Historical instructor

DON REEDER

Adjusted rating
RMP difficulty
captured reviews
About this rating

Raw average: 1.95/5 from 21 quality ratings. The adjusted rating blends this with the UW review average (3.66/5), weighted as 20 additional ratings. Smaller samples stay closer to that average. Each captured review is counted once in the prior; this does not correct who chooses to leave a review.

RMP profile ↗ · All captured review dates; profile matched by name.

What students say

Original student reviews · all captured dates

PHYS104 · course not matched
Quality 2/5Difficulty 5/5
This fossil should quit teaching---he's clearly lost his drive. Lecture is completely useless, don't even bother going, and this comes from a student who NEVER skips.
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PHYS104 · course not matched
Quality 3/5Difficulty 5/5
Just took the first midterm (that he wrote even though he only taught a couple of lectures), and it was ridiculous. The class average was a 45%. Totally unlike any sort of practice exam or homework problem, a lot of it material we hadn't covered.
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PHY202 · course not matched
Quality 2/5Difficulty 4/5
I thought the reviews would be proved wrong. But I was the one who was wrong. DO NOT GO TO LECTURE!! He is OLD and just has lost the drive to teach. This seems to be reflected in the Physics dept as a whole. The ONLY plus side to this professor is that he is better than Pondrom. Again like I said, SKIP LECTURE
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PHYS202 · course not matched
Quality 2/5Difficulty 4/5
prepare to teach yourself! for the 3 lectures i went to, he seemed like an alright speaker but was very slow and just read his slides.. the homework probs are pretty good and the book is aright.. multiple choice tests & he tries to trick u - not cool.. my TA was a slacker too :( ..best advice: make a good eqtn sheet and know how to use it
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PHY202 · course not matched
Quality 2/5Difficulty 2/5
The only physics 202/208 professor that I know who gives multiple choice exams so take him if you're lazy to write. However, each question is worth 5 marks so you can lose quite a lot, but the class is curved so it's not too bad. Lectures are very bad though
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PHYS202 · course not matched
Quality 1/5Difficulty 5/5
I'm sure he's a brilliant physicist, but he's TOO OLD. He can barely stand up for the whole lecture, and he spends about half the time repeating the same thing because he can't remember if he told us the past seven times. If this is the best UW Madison's physics department can find, it is a sad day for Chamberlain and Sterling indeed.
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Personal experiences, not a representative survey. Profile matching and captured coverage are shown in the source details.

Classes with DON REEDER

No teaching recorded in Fall 2026.

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Recorded teaching history

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Teaching history may be incomplete. Course pages contain course-specific feedback and citations.

Instructor identity & provenance
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