Yuran Chen

Actually the worst professor ever. Fails to even teach. Doesn\'t even know chemis

5/9/2026

10+ hrs/week

Exams were honestly fair and straightforward if you studied and kept up with the course. There was also a midterm drop. There were pretty easy quizzes to test basic understanding but you could drop one as well. Sometimes the textbook had conflicting info with lectures. Like a lot of other courses here, a pretty self-taught course. If she saw that you put in effort like office hours and workshops, you had a chance to ask for a grade round-up. There were also one or two extra credit opportunities. Chen is also very receptive to student feedback and is doing her best to improve her course.

12/27/2024

2-4 hrs/week

Super interesting class. Only a few assignments, but they take a while. Professor announces them well in advance so you can spread them out.

10/21/2024

2-4 hrs/week

the course is run awfully. Chen means well but is just a bad teacher. You would be best served skipping class to read the textbook

5/19/2024

10+ hrs/week

Hardest course at WashU by so much. Content is challenging, problem sets are harder, and exams are ridiculously hard. Ultimately the course content was interesting and I feel that I learned a lot but was very challenging and stressful to get there

5/19/2024

4-6 hrs/week

Aside from it being a difficult course, chen was not a good lecturer. Not sure what other professors/sections were like, but technical issues that she wasn't able to fix interrupted lecture probably once a week. She also just wasn't great at responding to questions during lecture. Lab required much less work than gen chem lab, and was very doable if you completed everything for it. One of the midterms was dropped from the final grade, which was nice

5/18/2024

Avoid her at all costs. Has no idea how to teach, glazes over difficult concepts with no explanation, very confusing lectures. Get ready to learn on your own. Tests are difficult, some close to impossible. Class averages were in the 50-60's, that should tell you something about the her teaching abilities. Take the class with literally anyone else.

5/14/2024

While I am aware this was Professor Chen's first semester lecturing, lecture was difficult to follow and did not adequately cover topics for exams which almost entirely make up the final grade. I found reading the textbook to be a better alternative to lecture but lead to a lot of time spent reading rather than practicing. Exam avgs were around 50

12/29/2023

Lectures were not useful and it felt as if you had to fuse both professors together to gain some basic understanding of the concepts. Office hours were not helpful as she did not understand what students would ask her or how to explain the concepts clearly. Very frustrating to deal with and did not feel supported by the professors in the course.

12/23/2023

I was frustrated w/ Chen a lot this semester. This was her first time lecturing, so she deserves some leniency, but some lectures were just inadequate- eg not going into depth on the things students need to know, writing mechanisms in literal silence. OH were occasionally helpful- sometimes she didn't really get what students were trying to ask tho

12/22/2023

What a terrible semester. Prof Chen was as confused as we were. I tried to go to the extra sessions, but those were just as bad. No idea what grades were based on. Just plain frustrating. To go from Chem 111/112 to this felt like false advertising. I was considering Chemistry as a major...not any more.

12/22/2023

She doesn't know how to give clear lectures and would confuse the class and herself. If the average is a less than 50 on the exam for many students than that fault is on the professor not the students regardless of how hard the class is. She doesn't know how to gives lectures.

12/19/2023

Was satisfactory at teaching the material, but could be better at explain concepts for everyone. Lectures were very fast paced but that had more to do with the material rather than her own doing. Was helpful if you went to office hours.

12/9/2023

Boring lectures, inconsistent exams. Lack of useful practice questions. Generally not very helpful. If I hear her say "clearlei" again I\'m gonna explode on the spot.

12/8/2023

Not a good lecturer, very unengaging and not good at explaining concepts apart from surface level. Exams deal with much more complex problems that you could only be prepared for by work outside of class. Poorly structured. If students are averaging Ds on your exams you probably aren't teaching properly.

10/21/2023

Although Chen is a decent lecturer, his class design is awful. You'd learn more about the topic in the first three weeks of the electrical engineering undergrad course. Chen lectured around 6 times and the rest were peer presentations (he doesn't even attend these himself) with no in-depth content. Insanely easy A but don't expect to learn.

6/17/2023

Excellent professor! Very passionate about what she teaches. The grading is fair and considerate. Your score reflects your understanding, and you final grade reflects your overall effort. She doesn't have all the answers to all your questions, but she's willing to learn and get back to you later. Very professional and caring to her students.

4/15/2023

This class is ridiculously easy compared to any 500-level class, especially a Theory class. His lectures are very clear, but it only lasts for a month, and the rest are presentations and a group project, which are all graded uniformly.

10/16/2022

Provides no textbook or other resources to study from. Presentations on topics are just 2-3 examples with no answers and recordings are illegible. No way to self-study and changes to office hours and the midterm format will not be announced online or the syllabus, so make sure you hear every second of this course to catch important announcements

4/5/2022

Class info was extremely inaccessible throughout the semester. Many changes were made to the class format without updating the syllabus, class schedule, or making announcements (in person or on canvas). Her class is extremely disorganized and her canvas doesn't give you any accurate information, yet she won't update, remove, or change it.

3/9/2022

A terrible teacher who cannot explain things clearly. Her handwritting is so light that hard to read. Has no structure at all. you can't even self learning because the ppt and notes are useless. Avoid her at any cost

3/2/2022

She's genuinely the worst, least engaging professor I've had at this college. She has no talent as a teacher, her explanations are unclear, and she is easily frazzled by student questions. She races through material and appears upset when no one understands. She also made rather extreme changes to the syllabus in the middle of the course.

2/28/2022

He is very knowledgeable about the topic, right to the point. dunno about others, but this course has the right difficulty for me who just want to know more about optimization but don't like too much math. the course presentations by peers are awesome as they cover some current applications in machine learning, which I am eager to learn about

12/6/2020

Prof Chen is going to offer about 10 lectures and skip the rest of the semester. So you basically just going to listen to peer's lectures, which has various quality.

6/30/2019

Chen is an expert in optimization. What I liked most is the organization of the course: a mixture of classical stuff and modern applications. He would condense a 400 page textbook in to a series of insightful slides and pick out the key concepts for us. Oh, you don't need to be a math genius to pass this course.

11/1/2018