Durham, Garland  

What the guy/gal below said. Amen. I too took this class and have long since graduated from Poly, but I was cruising Poly Ratings for a kick and thought that I should pipe in and let you know how much of a joke this prof is.

Garland Durham is a nice guy but is not the best instructor of this material. This was his first quarter at Cal Poly so it reasonable for him to struggle a bit but not as much as he actually did. He teaches at a very fast pace as he read the slides for verbatim. The course material is reasonable to comprehend but he would make it difficult by not revealing all the work associated to his answers. The practice problems assigned were not bad as it would take about an hour to complete and there usually was textbook reading which would take about an hour. There were homework assignments and quizzes handed out at random. The main issue I found was that his syllabus didn't state what the students should do on a class session basis. Due to this, students relied on Professor Durham to post things in a timely manner which he didn't. For his exams, you need to know how to do all the problems and remember the qualitative characteristics associated with his slides. The exams had multiple choice questions, short answers questions, and problems on them. The grade was divided up to: homework assignments and quizzes were 20%, midterm 1 20%, midterm 2 30%, and final 30%. Overall, Professor Durham's presentation style makes the course harder than it really is.

Due to King Cyrus's amazing performance as the Finance Emperor, Durham is the only addition to the Finance department that is actually worth mentioning when evaluating finance faculty quality without feeling a large amount of regret of why you're at Cal Poly. He and Gorman are the only finance professors I've encountered that actually help develop your finance knowledge. The first half of his course was making sure everyone was on the same page, but the latter half was filled with concepts and methods I've never touched upon while at Poly, but have read through at other (better) finance schools. Overall, Durham is a solid pick for 438, but it's worth mentioning the feeling of overlap with Gorman's class is due to the fact that it literally is the true sequel to 342. The things you learn in the class will obviously help if you're going the Corp Fin route. That being said, his tests were hard but if you actually pay attention during the lectures and do every single quiz/homework/review slide problem prior to the midterm you should make do with an A in the class.

Professor Durham changed the way we taught the class this quarter. He really wanted to base it off of the book. The class consists of quizzes on every chapter (we ended up doing 18 chapters so you have a couple quizzes a week and it adds up). The quizzes can be taken as many times as you wanted so I would always take them until I got 100%. They are five questions each taken from a test bank. He would also give labs at the end of class which would either be practice on the stuff in class or a random excel assignment he wanted to teach us. Most of them were very easy and could be finished in class. Some would be hard and he would not explain it properly and you would fail it. The first midterm was 9 chapters long and was basically a review of BUS 342. I took it with Gorman and it was nothing to stress about. The average was a high C. The second midterm added another 8 chapters and was a lot more challenging. The average was a D and because of that he decided he would drop our lowest test grade. The final was cumulative and fortunately I did well enough on the first two midterms where I didn't have to take the final. Overall he was a really nice professor and having the quizzes and midterms be based off of the book was nice so you knew there wasn't any wildcards. The multiple choice part of the midterms came straight from old quizzes and the practice midterm he gave. And the written portion came straight from the end of the chapter problems he assigned (which was a lot). Overall I really enjoyed this class and thought it was fair if you put in the time.

Garland is awesome! He explains things very well and his exams and homeworks are very fair. You learn a lot in this course and he is super chill.

Really good professor would totally recommend.

Does he even know finance? He's always so lost in the sauce

Dude doesn't know Finance. Every class he will explain a problem, and then midway through the problem, realize he messed up on one of the first calculations for the problem. He told the class Profitability Index was calculated as the Net Present Value of all Cash Flows divided by the Original Cash Flow and was adamant that he was correct (PI=PV of Cash Inflows / Original Cash Outflow). Basically review of Gorman and then brings in some new information. Waste of time and tuition money. Incredibly boring.

I'd already taken Durham's BUS 438 class, so I knew what he was like. As soon as I saw him teaching a Senior Proj class, I signed up ASAP. He's a super chill professor and he's open to answering questions on what he wants. In terms of the Senior Proj itself, it consists of the first 5 weeks just doing online courses. The online courses were pretty chill, you just had to go through lecture slides and then answer the quiz at the end (endless tries on the quizzes) and get a passing score. After 5 weeks are up, you start the actual Senior Proj. You partner up and basically have to mimic the Excel sheet model from the online courses. You pretty much just fill in the financial numbers from the company you pick. There are three parts to the senior project: the Excel sheet, a 10 or so page essay, and a presentation. The essay was pretty easy to fill up with info you grab from your company's background and financials. The presentation though, is a bit unclear on formatting, but so long as you fill it up with info, you're good to go. Durham was super helpful and chill about everything (even asking if anyone needed an extended deadline on the online courses LOL) and he makes you sign up for mini-conferences with his office hours so he can check in on how your project is going. Would definitely recommend for a chill Senior Project class that is relatively stress-free. I only had to meet up about 3-4 times with my project partner, and even then we could've done some of those meetings just via text.

I took Durham for my senior project which consisted of learning how to use Factset. He’s a really chill professor which I admire. The first half of the quarter was individual learning with the factset tutorials you did online. Then the second half the quarter was working on the project which was to do a financial model on a company you chose using factset. The paper had to be at least 12 pages and presentation was 15 min between you and another person. It was frustrating trying to do the excel portion of the model but he gave us an example of an old project which helped a lot. Overall it was a pretty chill and interesting senior project. Didn’t require a lot of work and was very informative/ I learned a lot.