Reviews for Jandelyn Dawn Plane
Average Rating:| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A May 7, 2012, 12:34 pm | At first I wasn't sure what I thought of Jan. I've definitely never had a professor with her style of teaching and communication. That being said, I thought she did a great job teaching 131. Here's why: 1) She is VERY approachable outside of class and is really good at clarifying stuff 1 on 1. If you don't understand a lecture she could probably explain it all to you in a matter of 10 minutes if you're bright. 2) She explains stuff and demonstrates what she's talking about by coding in front of you in lecture. It necessarily make the material easy, per se, but it definitely makes it a lot easier to visualize and understand. 3) She has a PhD in both Comp Sci AND Education so she knows what she's doing. 4) She curved both of her midterms this semester. Honestly, she's probably one of the best professors I've had at Maryland yet. Here's the rub, however, with CMSC131: If you're not logically inclined (and honestly not too bright...there's no point in lying to yourself) you're going to really struggle with this class. That being said, Jan is definitely your best option because of her approachability outside of class. Regardless of that fact, I thought Jan was a great professor and I would highly recommend her for CMSC131. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A May 2, 2012, 10:47 pm | I had taken computer science classes in high school, but hadn't learned some of the material taught in the 2nd half of the course. I thought Jan was a great teacher. If you came into this class knowing absolutely nothing about java, then I can see how this class could be very difficult. I know a lot of people got C/Ds on the quizzes. Anyway, the use of projecting Eclipse onto a large screen really helped. Unlike some reviewers mentioned from past years, she only used a few pointpoints near the end of the course. And Piazza was great for communication. I came in dreading this class b/c of these bad reviews, but I thought it was pretty bearable. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC216 Grade Expected: A January 26, 2012, 12:34 pm | I thought that Jan was a good professor who did an excellent job explaining confusing concepts in Lecture. All lecture slides are available online, and she also posts many coding examples that make life a lot easier when it comes to doing the projects and studying for the exams. In office hours she is friendly and willing to help. The class definitely is a lot of work, but just avoid procrastinating and you should do fine. For many of the projects extra credit is offered if you pass all of the public tests by a certain day, so definitely start early and take advantage of this option. There were also office hours from 10-6 every weekday, so if you are stuck on project just go to the TAs and they will usually clear up the problem for you. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC216 Grade Expected: January 23, 2012, 7:39 am | Jan is a very nice and knowledgeable professor. Because of the nature of the course, she has to cover a lot of material in a short amount of time so blanking out for even a minute will leave you lost for the rest of lecture. She's not one to care if you're messing around on the internet during lecture (as long as you're not disruptive to the rest of the class) but I highly suggest you pay attention. One of the most efficient ways to study for this class is to attend and understand the lectures - and this is only a quarter of the work. This class is curved around an average of 75, despite what she might say about only ever curving 2-3% ... this is a lie. Quizzes - She says "you are always to expect a quiz in discussion" but she really only gives them about once a week or every 10 days. The topics are never announced but you can bet that it will be on slides covered about 2-3 lectures ago. If you use those topics as a guide and prod around, Jan can't lie, so I suggest you straight up ask her if, say the quiz will have 'Assembly' coding on it. If she says 'maybe', or does a slight nod, it's probably a yes. Use your best judgement. Labs - you can tell that no one put any effort into these as my labs were titled with the previous semester with the wrong directory name. We spend the first third of the class trying to locate the file, the 2nd third trying to figure out what the directions were asking and the rest trying to follow the confusing instructions. Put out your best effort and hopefully your grader isn't a dick and gives you a 2/2. Highly suggest consulting the people around you. Projects - start early. Try to talk to Jan/TA(/friends). Use Piazza. They are hard and you never know what the Secret Tests are looking for. If you think you're done, you're not done yet. Exams/Final - You'll be able to pick up clues on what's to be test in lecture and if your TA is nice, in discussion. Give yourself code to write and run them on your computer before you have to spit it out on paper. If you've had to do it on a project, expect to do a simplified and different version on an exam/final. TA - possibly one of the worst TAs I've ever had. Thought he was too smart for anyone else and just sat in the front of the class not answering any questions. Complained about now being paid enough ... -__- Overall, if you're not a CS genius, work your ass off if you expect to even pass. |
