He is very smart but does not express his thoughts well to students. He makes little sense and makes the math harder than it needs to be. Do not recommend.

He may be smart and excellent at math, but he's not a very good professor and makes it a lot harder than it should be esp on exam. Take a different professor if you can

Last minute he changed the grade percentage which affected my overall grade, gave us a written final and oral final. I do not recommend this guy. If there is an option "0" I will have no hesitation of giving that.

He's nice but that's about it. Not good at explaining things and is VERY conceptual, so if that's not ur way of understanding things I would avoid this prof. Oftentimes he will subtly go over new material in lecture and expect us to catch on without clearly indicating new rules or equations. No practice midterm before this first midterm too. Ugh

Hands down the worst professor Ive ever had. Super nice guy but an awful teacher. He explains nothing and assumes you know everything.

Absolute worst professor ever, lectures are completely useless, nothing on the homework is covered by lectures, no practice tests for exams, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS

One of the worst professors I've ever had. He covers basic topics during lectures and then tests us on extremely abstract, conceptual concepts that we never learned. No practice midterms, pretty much need to teach all of the the material to yourself in order to do well. Would not recommend!

Schley is a great person. He's kind, nice, and really wants his students to succeed. However, he is not a good teacher. He is horrible at lecturing. He tests his students on topics that he never really taught before. Most of the time, I would have to teach myself all the topics.

Nathan is a very nice and caring Professor but should not be a teacher. Although he does want his students to do well, he is not a strong/clear lecturer. I ended up having to teach most of the material to myself. Exams include abstract concepts/rules that he expects you to know just because he knows them.

Man does not know how to to teach, only sets up practice problems for each lecture. It is a self taught course and be ready too be mad. I did not enjoy his course one bit at all

I just started this course but genuinely wtf

Does not explain anything and only uses examples to teach. I am always confused in lecture

If you want to truely learn and grasp Abstract Algebra, stay away from this professor.

This class is terrible. The TA is unkind and not helpful whatsoever, he also is extremely judgmental. The teacher is nice but the lectures make zero sense and neither does the homework. Compared to the other teachers that teach this taking this class with him is like taking a completely different class.

Horrible at explaining, and the homework and tests do not correlate to what we learn in class. this should be an easy class but he has made it extremely difficult

Schley is one of the worst teachers I've ever had, for ANYTHING. He's very nice and personable, but his teaching style is impressively horrible, teaching the whole course through example problems and only briefly explaining core concepts. The homework is also useless and unhelpful, as he likes to jump around without ANY consistency whatsoever.

This professor is absolutely horrible, he teaches only by giving examples and is horrible at explaining any of the concepts. The average on all of the midterms have been extremely low and he is claiming that he will not curve the class

His lectures aren't organized, he has poor time management and expects us to know almost everything already so he teaches us as if we're reviewing the topics, never really getting deeper into how to do problems. He's very nice and wants his students to succeed but he is just horrible at teaching

He does not accept any late homework even if you have appropriate excuses. He forces students to engage in class and no one responds, which is super awkward. He only spends time on the easy parts of the course but doesn't teach well on the hard parts.

Seems like a lovely person who wants his students to succeed but he does not know how to teach. We went over his quiz question and even he was doing it wrong

I'm sure he's a great person but this man cannot teach. My friend and I decided to teach ourselves the material instead of actually going to lecture. We've noticed we can get more done and actually understand it that way. 0/10 would not recommend. If you have the choice choose Peter Garfield as your math34b professor.

Lecture is a complete waste of time. Prof rarely does example problems with the class which is unfortunate considering how many he assigns. Spends most of lecture reading off slides he's forgotten. Material+tests are pretty simple and all it takes is a competent CLAS tutor to do well Easily the most useless prof/lecture I've had here (4th yr)

If you ask me what I've learned for the past 7 weeks from this man literally nothing comes to mind. I review all his lecture slides and materials and still don't understand how I'm learning anything. he worst part is that although he doesn't make sense the TA Christine Alar is also unhelpful as well. He also rarely posts answers to his study guides

He seems like he genuinely cares about his students. However, he's a pretty bad teacher and it seems like he doesn't really know what he's talking about. He makes a lot of mistakes during his lectures and honestly I'm more confused after attending his lectures. Take him as a professor only if you're good at self-studying.

Wow. Worst teacher i've ever had. A very nice man I'm sure, but utterly and wholly incompetent. I had him for 34a and 34b, and just wait to take this class with another professor. Simply not worth it at all. Lectures are completely useless and hard to follow, couldn't even do his own problems in class. He's so disorganized and just.. don't.

Very boring lecture and very heavy homework. Office hours is not helpful at all. Avoid him if you can.

