of homework every week.

MATE 232 Sophomore Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 1:48 pm, Mar 10, 2010 Report Evaluation		Dr. Chen is very knowledgeable and knows her stuff better than a lot of the teachers in the MATE department. She is a great lab instructor and helps students tremendously in lab. That being said, her teaching style for lectures needs to change. She is clearly very out of touch with the students. She assigns ridiculous amounts of homework that are absolutely unnecessary for an ethics class, with complete disregard for the other classes students have and how busy their schedules may be. Her lectures are straight off the power point, with perhaps the only cool part being the items she passes around. The lectures are dry and hard to follow. The readings she posts on Blackboard usually consist of extremely opinionated articles that are very difficult to read. She is very uptight and doesn\'t show much personality in class. This shows especially in her grading as she grades students down on anything and everything, without any tolerance for small mistakes. If she doesn\'t see exactly what she wants to see, almost verbatim, then it\'s partially or entirely wrong. Again, Dr. Chen is very knowledgeable and clearly intelligent, and I would recommend her as a lab instructor, but the way she teaches and grades in lecture is a huge discouragement to students and makes students lose interest in the material. A reduction in the amount of busy work and adding some humor into the lectures would make her teaching a lot better. If you have a busy schedule with a lot of work in other classes and you have any choice at all when it comes to teachers for this class or another lecture (which isn\'t likely if you\'re a MATE), then try to avoid her class.



MATE 232 Junior Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 10:46 pm, Mar 22, 2009 Report Evaluation		This class on nano/ethics is such a joke. I feel like such a fucking lab rat in this major, like they're constantly trying out new classes on us, and always getting it wrong. In this class you learn basically nothing new. You read a lot of boring opinionated articles that tangentially relate to materials engineering, if at all. The best part (only good part) of this class were the guest lecturers who came and really made it easy to see that any other major would have better and more interesting teachers. Dr. Chen grades harshly, unless you go to her office once, in which case your shit is golden. All her powerpoints are posted on blackboard, thank god, otherwise I would have actuallly had to try and extract meaning from the endless stream of random, unorganized information that was "taught" to us at every "lecture." I would say avoid her, but like any other mate class, there's usually no choice.

MATE 101 Junior Grade Earned: C Required (Major) 1:36 pm, Jan 26, 2009 Report Evaluation		Dr. Chen I can't keep getting mad at London anymore. It's your fault he's here, the entire junior series talks about how fucked up he is as a teacher, and as a person. Watching London and Harding operate is like reading a Goofus and Gallant cartoon strip. Guess which one is Goofus? I wish to god I had London for MatE 210. I would have known to get out of this major. It is disgusting and horrible that you have London hiding in the junior series. I love Material Engineering, but man, I simply hate London. If I had known I would have to take an entire year of him, I would have simply been a different major. So Chen since you ignore our student-teacher evaluations I post this here. As my only way of getting back at the department.

MATE 500 Senior Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 7:57 pm, Jul 17, 2008 Report Evaluation		Uptight and devoid of any personality

MATE 215 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 11:45 am, Mar 31, 2005 Report Evaluation		Good lab instructor to have! She is highly interactive with the students. If you have a question, she's ready to help. She won't just give you the answer, but she will lead you to finding the answer yourself. This make it so you have to learn and understand the material. It was an easy A. Plan on spending the full 3 hours in lab almost every week though.

MATE 215 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Support) 11:47 am, Mar 23, 2005 Report Evaluation		Good teacher, Good class. No final. With a little out of class work, it should be an easy A (or at least a B).

MATE 215 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Support) 10:07 am, Jun 16, 2004 Report Evaluation		She is helpful in answering your questions, and she really wants you to learn the material and do well. Sometimes she is not clear on the what kind of answer she is looking for on her lab worksheets. She is always looking for twice as much explanation than the question really asks for. Other than that, she's a good lab teacher and doesn't leave you in the dark. She stops by your group every 20 mins or so to see if you have any questions, and if you study for the final getting an A in the class isn't all that hard.



MATE 215 Sophomore Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 12:42 pm, Feb 18, 2004 Report Evaluation		prof chen is pretty tough. she likes things in a certain way, but she does let you redo things if you just totally get it wrong. be sure to not forget anything for lab or she'll dock you points. overall its an easy class with no final so its really not that bad.

MATE 210 Sophomore Grade Earned: A Required (Support) 3:16 pm, Feb 17, 2004 Report Evaluation		Professor Chen is definetly not the best or the worst teacher you can get for MATE 210. While I think she is a little more difficult than the other teachers the class is still pretty much a breeze. I spent maybe an hour or two a week studying for this class and that was very adequate. She gives weekly quizzes, which seem tough, but in the end for us she dropped 3 out of 8 of them. Now that is a pretty good curve. She has two midterms which are easier and nothing to be sweated. The final wasn't too bad. In the end she is a pretty decent teacher and I think all of the other teachers use her powerpoint slides for their lectures.