| bigbabby Course: CMSC216 Grade Expected: December 19, 2011, 9:53 pm | Alright, so this class is gonna suck, regardless of who you chose for 216. 216 is a fast-paced course by nature and on the way you'll likely be learning two new languages - C and assembly. If you barely passed 131/132 or had trouble on some of the assignments I HIGHLY recommend you work on projects early. These are not the kinds of projects you just sit down and burn through in a few hours like in 132, and I took the honors version. Anyways, Plane is a decent 216 professor, she uses the same slides as all of the other professors use and she remains fairly engaging at 9 in the morning, so that's good. She does a good deal of coding examples in lecture which helps you understand topics. I would recommend you go to lecture and work a bit on your projects while she teaches, and pay attention during the more important bits of the lecture. There are six projects in this class, each with about two weeks to do. The spec for each one is drawn out and boring to read, but make sure you do, as there are a lot of hidden tricks and requirements hidden in the text. Gone are the days of private tests - 10 percent of your grade is public tests, and 75 is secret tests. You don't get to see what your project grade is when you submit - you wait a week and you get a magic score. Again, start these early. If you finish early, great, you can relax for a week and you are prepared for the quizzes. Again, this is NOT like 132. Secret tests often test a bunch of odd things (malformed input, large sample size, etc) and since you can't see the results until it is graded you can't just spam submits like in 132 until you get that perfect submission. Quizzes are slightly tough. If you haven't started the project most likely the material on the quiz will be brand new to you, and considering you are given 15 minutes to do a few concept questions and a programming assignment, you need to know the subject matter going into the quiz. Labs are the same as quizzes - if you have started the project, you should know what you are doing because the labs are a derivative of the project material of stuff that has gone on in lecture. Tests are fairly hard, alot of programming questions, and the graders seem to love taking points off on things like syntax (I always found that rather stupid - a compiler will catch syntax errors, not logic errors). All you really need to do is look over all of the slides (posted online) before each test and refresh yourself. If you do well on the quizzes, labs, and projects up to the test, you should do fine. I learned so much from this class - and that's because the class moves insanely fast. You'll be doing C projects while learning assembly, then going back to learning C and doing assembly projects. If you are not up to date with the latest 131 and 132 concepts (recursion, structures, blah blah) you will get your ass handed to you in this class. I aced 132H and this class was much more time-intensive. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC216 Grade Expected: B May 23, 2011, 9:25 pm | I'm going to start off by saying that this class was hard. Really hard. Probably the hardest class I've ever taken. I breezed though 132 and pulled an A easily, but 216 kept me stressed almost the whole semester and especially during the last two weeks of the course. This is the review of the course: -From what I've heard from friends the books are useless, don't buy them. (I didn't) -The entire course is in a Linux environment, through GRACE. If you're already familiar with Unix commands and such, you're in luck. Unfortunately I wasn't, and this made the first few weeks using it very, very confusing. Even at the end of the course I still felt weak with Unix. -You use Emacs to code in which is OK. The debugger is complicated and I never bothered leaning how to use it. I just debugged using print statements and other little tricks. -The major topics for the course were as follows: Learning basic C, Arrays in C, Structures, Pointers and pointer arithmetic, Makefiles, Dynamic Memory, Assembly, Process Control, Function pointers, Threads, and some misc. -Both Midterms and the Final were good. They were challenging but definitely not unreasonable and tested fair material. -The quizzes, on the other hand, were plain rude. The difficulty was unreasonable, they tested stupid material, they were graded harshly, and everyone failed the shit out of them. I failed every quiz except for 2. -Lab exercises were really hard for me, and I felt like everyone knew what they were doing except me. I would recommend trying to study the material that the lab is on beforehand. It's hard to ask questions when you're completely lost. -There were 6 projects, each of them took around 10-18 hrs to complete. Projects for this class were hard and stressful (a recurring theme). I didn't need office hours at all in 132 but I went for 4/6 projects for 216. The difficulty of the projects went up for each one. Even though the projects were extremely challenging, I thought they were all semi-reasonable as long as you started early. Except for the last one. -(Mini rant) The last fucking project. Assigned literally 10 days before the final, it was easily the hardest and longest project of the