Warren Carithers

This is one of the few great CS professors left at RIT. I've had him for several classes and take him any chance I get. His focus is teaching the student. Some may find his lectures a little boring, but he usually mixes in jokes and stories to lighten the mood. His tests come across as difficult, but if you go to class and actually do the example problems he gives, they are really fair tests.

In CG1 : Occasionally humorous, however very dry lectures. Could be because I already know D3D programming extensively, but I doubt it. Seemingly straightforward lectures are followed by brutal tests very late in the quarter ( first test in the quarter bl

Great teacher. Sure knows his stuff. He's got a great sense of humor and really approachable. His tests are great and he grades easy too. One of the great prof's at CS.

A really nice professor, and he really knows his stuff. Take his classes if you want some insightful and detailed information to how things work. Also tells some very lame (and funny) jokes :)

Decent professor. Sort of boring, but he covered material fairly well. Tests were hard but graded easily. He also seemed to be late for more than just a few classes.

Can't beat this prof. One of the best. Keeps attention well, presents material clearly. Take courses from him!

Warren is very experienced in his field and knows what he's talking about. Ask a question in class and you'll get an answer that makes sense. He's a little less approachable out of class, but in class is great. He has a quirky sense of humor that fit

Great teacher, tests are realtive to the subject matter. The cs4 cousrse this quarter was a joke but carithers was a good teacher.

Warren is always willing to go out of his way to help out students, and will just stop in the hall to chat. One of CS s better professors.

Not a particularily good teacher in my opinion. I had difficulty staying awake during his class, but that may be more the material then the professor. Some of his tests were very hard and he is not a very easy grader.

Warren Carithers strikes me as a very nice guy. He's always in a jovial mood, and he's quick to make jokes and banter with the members of the class. Unfortunately, I found him lacking in just about every other area when I attended class with him as instructor. I'll go through the list.

* Exams - his exams are awful, torturous things that concentrate on what feels like exactly the wrong things. His lectures cover an incredibly broad range of topics, which makes studying extraordinarily difficult. On every one of the three exams he gave I found that his study tips were incredibly broad and general, but the tests themselves focused on two or three "key" topics. I use the term "key" loosely because it felt to me that he was focusing on the wrong things. I felt that I had wasted hour upon hour studying the "wrong" material, such as data structures in assembly, only to be surprised when I sat down and discovered that all of the questions focused on converting assembly to and from hex code. While I agree that understanding the relationship between hex and assembly is important, should half of an exam be focused on it, or would it be more important to focus on any one of the 100 other bulleted points on the study guides?

* Handwriting - his handwriting is bloody awful; I have no idea what his comments say most of the time. Thankfully he does circle the errors on the exams, so it's fairly easy to figure out where you screwed up.

* Homework - The homework in the course is horribly out of balance. At the beginning of the term there are a few out of class reading assignments that are completely useless (for reasons that I will get into shortly). Then there are 1 or 2 weeks with no homework at all. Then the projects kick in. There are 6 projects, one due each week for the last 6 weeks of the quarter. These "experiments" are easily as difficult as a lab, only the class offers no lab credit. Each one takes hours to program, mostly because you'll write one or two obscrue errors and spend hours trying to figure out where they are. To make matters worse, the reading assignments again pick up in the last 3 weeks, with 2 exams scheduled (the second in class exam and the final) in the same period. The work load became almost unbearable towards the end of the course.

* Lectures - Awful. Horrible. Boring exercises in repetition and monotany. Filled with useless trivia. Warren has a collection of slides that I would guess that he has been teaching the course with for years. He makes minor modifications and spelling fixes, but other than that he has his slides prepared weeks, if not months, in advance. When he lectures he basically reads the slides to the class. This is bad enough, but when there is assigned reading, it's even worse. The information in the reading perfectly mirrors the slides. Which means that between the slides, the reading, and the lecture, you are getting the same information three times. Warren does add a few interesting facts and anicdotes to his lectures, but this information is not useful for the course, and you will not be tested on it. If you can read through and understand the slides, the lecture is completely optional, which is unfortunate. I like to think that my $2000 per class is paying for more than a few slide packs.

* Outside class availablility - Warren was quick to answer e-mails, and I never tried to contact him in his office. The only reason I really rated him a C on this is that he frequently announced that he would not be available during his posted office hours, or apologized for not being in his office when he was supposed to be. Considering the relatively few hours a week he did have scheduled, this strikes me as bad form.

* Personality - as I said, his strongest advantage. He truly seems to be a nice guy. He's friendly, likable, and jokes around with the students. He made me laugh more than once with his geek humor (most of his jokes centered around the VAX architecture).

* Projects - The projects were awful, and agonizing. Each one took several hours to complete, and most of that is debugging time. Debugging assembly is an exercise in frustration. To make matters worse, the projects frequently require advanced knowledge, and you will be docked points for not figuring things out on your own (another example of the futility of the lectures). For example, I lost a point on one lab (the labs are worth a total of 10 points, so I lost 10% of my grade) because at one point in the code there was a SOBEQL branch that should have been a SOBLSS. I had two problems with this. 1.) I did not write that piece of code. It was provided for me as part of the lab, (along with a couple hundred lines of other code) and I was expected to find it, and 2.) Warren did not cover the SOBXXX branches in class until the week after the lab was due. This got better towards the end of the quarter, but not much. Warren covers most of the assembly stuff in weeks 6-8, but the projects run from weeks 4-10, so things seem a little out of sync.

* Speaking Skills - Warren is a fine and entertaining speaking, except that he goes too fast to take notes. He relies so heavily on the slides, and he goes through them so quickly, that there is little time to take notes. About half way through the quarter I gave up taking notes at all, and just started printing out the slides.

My last complaint, though it isn't on the list, is that Warren strikes me as lazy. He often to 2 or 3 weeks to grade labs or exams. This strikes me as very hypocritical given the CS department's "submit your work on time or receive a 0" policy.

Warren is a very knowledgeable and approachable teacher. If you work hard and do your work, you will do fine...and he's a very fair grader. I had him for Computer Graphics 2 where you worked on your own project and wrote a 10 page paper. We also got a chance to go and see Shrek in the theatre as a class. Overall, it was a very fun class to take.

Carithers was a great professor. He really knew his stuff and really wanted us to go where we wnated to go, which is very important in Computer Graphics 2.

FYI, Computer Graphics 2 is like an independent study in computer graphics. One big project and one big paper. The key is to start early and do everything little by little (not all at the end). It was a great experience and I got to learn what I actually wanted to for once and my project was so fun I still use it for pleasure.