He is incredibly kind and caring for his students, but was rarely helpful. When students asked questions in lecture or office hours, the answers were frequently long-winded or merely repetition of confusing initial explanations. He encouraged students to visit him during office hours and to email him with questions, but few, if any, students seemed to find these helpful.

There were significant technical issues throughout the quarter: even in a final review, I heard that the professor accidentally left during the middle of the session.

Chatterjee lectured using slides that were both disordered and filled with errors. He struggled with pacing, at times speaking too quickly for students to follow and at times moving incredibly slowly. He clearly knows the class material well, but doesn't seem to understand what material students will struggle with or be able to provide alternate explanations.

Homework answers are provided with assignments but are frequently incorrect. The homework is generally good preparation for exams, but some assignments were difficult more because of ridiculous integrations than implementing concepts.

This class was a lot of stress and I didn't feel like I learned anything by the end of the quarter. The textbook was generally more helpful than lectures in understanding differential equation concepts, but exams often featured conceptual equations answered in class.

Lectures: mandatory attendance and he calls on people. His slides are extremely long and difficult to read. Teaches you all the things you need to know and be able to recite in the test but does not draw connection between different topics.

Discussion sections: taught me everything I need to know for this class. Bless the TA. It's a weekly 2-hour lecture that teaches you everything that's important.

Homework: Really fair and encompassing of the major knowledge points. Not excessively long and does a good job to check student comprehension.

Office Hours: he's really nice. Go to his office hours and talk with him.

Exams: Pretty fair exams. Similar format to homework questions usually with an extra thing to test comprehension. Does a good job checking for understanding of course material.

Overall: Be patient and persevere. Be prepared to go to discussions and look up some outside resources to gain a deeper degree of understanding. Definitely caused me some headaches at times but at the end, I feel okay.

DISCLAIMER: This was online during COVID-19

Chatterjee was the worst professor I have ever had. Seeing his other reviews on here I am giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this online style of teaching is just not for him. He was really poor when it came to teaching us online. He was unclear, his notes were sloppy and illegible at times, he never clarified anything when it came to questions, his notation was inconsistent, and he was near computer illiterate. He is a nice guy and really wants his students to learn, but is not very good at helping them to learn (at least through online format). I would avoid taking this class with him at all costs if it is online, in person he might be better. The exams were tough (average for the midterm was 58%) and they were nearly undoable in the time frame he wanted them in. This class was very theoretical at times and he would often ask questions about a specific thing he explained for like 30 seconds in a lecture 2 weeks before hand that is not something really in the textbook (at least under the same name). I learned more from my TA than I did in his class. The textbook we had was awful which only added to the confusion.

My experience with this class went like this: Try to read the textbook before class so I would understand what he would be referencing -> go to class and not really understand much -> Go to discussion and actually learn the material -> read paul's online math notes (seriously these are life saver. Look them up if you are in this class) while I did the homework to actually get the concepts down. If Chatterjee was actually a good lecturer with good explanations this class wouldn't have been so bad, and the discussion session would have been review rather than like lecture 2.0

An important factor in this review is that I took this course in Spring 2020, which was completely online. Those of us that took this class at this time missed out on the in-person helpfulness that Chatterjee is apparently known for. The lectures were roughly based on slides, which would not be a problem if the slides were straightforward, legible, and correct. Instead, the slides were inconsistent and illegible at best. Numerous corrections were made during each presentation. This lack of attention to detail was reflected in the homework sets. The problems did not come out of the textbook and the solutions provided were often wrong, which was frustrating and prevented me from developing a sound understanding of how to solve differential equations. The tests were very difficult and were rarely at the level of what was discussed in class or what was presented in the recommended textbook. I went to office hours a handful of times, which confirmed that he definitely cares about his students, but his lack of clarity undermines that concern.

In short, Chatterjee is a caring, though unclear professor that I would not recommend.

I'm normally not the type to say this but the professor was pretty hard to understand. He seemed nice but I had a lot of difficulty deciphering what to take away from his words and sentences. Differential equations are already fairly difficult, so this class was definitely a struggle. I recall using online resources to teach myself and check my work because I was generally lost otherwise. It would have been helpful to have a basic knowledge of linear algebra before taking this course; it was very easy to get lost.

I took Chatterjee for statics two quarters ago and I vowed to never take another class of his unless I absolutely needed to.

Well... here I am again :)

A solid third of many of his lectures were essentially him figuring out the technology, so we'd spend 20 minutes at a time doing literally nothing as he attempted to present his slides or use the stylus. You'd think this would be a one-time thing but nope, all the way until the last lectures even when we were in person, he still had trouble writing on the slides.