year. Project 6 stressed me out so much that I felt like I was going to vomit in the coming days before it was due. (Right before the final remember) You have to pass 75% of the public tests for each project to pass the course, and I couldn't pass any of them until the day before the project was due. I tried to go to office hours all 3 days before it was due, and each day office hours had at least a 20 person waiting-list for 1 TA. I have NO IDEA what Jan was thinking. How difficult was the project to complete? Fuck if I know, I didn't even try to implement threading because I needed to study for my two hardest finals that were the first day of finals week. -Overall the course was VERY fast paced. Looking back I definitely learned a ton from the course, but I didn't really have time to get a thorough understanding of all the topics. This is the review of Jan: -I'm giving Jan 4 stars mainly because I think her current rating of 2 is too low. -Jan is a very nice person and a pretty good lecturer. She has a good grasp on all the material and knows what she's talking about. It's not too hard to pay attention in class, there is just so much material that it's easy to instantly forget a lot of it. -The format of the class is a bit boring. Powerpoint lectures. -Some of the powerpoints are not well done and confusing. You really need to pay attention in lecture to figure out what's going on. Especially the powerpoint on Assembly, which I thought explained Memory very poorly. Advice: -Go to class, study before the Lab Exercises and quizzes. -Start the projects as early as you can. I wish I hadn't procrastinated some of them. -Make a couple friends and talk about the projects together. Yeah it's technically against the rules, but it will keep you from going insane when working on the projects. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: B+ January 26, 2011, 10:38 am | She is a really nice professor. She cares about her students but does not mind that most of them are not paying attention to her. She gets really annoying with her cat analogies, but she is a good teacher. She describes concepts well and exams are not that hard. Quizzes are also pretty easy. The bad thing is that the last project she assigned were almost impossible. They were way beyond our level of programming and I just feel she did not prepare us well for CMSC132 |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A February 21, 2010, 9:32 am | Jan is a decent professor. She does a good job teaching the material, but if you have any programing knowledge you'll find the class slow and boring. Since this is an intro to java course and aimed at people who never programmed before. Projects and exams are the same with any teacher and aren't very hard. Contrary to what others say I found the quizzes to be quite easy, some of the quizzes on inheritance were pretty hard and I failed maybe 2 the entire semester but each quiz counts for very little of your grade. Just do well on your projects and exams and you'll do fine. You will breeze though the class if you have prior programming knowledge. If you don't have prior programming knowledge this class isn't impossible you'll just have to work a little harder and go to office hours or ask a friend to explain it to you. |
| Math_Major Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: December 22, 2009, 11:51 am | I completely hated this class. I really didn't learn anything from the power points. The quizzes were confusing and if you don't know how to program, it's pretty tough. If anything take this class with Fawzi. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A December 21, 2009, 2:27 pm | Easy class, especially if you have programming experience. Contrary to what others have said, I believe she did a decent job teaching programming. Her lectures were to the point and covered most of the important exceptions that help. Quizzes and tests were a breeze, as was the final. Labs are very simple and take only a few minutes. Projects sometimes do not overlap with the material being taught, and often take a bit of extra effort, but they are generally not difficult to finish, as long as you start on time. The last project is a bit tricky, though. Overall, a pretty good teacher. I found her lectures helpful, although she does tend to be rather repetitive since this class is geared more towards people without programming experience. Some of her metaphors are quite helpful, I found quite a few of them enlightening, although I can kind of understand being put off by them. Don't listen too much to the other reviews; as long as you actually attend classes and vaguely pay attention, it's definitely a softball class. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A- December 18, 2009, 10:44 am | Pros: Jan cares a lot about the progress of her students. I went in to her office hours a few times, and she was a huge help. She's very thorough with her explanations. Cons: I found it extremely difficult to pay attention in lectures, and I stopped going after a few weeks. Don't be deceived by the lecture slides posted online, because they don't always cover everything that Jan covers in class. Also, if you're like me and you prefer to learn everything the night before an exam, don't expect to do well. Weekly quizzes are given to ensure you're keeping up with the material. Bottom line: This class wasn't exactly a nightmare for me, but it wasn't all that fun either. