DURAN R (CHEM)

first off, organic is totally new material so teaching it should be done carefully. second, dr. duran didnt teach at all. he pushed all that on the SI. I lived off of those SI sessions. Duran is arrogant and talks about random stuff like budget cuts and how Florida is better than LSU. if you ask him a question, he answers "you should know that" but he didnt even teach you. this man does not know how to teach, just here for his head of research job. test are however, relative easier than the other sections.

Definitely not recommended- basically you have to go to every SI session to get the material b/c Duran will literally say I won't cover this in class so go to SI or learn it on your own. He has horrible communication skills and frequently does example problems wrong, and when he does them right, he moves on too quickly for anyone to be able to copy it down. I will say that his exams weren't as bad as they could have been, except for the final, which was killer. He doesn't even use his own ppt to teach from, he used Spivak's all semester. By all means avoid Duran.

Please do not take Duran. He literally didn't know organic chemistry to save his life. The man is a genius but used spivaks power points and just read from them. At the end of the semester he tried to make up problems but they were all wrong and when students would call him out he would just skip to the next problem. The only reason I passed was because of SI... We had Gary Bernard, dont think he is doing it again, but please do not take Duran.

I don't even learned from this class. I never skip the class, but SI session was more helpful than professor class. Don't take this class. It's hard to earn good grade in this class even he has really low grading scale, still hard.