The slides themselves were cluttered with often incorrect or incomplete examples, but somehow they were just barely enough so that if you go to lecture, you have a good chance at getting through the homework. Will you actually understand the concepts? Eh. Maybe. I think his greatest flaw is that he never actually works out any example problems himself. Sure, he has example problems on the slides but he essentially puts them on the screen and reads them to you. He does not write out and solve any new problems from start to finish and combined with his often confusing explanations, this makes it very hard to understand the concepts in class.

He definitely tries his hardest to help us learn, which is why it does hurt a bit to be so critical of him. He gave us his personal phone number to call for help, was always willing to go back and try to explain things if we wanted, and held extra office hours before the final. His heart is for sure in the right place.

My greatest piece of advice if you find yourself in this class? Use this site: https://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/Classes/DE/DE.aspx
It helped fill the ever widening gaps in his instruction and I would not have gotten an A without it.

Good luck.

Prof. Chatterjee clearly cares a lot about his students, but his lectures are very convoluted and not super helpful. I learned pretty much all of the material from going to discussion and reading the textbook. Random participation checks are taken, especially towards the end of the quarter, so would recommend attending and keeping your audio on in case the professor calls your name. The quizzes weren't difficult, but would recommend knowing how to solve every single kind of problem for the midterms because they're surprisingly difficult. I think the professor curved the class quite a bit which is nice, and seems to take into account how hard you try so show that you're putting in effort and you'll do well.

Taken during quarantine. I'll repeat what a lot of reviewers have also said which is that Professor Chatterjee is a nice guy who really does genuinely care about his students learning the material. He asked us for feedback many times and did his best to accommodate us.

However, that's kind of where the positives end. A lot of the issues with this class came from it being online, but some of the issues are just with Chatterjee's teaching style in general. There's no doubt he knows what he's talking about, but he's one of those teachers that understand the material so well that they have no idea how to explain the more "simple" aspects to other people. The hardest part is that he teaches exclusively through powerpoints. For me, the best way to be taught is through examples that the teacher writes down step-by-step. Chatterjee has examples in his notes, but he never actually writes them down and goes through them; instead he takes the pre-written notes and simply narrates what each line is supposed to mean. I don't think this is nearly as effective as actually writing through each example. The only way I actually started learning how to do problems was from the TA who actually went through examples and wrote them down during discussion.

The grading scheme was kind of weird to me as we had homework, 2 quizzes, a midterm, and the final. Even with the 2 quizzes (which you would think would lessen the amount the final was worth) the final was still worth 45%. Because of all the exams in this class in addition to my other classes I only had a total of 3 weeks this entire quarter without some sort of assessment, which was really rough on me and made me feel super burnt out. One helpful thing was that Chatterjee did say that if you did better on the final than the quizzes and midterm then he would just use the final and homework to calculate your final grade.

All in all, even though I ended up doing well in the class, it was a huuuge headache and more trouble than it was worth. If you need to take this class then there's a very high chance you'll have to take it with Chatterjee, so there's not really much you can do except try and be prepared for the dumpster fire that will probably ensue. Crossing my fingers for you that he manages to get better at the whole online learning thing!

Taking this class online was nothing short of a mess. Chatterjee pre-wrote his notes and scanned and uploaded them and so during lecture he would just explain what he had written down, which I found really hard to follow. When people would ask him questions in class, he would often give explanations that were really hard to follow. I really struggled with learning the material in this class and even though I ended up passing, my knowledge of the content is very poor. He really does care a lot about his students though, and was pretty receptive to the survey responses he got when he asked about his class. It's just hard to go to OH and ask him questions when his explanations often just don't really make sense, especially because it's so hard with doing everything online.

Chatterjee had really good intentions but I had a really hard time with this class. I ended up having to get a tutor for me to understand the material because I felt the book didn't go as in-depth as Chatterjee wanted, but I wasn't able to follow Chatterjee's lectures or slides. He was very nice and understanding during his office hours and was willing to talk to me about my grades and go through problems with me step by step. He expects you to know a lot of conceptual stuff and you have to go to lecture and pay attention to what he says will be on the tests. He asks for seemingly random things on the tests that I definitely would not have paid attention to if he hadn't told us it would be on there. I also highly recommend studying past tests because his wording style can be confusing and several times I gave a wrong answer because I just didn't understand what he was asking. I'm not sure if I just found the material difficult or if it was the professor, but overall I wouldn't recommend this class.