Historical instructor
Original student reviews · all captured dates
Prof Van Lehn was an informative and funny professor. His lectures were straightforward, although they tended to be derivation heavy with few practical examples. He provided practice problems for exams that made midterms easy to prepare for. Grading was very fair. Cons: Discussion was unhelpful and HW problems required lots of Excel/Matlab use.Rate My Professors ↗
Prof. Van Lehn is definitely the BEST professor I've ever had, super smart and also fun. Incredibly clear lectures and explanations, inspirational homework, and fair exams with similar practice problems provided. Taking thermo with Van Lehn = success + actually learning. I really enjoyed his class and hope he can be my professor for all classes!Rate My Professors ↗
He is one of the best professors I've had at UW-Madison and tied with Murphy for best in CBE. Modern class with tricky HW problems that allow derivation thermodynamic figures and datasets. Exams are extremely fair. Class is tough. I didn't know thermodynamics could be taught in such a definitive way.Rate My Professors ↗
Easily one of the best professors in the engineering department. He is extremely well liked by the students despite teaching notoriously difficult subjects. His class is challenging but the work load manageable.Rate My Professors ↗
Van Lehn is a great professor. The course is very difficult, but he does his best to actually "teach" the material. He makes his lectures very easy to participate in by having group discussion times to help with understanding. He seems like he cares about his students' learning very much.Rate My Professors ↗
Extraordinary professor and person, try to learn as much as possible from him! always oriented when teaching. He's got your back. It is not an easy course at all! at times you may wanna cry, but Van Lehn is your guy.Rate My Professors ↗
Personal experiences, not a representative survey. Profile matching and captured coverage are shown in the source details.
No teaching recorded in Fall 2026.
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