Reviews for Manoussos Grillakis
Average Rating:| Anonymous Course: MATH140 Grade Expected: A April 30, 2012, 6:16 pm | He's an OK professor overall. My semester was the first that he taught 140. His lectures definitely aren't a thrill, but they are worth attending. Based on my friends who took other professors for this course, Grillakis is definitely one of the fairer ones in terms of the makeup of exams and the scheduling of WebAssigns. He's also a very nice and understanding guy. PS: I found the reviews given by other professors before exams to be very helpful for studying. |
| Anonymous Course: MATH140 Grade Expected: A- December 20, 2011, 9:55 am | First of all, I'd like to say that I only went to 2 or 3 lectures all semester. That being said I'm going to talk more about his exams. Grillakis' first exam was very hard and the highest grade in the entire lecture was 94. The second exam (I guess he did this to compensate) was really easy and I got 100. The third exam was a little bit harder and the fourth exam was pretty tough (There were only two As in my section). I'm pretty sure that this was Grillakis' first semester teaching MATH140 so I guess this style is to be expected. Overall the class was fair and really not that hard if you keep up with your work and aren't clueless when it comes to math (you know who you are). The only serious complaint I had is that he doesn't curve the course at ALL until the end of the semester. He dropped one exam but because he curves the overall course instead of each exam he might (and did in my case) drop the exam that with a curve would have been a 95 but without was a 65 (and I got a 90 on the last exam so he should have dropped that one). Overall though, really interesting class with fairly standard difficulty exams. Just don't expect an A unless you do your work and are pretty smart already. |
| zhangsta Course: MATH462 Grade Expected: A+ September 3, 2011, 9:11 pm | He has the neatest handwriting in the world and his lectures are very organized. He explains concepts fairly clearly. Homeworks typically took a long time to finish, and quizzes were usually relatively simple compared to the homework. However, his final was much harder than anything we had done for homework or quizzes so you really have to know your stuff for the final. |
| Anonymous Course: MATH241 Grade Expected: A May 20, 2011, 2:59 pm | This professor has some of the neatest chalkboard handwriting I have ever seen. This really help when taking notes and drawing 3D diagrams. He is a good professor even if he does talk in monotone most of the time. He is very kind and is very approachable if you have a concern about your exams. He allows one page of notes on the exams (except the final). The matlab assignments are incredibly easy as it is mostly just copying and pasting what they give you. However some symbols don't copy over correctly and might throw an error if you don't catch them. Overall he is a very fair professor and would recommend him. He not the best professor I have seen but he is a pretty good one. |
| SirSlacksALot Course: MATH241 Grade Expected: C May 9, 2011, 10:09 pm | Lectures honestly put me to sleep. He wasn't engaging in the material, which made it cumbersome. However, he makes up for this with his grading policy. He drops your lowest of the four exams, and we had eight quizzes and he dropped the lowest three. Homework is graded on completion. A flaw in his style is that he allows one page of notes for every exam, but not on the final. So if you train yourself to rely on the notes, your setting yourself up to fail. Average Professor, student-oriented grading system. |
| Kevin Garcia Course: MATH241 Grade Expected: A April 25, 2011, 3:28 pm | Compared to most of the math professors at UMD (excluding Justin, of course), he's great. He's clear, concise, and relays the information in the book well. He doesn't just recite the text verbatim. He has very good handwriting, making the 3-d concepts easier to understand. Has a slight accent, but doesn't get in the way. He does tend to be a bit monotone and he likes to start every lecture with, "Let me remind you..." For the exams (excluding the final), he allows you one page of notes for reference. If you have a good TA, there's no way you'll less than ace every exam. He's extremely friendly and very laid-back when it comes to grading and his approach to teaching. I chose him as my faculty adviser this semester, and he helped me greatly. If Justin is unavailable, take 241 with Grillakis. |
| Anonymous Course: MATH241 Grade Expected: A+ December 23, 2010, 5:27 pm | Great class, great professor, easy A. He drops the lowest 2 of the 12 quizzes, and the lowest 1 test of the 4 chapter tests. He also curves this class, which makes it very easy to get an A. His TA's aren't helpful at all, however, the homework is mainly graded on completion and if you have a nice TA this should be a guaranteed 100 points. The first three tests are easy, but the last test is very hard, so if you need this grade you may want to study for the last test. The final is okay, but luckily I needed around a 60% to get an A in the class, so no worries. |