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: November 22, 2009, 6:10 am | Jan Plane is a horrible teacher! She actually does try, but she just makes no sense to me. About half way through the course I started going to lectures by the other instructor -- Fawzi Emad -- and it is 1000% better. Mr. Emad explains things in a way that anybody can understand. If you have a choice, take the class with Emad not Plane. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A May 22, 2009, 10:53 am | I got an A in this class but I cannot imagine how hard it is if you have no programming experience. My programming experience is very limited but it definitely helped a lot. She tries to use metaphors but she doesn't understand that metaphors are suppose to be something that students can easily relate to to make things more clear. So when she teaches she just makes things confusing as hell. She responds to her emails at ridiculous speeds and is very friendly and approachable outside of class. The quizzes in the class are INSANE. They are so hard and purposely made to hurt your grade. My TA sucked but some of the others were awesome. Exams are hard to finish on time (except for the final) |
| fhawkes Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: B May 16, 2009, 2:16 pm | I consider my self to be a pretty computer savvy guy, but this was my first programming experience... Lectures were boring, didn't really cover everything I felt was needed for the projects.. Jan did offer help on projects and pretty much does them for you if you go to here office hours or email her constantly.. Thus I received high As on every project.. QUIZZES were IMPOSSIBLE.. I have a D average for quizzes. EXAMSSS.. are rediculous like everyone below me said they are beyond impossible to finish on time and extremely hard.. look to make most of ur points in projects. if you do Well on projects you might just get a B |
| RalphSteiner Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: C April 20, 2009, 10:15 am | This class with this teacher is ridiculous. Not only is she incredibly boring, but she makes things that could be easily understood incredibly hard to understand. She also LOVES cats and makes every analogy incredibly confusing. Projects are extremely unclear and confusing. Exams are idiotic. She gives a study guide and study questions, and guess what, very few of them have anything to do what showed up on the exam. SOME of them are based on what she says during lecture but who can understand her? To top it off, you get very little time needed to complete the exam. Even the people who have prior CMSC knowledge are struggle to finish on time. Do NOT take this professor, you WILL regret it, especially if you have no prior CMSC knowledge. |
| vbury Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A February 25, 2009, 10:26 am | I took 2 years of Java during high school, but chose not to do the AP Comp Sci test, so I had to sit through this class, which was essentially my 2 years of high school Java condensed into one semester. Didn't fall asleep in class, but didn't pay close attention, either. I did most of my learning through the projects. Quizzes were similar to others' experiences. I'm still kicking myself that I didn't take Fawzi. |
| MichaelS Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: C February 23, 2009, 4:18 pm | This class is beyond horrible, but she was the ONLY teacher available for CMSC131 at this time. Only those who have prior knowledge in programming will do well. The first week or two were okay as it was relatively simple and therefore easy to understand, but after that, it gets boring, at least, with this professor. Teacher: She is a really nice lady, she tries to help you as much as she can and is approachable outside of class. However, she cannot teach at all. She is incredibly confusing, boring, and only she tends to know what she is talking about. She makes things that could be easily understood even harder to understand. She makes a lot analogies, which are freaking horrible as they only confuse you further. (She uses lecture slides and refers to examples she puts up on screen.) TA: My TA was pretty nice, but she follows the instructions of the professor when it comes to how to grade or what to do, so it doesn't really matter how nice she is. Projects/Homework: You get a project/homework once every 1-2 weeks, since it takes a while to do. You get a guideline on what you have to do and you have to use what you have learned from lecture. This isn't so bad because you have a long time to do it, so you can get help from TAs, the teacher, or friends(sometimes). Quizzes/Exams: WOW, these things are beyond RIDICULOUS. For someone who does not have prior programming knowledge, you will NOT finish on time. In my class, only 1-2 people, who DID have prior programming knowledge, were about to finish in time. Everyone else did not. Not only are they badly timed, they are HARD. Like I said earlier, she was the only teacher available for CMSC131, but if you can avoid her, DO SO WITHOUT HESISTATION. If you aren't a major in computer science, AVOID. If you can't avoid, you will need to invest an incredulous amount of time if you want an A. Make sure you get a lot of rest before you enter her class, because she goes through a lot of stuff and she will bore you to sleep. Her poor speaking skills and habits do not help her either. It was hard for me to stay interested and awake. |