MATE 0 Junior Grade Earned: C Required (Major) 12:12 pm, Jun 16, 2003 Report Evaluation		Dr. Chen is... well to put it bluntly, a hardass. She expects a ton of hours to be put into her classes, and labs (except for 215) are rediculous! She is a smart lady, but expects you to not only understand material presented in class, but to apply it on tests (with minimal explination of the thing you are actually applying it TO). I put a rediculous amount of time into the class I most recently took from her, and got a C. I was just mad because my other grades suffered severely from taking a class with her (not that I had a choice). I undersand that she wants us to be able to think on our own, but the truth of the matter is we are friggin students and we just learned all this stuff! How can she really expect us to apply it when we have had no real-world experience!? She is just a very difficult teacher... my reccommendation to all non-MATE majors is to take someone else.

MATE 504 Senior Grade Earned: A Elective 8:47 am, Apr 28, 2003 Report Evaluation		This was an experimental class, that ended up covering so much interesting stuff. Dr. Chen included a ton of cool topics, that I didnt know anything about, and made it really fun to learn. She structured her class differently than a typical lecture- with no tests or hw, only reading (lots), presentations, and reports. She let us choose our own research topics so that it was interesting to us, and was really good about class participation and discussions. I would recommend her and this class to anyone, even non-MATEs.

MATE 210 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Support) 5:04 pm, Dec 23, 2002 Report Evaluation		Chen's great. Fun to look at and fun to listen to. She's a tough cookie on quiz grading: be sure to answer questions as completely as possible, with lots of words.

MATE 210 Junior Grade Earned: C Required (Support) 12:30 pm, Dec 18, 2002 Report Evaluation		If you are a MATE definately take this teacher because she will certainly make you know the subject to the extent that you need to know. If you are any other major (ie. I'm talking to EE's and CPE's etc.) then take Orling if at all possible. Chen makes you memorize all the useless MATE equations and then always tries to trick you on quizzes and tests. She gives chapter overviews, but she makes sure that her exam questions can not be answered with only that knowledge. She wants you to use certain words in your answers and if you don't, she docks you because you know the material but aren't "digging as deep" as she wants you to. She says that you should read along in the book, which is also just a waste of time. Then we had a useless material selection group project to do which wasn't worth much of our grade anyway, but took up WAY to much of our dead week study time. And on to the final, it was very long and was exactally like the stupid little "mini quizzes" and "quizzes" that she gave us before. THAT would have been nice to know before hand, huh? She brought us cookies twice as if we would all change our mind from all the bad things that we thought of her. I don't want her f-ing cookies. So to wrap this up...If you are a MATE or like looking at teachers asses (see below comment) take Chen....otherwise DO NOT TAKE CHEN.



MATE 215 Sophomore Grade Earned: A Required (Support) 10:56 am, Dec 16, 2002 Report Evaluation		Talk about attractive- she has a cute butt which really adds to how cool MATE 215 is. The labs were really fun and easy. I'd take her for anything.

MATE 405 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 11:05 pm, Aug 9, 2002 Report Evaluation		Dr. Chen is a good professor and knows a lot about what she is teaching. I mean she got her Ph.D. at MIT for crying out loud. She is, however, not very helpful at times when you ask her questions (esp. from homework) because she wants us to figure out the problems on our own/with our classmates. But if you show her some of your work, she is very helpful and may even let you see her answers if you ask. The other thing is that she doesn't know exactly what she wants sometimes. for example, one homework assignment had us find a read a few research paper/journal articles and we were supposed to write about it. I put in a lot of work but it ended up only worth 3 points. Her test are generally half calculations and half written responses, very similar to the ones in MatE 220. I felt she emphasized much more on interputation of numerical answers now rather than just getting to the number (that's the too difficult anyways since you get an equation sheet, though it does not really cover all the equations used in the class, the rest you need to derive (quite easily done) from what's given). As for the lecture, you probably got it at MatE 220 also: she writes stuffs on the board and talk about them and you copy them down. She sometimes ask the same questions again and again to make sure you understand some basic concepts, they are important but can get annoying. As for the lab, she doesn't give you the cook book instructions anymore, nor should you expect it. she does guide you towards the general direction. this should've started back with london in mechanical behaviors, so it should be no surprise to you. in conclusion, if you are taking MatE 405, you are probably a MATE and don't have a choice in the teacher. And you probably had her in MatE 220, she's pretty much the same, with only a stronger emphasis on the figuring things out on your own.

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