| Anonymous Course: Grade Expected: B December 17, 2010, 7:07 pm | Professor Grillakis is a really nice guy but for my calculus 1 class he wasn't very effective. I had trouble understanding what he was telling us because, as a calc one student, I had very limited knowledge of calculus. He's obviously brilliant but his teaching style wasn't ideal for students who were just learning fundamentals of calculus. His exams and quizzes were unpredictable but he did drop one of three exam and two of twelve quizzes. He taught us much differently than other 140 classes so when it came to the uniform 140 final, our entire class was lost. |
| mreese Course: MATH241 Grade Expected: A December 15, 2010, 9:15 am | Grillakis is a very nice guy, but not a particularly engaging or effective teacher. I went to every lecture hoping that for once, I wouldn't have to pull out my textbook and start taking notes on my own. Unfortunately, he never failed to nearly put me to sleep, and I would sit in class reading about whatever topic he was making unnecessarily complicated. Everything I learned was from my TA or from the book. Other than that, the quizzes and tests were very fair, as was his grading policy. |
| Anonymous Course: MATH411 Grade Expected: A May 26, 2010, 8:44 pm | He seemed like he knew what he was doing, the tests and homeworks were pretty standard, but he was really boring. He talks kind of softly into the board, and pretty much writes everything he says down (which is also all in the book). There was nothing particularly terrible about his class, but it was hard to pay attention for the whole 50 minutes, especially when the proofs were complicated. |
| MusickVideo Course: MATH411 Grade Expected: B May 18, 2010, 5:38 pm | Grillakis is a well-dressed man who knows this class in and out. Lectures are spent proving theorems, often differently from how the book does it, which can be helpful. Grades are the average of your homework grade (lowest of 7 dropped), your midterm average (lowest of 3 dropped), and your final exam score. Homework is often either plug-n-chug application or intense proof that you may need to go to office hours for help on. However, there is at least a week and a half between due dates, so you always have enough time to complete the assignments. Exams are basically a practical application of the material you learn. He does not put dense proofs on exams, but rather he tests your basic and superficial understanding of the techniques you learn in class. Exams can be tricky, but they are very doable and very much test your understanding of the material. Just as was said in the review below, this class is essentially a multi-dimensional extension of 410. Some of the concepts are very arcane and difficult to grasp (example, proving Stokes Theorum and boundary proofs with Jordan Contents), but Grillakis is great at explaining these concepts. |
| Anonymous Course: MATH411 Grade Expected: B April 29, 2010, 8:41 am | Grillakis is an effective professor (not great, but definitely a competent teacher). He will answer your questions directly when asked, and his proofs are generally easy to follow, though there are exceptions (not that this is his fault, as some of material is simply a bit complex to get in one go during lecture). His tests were well written - they were definitely short enough to be completed in an hour, but the questions were thorough in covering the content being tested. Also, the questions ranged in difficulty, so the exams weren't devilishly hard or too easy (though the exams certainly *seemed* easy when I was taking them, because I wasn't paying enough attention to some of the subtleties of some questions). Also, importantly, Grillakis was very responsive to student concerns about the shifting homework schedule after the week of snow, and the work load was never impossibly heavy. MATH411 isn't too bad, basically an extension of 410 into multiple dimensions. You can pretty much expect to do as well in 411 as you did in 410. |
| Anonymous Course: MATH241 Grade Expected: November 30, 2009, 8:13 pm | There is no way this guy is a 5 star professor. He is an average math professor, not the best, not the worst, just average. I learned little to nothing in the lectures I stayed awake in...I learned most of the material on my own. There is a quiz every week in discussion which usually isn't too bad. The exams have been mostly fair...just do the suggested homework problems on the syllabus. |
| Anonymous Course: MATH241 Grade Expected: A November 1, 2009, 10:55 pm | suggested hw only. easy quizes. drops lowest test. tests are fair but might be long. look for simplification tricks. classes are all proofs with abstract examples. some number examples would help a lot but that's done in recitation so you really can't ask for anything more from him. he's a good prof with a well run class. |
| gundamwing4132 Course: MATH141 Grade Expected: A May 1, 2008, 1:10 pm | Exams and hw were fair. Slightly heavy accent but very helpful teaching sytle. |
| almostdone Course: MATH411 Grade Expected: A December 4, 2007, 8:39 pm | I went into this class a little worried because of its reputation as one of the hardest at UMD. But Dr. Grillakis made this class both fun and simple. There is homework every week and 3 tests. The homework can be challenging sometimes but Dr. Grillakis is very helpful and alot of students go to him weekly for help. He also was very clear for what we had to know for tests. Overall if you found 410 easy, 411 with Grillakis is just a little bit harder but it is definitely not hard to get an A. |