| Snipe911 Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: C January 26, 2009, 12:00 am | Other reviews pretty much hit it on the head, so I'm going to let you know that they were right. At first, she's alright, tolerable, the material is interesting. And then, just after 'if then' statements, her lectures are off the mark completely. She zips right through incredibly valuable material with some occasional examples, but nothing near what your then supposed to be able to...code... in your own project. I emailed her several times with the most unhelpful condensed reply I've ever seen, as if I was wasting her time. If you haven't had background experience, she is brutal. She puts questions on the exams that are a harder evolution of an unexplained example in class. Oh, and yes, "Office Hours" IS a 'barrage of chaos', 50 kids to one TA. A real shame to have this class the first experience that CS majors get. |
| samiam762 Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A December 20, 2008, 10:57 am | This being my first computer science class, at Maryland or anywhere, I didn't come in with any idea of what a computer science class would be like. I thought overall Jan Plane was a successful professor - I learned a lot, and got a lot of good practice for programming. The lectures started off interesting, but as time passed they became less and less, but make sure you keep paying attention, because otherwise you'll suddenly have a ton of information to catch up on without much to draw from, other than going to the TAs for help. She has a lot of metaphors for the programming, and the usefulness of those vs. the amount they might just confuse you is definitely up in the air. The tests weren't too bad at all, but like I said if there's a topic you don't really feel that comfortable with writing code on, make sure you fix that because chances are there'll be a test problem that has you writing code on that. For the projects she was very helpful, always willing to look through your code to see what the problem was, which was immensely helpful, but make sure you start the projects early or you'll find yourself having to put hours and hours in the few days before it's due. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: A December 6, 2008, 10:20 pm | She is simply not a good teacher. The projects are the majority of the grade, but the examples she provides in class are inadequate. Therefore I've had to rely heavily on my programming experience from high school. The last few projects are a little hard even for me, so imagine how hard it must be for someone with no previous experience. If you have never programmed before, don't expect to pass her class unless you're prepared to invest a truly incredible portion of your time into it. |
| Billy4202 Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: B April 15, 2008, 8:46 am | At the start, this class was quite simple to understand, all the concepts were basic and taught at a steady pace that was optimal for understanding the material. A few weeks in, however, I, being the very-limited-knowledge-in-computer-science person that I am, was overwhelmed. Seemingly infinite material is provided in a matter of a few weeks, and if you're not extremely diligent and nearly obsessive about learning the material, you'll most likely have trouble here. Lectures rarely helped where they needed to (projects, quizzes, etc.) Quizzes were harder than you could imagine, rarely would anyone pass them (besides the ones that have been programming for 5+ years...). Projects were just as frustrating - and when you try to go in for help, you're met with this barrage of chaos, stuck in a void where the TAs only meet with you for less than five minutes. Really, you could learn more about computer programming from the textbook, or any other equally equipped textbook. If you're not a Computer Science major or don't have an extremely high interest in Computer Science, save yourself the trouble, money, and credits and don't take this course. If you do...you've been forewarned. |
| pluralfacade Course: CMSC212 Grade Expected: C March 5, 2008, 12:01 pm | Did not have a great experience with her. Lectures were boring, quizzes were ridiculously hard and stressed trivial points, and exams were too long and unfinishable. Her projects were pretty straightforward though, and I learned a lot from them. She was also very friendly and approachble outside of class. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: February 21, 2008, 7:41 pm | not a bad lecturer, but not great either. this was my first programing course ever, so i was in the deep end early. she explains every thing, but if you zone out, even for a minute, you are gonna be lost for the next half hour. if you already know about programing, than you probably dont even need to go, as the slides are online |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: C December 15, 2007, 5:04 pm | Not a very good teacher, bad jokes, only went when there was a review, and even those weren't helpful. Final was pretty rough. |
| Anonymous Course: CMSC131 Grade Expected: B October 31, 2007, 11:37 am | sucks at teaching, corny jokes, just sucks |