Reviews for Ashok K. Agrawala
Average Rating:| Anonymous Course: CMSC417 Grade Expected: A May 11, 2012, 3:26 pm | Agrawala was a horrible professor, and 417 was a horrible class. This was possibly the worst computer science course I've taken yet at this university. Unlike most other 400-level CS classes, that teach relevant and useful technology, this course seems to be mostly based on obsolete material. The projects don't convey any meaningful skills, and while in other classes I typically can look back on the projects and feel a sense of accomplishment, in this class, I felt like I jumped through hoops. (I got 100% or 90% on all the projects, so this isn't sour grapes -- the projects were just bad. Further, the projects and lectures seemed entirely disconnected. I felt as if I was taking two different classes where two entirely different things were being taught. Lectures didn't prepare us for projects in any sense. As such, the projects weren't challenging, because they had to be easy enough for us to teach ourselves how to do. This meant that the projects consisted entirely of "locate the standard library function to do this thing, and invoke it in the right way." The lectures were almost entirely taken from the textbook. If any reading had been assigned, this would mean that people who did the reading would get nothing out of lectures. The lectures were presented in an extremely dry and boring way. The lecturer would occasionally ask either extremely simple factual questions or incredibly complicated questions. Nobody was willing to venture an answer, because there was obviously a right answer (which the students didn't want to get wrong in front of the class), and in the simple case it seemed like the instructor was asking a trick question, while in the complicated case the students weren't sure of themselves. The instructor would, after doing this, chide the class for not participating. Further, the instructor would never revisit old or important material. The exams were entirely disjoint from the lecture or projects. The two midterms focused almost entirely on concepts that appeared on one or two days of lecture. Further, the instructors refused to give students any information about what would be on the exam. This forced students to study huge amounts of information, including large parts of the textbook (which was tested on the exam, even though no readings had actually been assigned and there was no reading schedule for the course). Most students probably gave up; those that didn't were equally unprepared, because the exams were, rather than general, incredibly specific. The only way to get a good grade on the exam would have been to study in huge detail every aspect of the course. Typically, courses that require this have clear focus and direction, but this course had neither. It was like taking a survey of 1990's networking concepts and technology. Overall, taking this class was a vastly unpleasant experience. I had hoped that something as basic and vital to a computer scientists skillset as *networking* would be treated better at a major university. |
| collegeguy752 Course: CMSC417 Grade Expected: B April 28, 2011, 1:40 pm | Good professor. Difficult to understand at times because of the accent. He asks a lot of rhetorical questions and goes on and on during lectures; therefore, they seem boring. Also, he just lectures from the slides and he posts his lecture videos and slides online, discouraging many from attending class. By the third week only a handful of people still went (I definitely did not attend), but this could be partly attributed to the class starting at 8am. His exams are almost entirely based on questions from the end of the chapters, and the remaining few questions are based on general terminology/ definitions of bolded words throughout the chapter. The projects in this class were very fair and interesting in comparison to previous year projects. The class is a lot of work because it feels like a programming class in addition to a theory of networking class (it is known as the 2nd hardest CMSC class). If you can keep yourself motivated and attend most lectures this is a very manageable class. Agrawala is a decent professor, but I feel he could be more interactive and give more examples/ real life problems. I would recommend him as a professor |