Don't take this course with this person if you are okay with poor-quality teaching, I'd wish I could sign up with Professor Porter instead of this guy, he is not meant to teach at the university, confuses people even more.

You could replace him with a bar of soap and learn more. Sign up for CLAS before signing up for him as a professor. You'll get away more from the tutors than the Pillsbury dough boy who runs that classroom. This is the 3rd time I am posting my comment after this dude requested to remove people's honest reviews twice, no shame!

After reading these ratings at the beginning of the quarter I thought "Maybe he isn't that bad" I greatly underestimated just how bad someone could be at teaching. The lectures were unorganized, he constantly made mistakes, made topics overly complicated, etc. Possibly the worst experience I've ever had with an educator. Avoid if possible.

Don't take this professor. you will need to teach yourself all of the material. Jit claims he spends 7 hours on notes but notes have mistake in every lecture. He doesn't post the completed solutions to the notes online so you have to go to lecture but you wont learn anything. Exams arent too crazy but I taught the entire course material to myself.

He's a great teacher, I believe the material is really hard to grasp just with his lectures alone. His class is really tough if you don't self-study for hours on top of that there is a lot of homework. 30% homework, 30% midterm, 40% final. A very tough grader.

Order of the class was all over the place and his lectures hardly ever matched what was on the homework. Very sweet guy, but confuses students by going off on long tangents in class. Tests were heavy on the conceptual ideas and not computation. Expected too much out of students who were seeing this material for the first time.

This professor is just not good. His lectures were just bad; they didn't help in the slightest. Another professor seemingly makes his slides and he will often presents as if its his first time seeing them. He simply doesn't care about a lower division class. The class was easy if instead of listening to him, you had math majors explain the topics.

40% HW, 15% per two Midterms, 30% Final Group Project. We don't know more than half of our hw grades by the end of the course; "lectures" are hand-out papers + some math joke + "yay do it yourself!"; midterm reviews is him verbatim reading midterm topics + not elaborating; office hours are with other classes so not too helpful; good grade = do hw

He is a real bozi txa

Really hard grader!

Terrible lecture, no idea what he was talking about. He seemed to be teaching only the few people in front of him. Self-study is required.

Professor Schley is genuinely the worst professor I have ever had at UCSB. He would not tell us what was on the midterm and he told us three days before that we needed to know 3 more chapters and his practice test was so hard so I dropped the class.

lecture notes are copied from online, not that helpful since he basically just explains in very abstract ways the "mathematical intuition" but doesn't really go over concrete examples. prepare to self study/ask ta. gives out extra credit for doing hw early (before he goes over the concept in lecture) so just self study, midterm has stuff not taught

Schley is more concerned with teaching himself how to code than actually teaching you. The only knowledge comes from (rushed) lectures, which are primarily his rambling rather than teaching you any material. When there is information, it's somehow wrong. Think you can learn in office hours? Only about his personal side projects. Not recommended.

Schley is a joke, take Matt Porter's class and save yourself some headaches.

Just hands out a worksheet and waits for someone to ask him questions during lecture. He also doesn't really mention anything about the midterms leading up to them? Always has to be reminded to put the time up for midterms. Said he'd been prepping for another class's midterm and didn't get to spend as much time helping prep for our midterm.

Perhaps the worst lecturer I have encountered

Absolutely the worst.

RUN. Lectures are way too abstract and never really explains anything. It amazes me how he can explain so little in so many words. HW has few problems but require so much work (but gives you some ec). Prob wouldn't have passed the class if we didn't have a 4 hour online final with notecards. Prepare to self study your a off

Schely is simply not good at teaching math.

Lots of homework but extra credit on it. Quizzes every section and often have content on it taught that same day in lecture. Lectures were confusing and he was bad at answering questions from students. The TA was more helpful than the professor. Self-study is needed

nathan is one of the worse profs i've ever had. fails to explain concepts well and just goes in circles. there's extra credit but that's not really helpful when you're left to self study by yourself. having a good ta helps

He was an awful teacher. Sure he's a nice guy, but absolutely terrible at teaching. Had I known ChatGPT and Youtube videos would teach me more than the professor himself I would have avoided taking his course. If you want a good teacher don't take this course. The tests are reasonable and you get a note card.

Nathan would often go into tangents and not really teach concepts in a way that leaves you feeling like you learned any material. His canvas/class structure/ just everything had a disorganization to it. Possibly an easy to pass class, however, if you want to learn material to supplement your future classes, find another professor

Nathan is quite literally the worst teacher/professor I've ever had. From not clearly answering questions, to assigning homework and quizzes weekly, I eventually had to drop his Math108A course, but if I stayed in his course, Im sure I would've gotten a C- or lower...