Reviews for CMSC216H

Information Review
Neil Spring
CMSC216H

Expecting an A
Anonymous
06/03/2019 		Positive: He knows his stuff, and if you pay attention you’ll learn a lot. The TAs were really good at responding to students and clearing things up. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he’s a generally nice guy. There was a pretty good curve at the end of the semester. Negative: He isn’t very prepared and he’s bad at responding to student questions. A lot of material on the exams is stuff he barely mentions in class, if at all. He is terrible with communication, and he had the wrong due date listed for almost every project. Project specifications are unclear. Overall: Class: 5/10 Teaching: 4/10 Communication: 3/10 Exams: 3/10 TAs: 8/10 Learning: 8/10 Curve: Almost a full letter grade Average response time on Piazza: 10 minutes Neil’s motto: If it’s stupid and it works it’s not stupid.
Neil Spring
CMSC216H

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
05/12/2019 		He is a nice guy, and when I was confused over something dumb he took some time to help me get things right. Class seemed to be distracting. We were in the new building (IRB) in the room with several projectors on each side and it was easy to get distracted or tune out. Some of the code examples were a little bit wonky. I tried to run some in the earlier weeks and it was clear that they were made on his downright strange mac setup (who aliases "vi" to emacs??) If you are good at programming then you will probably find this class easier than I did. I suffered through the assembly project, the shell project, and the optimization project. Advice for future students: Make sure to check the submit server (mainly snow.cs.umd.edu) and gitlab test result output to make sure you are passing the tests. I lost 2.5 percent of my grade (the TOTAL grade) because the gitlab test aborted despite displaying a checkmark.
Neil Spring
CMSC216H

Anonymous
05/17/2018 		Really nice person, but fails to have an organized teaching strategy. I was often lost in his class, and many of my peers felt the same but he is really great if you have a ton of questions. He knows so much about C and has so many ideas about how to approach a problem it is really cool.