Overall, I thought that Professor Stern himself was a good teacher; he definitely cared about us students, and he was very helpful during office hours. The homeworks were pretty difficult, and he definitely didn't flinch away from giving us hard questions. However, the exams were comparatively easy (since they were meant to be completed over a much shorter time span). One nice thing about the homeworks was that we were assigned groups to work in, which was a significant relief.

However, I did have several problems with the way he structured the course. For one, I was disappointed with some of the decisions on what to cover. We didn't cover rings or fields at all, which was very disappointing as I would consider covering those to be a fairly vital part of the course material. Instead, we spent three days near the end of the course proving the fundamental theorem of finitely generated abelian groups, which, while useful, did not deserve so much attention when compared to topics that we were actually supposed to cover.