Walid Aref

There was an extremely large disparity between the complexity of his lectures and of the complexity of homeworks and exams. He simply read the slides straight off the projector, occasionally stopping to ask the class questions on the most blatantly obvious points. A weak attempt at classroom interaction. His speaking skills were satisfactory, and for the most part udnerstandable. In contrast to the simplicity of the lectures, his homeworks and exams border on the near impossible. The few homeworks he gave took me almost 15-20 hours each. Although they taught me a lot, they did not reflect his lectures. The final exam was probably the most difficult exam I have ever written. He did not give sample questions or practice examples for the exam. At was a blind attack.

He has a weird sense of humor. He gives out these extra credit half-points (full points towards the end) in class to people who say something intelligent or regurgitate what they read ahead. These aren't in the syllabus and he never told us what they're worth.

The lectures are him reading off of powerpoint slides. He only goes over what is in the book, but the book is so poorly written that sometimes it's worth listening to him give a different explanation. The problem is that he won't post the slides. He uses other people's slides, and says it would be copyright infringement. Bull. He won't even give a link or anything.

The projects are not hard, but they are poorly described. Even the TAs fight each other over what the project is. The whole idea of the class is to design/use efficient algorithms, but we can just brute-force on projects. The worst part is that one of the projects was a verbatim copy of a fall of 98 project at John Hopkins Univ. The only thing changed was that they removed the original professor's name. And they don't like students cheating? Whatever.