Reviews for CMSC427

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Roger Eastman CMSC427 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/24/2022	Dr. Eastman is a great guy and a good professor. He will take the time to make sure you understand concepts if you ask about them. For 427 in particular, if you do whats asked of you in the projects, its very possible to get a 100% on all of them. Because projects are 45% of your grade, doing so gives you a solid foundation for getting an A in the course. However, the course was a little bit ungrounded, and sometimes his lectures meandered. He pulled most of the lab starter code from online instead of making it himself, and sometimes the project descriptions and homeworks were unclear and contained typos. Overall its a manageable course if you manage your time well and brush up on your linear algebra. Eastman in general is very reasonable and cares about his students, but he's a little scatterbrained sometimes.
David Mount CMSC427 Expecting an A zaqu413 12/17/2013	Really enjoyed his lectures. He knows this stuff really well and can explain ANYTHING. Projects: We had 3 projects, the first and last were pretty hard. You should definitely start early on these graphics projects because most of the time the language you use (OpenGL with C++) won't tell you what mistake you made, it will just produce a blank image. I had a lot of fun working on these projects. HW: We were supposed to have 2 homeworks, but it was reduced to one because of project difficulty. The homework was like mini-projects and some linear algebra stuff. While I am on that topic I would like to say that you really should have a basic understanding of linear algebra to understand how things work in this course. It won't matter much for projects, but it will matter for exams and just being able to understand how OpenGL works. Exams: 1 Midterm, 1 Final. He gives about 10 practice problems in preparation for the exams and if you can get through those you'll be in pretty good shape. The final had some trickier problems than the midterm (the final really tests your in depth knowledge of graphics combined with linear algebra). Lecture Notes: He posts awesome lecture notes online. You can pretty much just read these, but there are places in the lecture notes where he puts things like "Can you think of why this is true?" or "What would happen if we used a cone instead of a sphere?". We always discuss these questions in class and they seem to have a habit of showing up on homework or exams.
David Mount CMSC427 Expecting an A- random 12/24/2010	Dave Mount is a really good professor simply because of two things: he knows graphics well, and he is exceptional at teaching. While there are many professors in CS dept who know their stuff, most suck at teaching. Mount, on the other hand, takes a lot of pain to make sure people understand the concepts. And the best part was that he did entire class on white-board. Graphics can be a hard class to teach on the board because it involves so many 3D drawings and stuff, but Mount stuck to doing everything on the board, and that just made his lectures very effective. There are legends about his lecture notes -- other professors like Meesh use his notes for their classes. We had great lecture notes for this class that included everything he went over in class. Yet, it was still useful to come to class because his teaching style meant that you needed to do very little preparation for the tests. There were four projects, which did a good job covering most of the important topics we discussed in class. The project difficulty level was about medium. His final was harder than the midterm, but neither was long. This class is great fun in general, and it was quite an experience with Dr. Mount. Strongly recommended!
David Jacobs CMSC427 Expecting an A Andrei 12/16/2007	Good professor, definitely knows his material. Goes a bit fast, so if you can't keep up, definitely ask questions - he likes questions.