yeah I meant teacher of a grad course, and I should probably give a better explanation, it wasn't so much about a class not having a review as the teacher's attitude. Also it was a computer science class, being both a comp-sci and math major I know in computer science reviews are far more useful, especially in this particular class, a distributed systems course that was a general requirement, covered tons of topics (the book was closer to a dictionary than a textbook), and no one really understood what was taught.
The thing is that any speaker will tell you that if you want to teach someone something you should tell it to them three times - intro, actual discussion, and conclusion, so I view a last day study session as the conclusion part, making it a useful teaching tool. I totally understand that graduate students should be able to learn on their own and not need something like that, but I still think teachers should keep an open mind and try to teach their students as well as they can.
However our teacher told us several times, in kind of an arrogant manner, he wouldn't have the review because otherwise he would be "holding our hands." He didn't have the attitude that it's a tool, he didn't ignore it, instead he looked down on it like if you want a review then you're stupid. This guy constantly used us being grad students as an excuse not to teach us, he would expect us to know entire classes that were never required, never taught, and not prerequisites, simply because we were grad students. We actually had a project worth half the class that centered on a major networking project when the entire class had no networking experience. The whole class was miserable, we learned nearly nothing, and then he curves tons so we pass and he doesn't look so bad. I just hate the attitude that a teacher's job isn't to teach, but instead to read the book to the class. I encountered that with all my required classes in grad school while the electives were amazing with teachers who were extremely challenging but at the same time actually taught us enough to deal with the challenges.
