Current instructor

Shiva Chidambaram

/5Adjusted rating
/5RMP difficulty
captured reviews
About this rating

Raw average: 2.43/5 from 23 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

MATH 541
Quality 3/5Difficulty 4/5
It's obvious shiva is not properly planning out his lectures beforehand because his thoughts are scattered and difficult to follow. That being said, abstract algebra can just be extremely unintuitive at times. Biggest complaint is homework is graded unnecessarily harshly. Textbook is really good and it saved me on homework/exams.
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MATH 541
Quality 3/5Difficulty 4/5
Will read from the book. Is a nice guy and definitely has potential as a teacher, but for now seems to just copy the textbook. Occasionally gets a little confused and has to redo a lot of work. Hardest exams I have ever seen, but he will lower the grade cutoffs significantly at the end. Will go over at the end of class. Again, really nice guy.
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MATH 222
Quality 3/5Difficulty 4/5
Just walked in, read the slides out, underlined words on slides and walked out. Because it was his first time teaching the course, he seemed nervous and wouldn't really say anything when people disturbed class, that grace could be given to him. But overall, even if u attend lecture, you'll have to teach the material to yourself
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MATH 222
Quality 1/5Difficulty 4/5
Calc 2 is an inherently hard class and shiva only made it harder for me. The only reason I passed was because of TA doing gods work lemme tell you. I took it in the fall and all of the freshman in the class would just talk over him the entire time. Along with allowing himself to be treated like a door matt his lectures were hard to understand.
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MATH 222
Quality 4/5Difficulty 3/5
Lowkey he is chill and gives good examples, but it was kind of hard to understand him sometimes because the examples were not really related to things we did in discussion.
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MATH 222
Quality 1/5Difficulty 5/5
Shiva's lectures were extremely hard to follow and understand, and he spent a lot of time doing proofs rather than clear examples. The class felt like I had to teach it to myself with him as my professor.
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Personal experiences, not a representative survey. Profile matching and captured coverage are shown in the source details.

Classes with Shiva Chidambaram

Introduction to the theory of probability covering axioms, distributions, and limit theorems

Offering recorded · Fall 2026

historical GPA · grades

Spring 2022–Spring 2026

Recorded teaching history

Explore courses taught by this instructor →
Browse recorded courses
TermCourseTitle
Fall 2026MATH/STAT 431Introduction to the Theory of Probability

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

Instructor identity & provenance
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