CMSC427 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Roger Eastman CMSC427 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/14/2025	I came into this class with no experience in anything graphics-related, regardless I was optimistic that I could learn a lot. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed. Eastman likes what he teaches, but it's very hard to follow his thought process. He has slides, yet somehow his teaching has no direction. I find him consistently flipping back and forth to make a point that doesn't seem to tie into the greater topic we're being taught. It's almost like he uses the slides as a bunch of flashcards rather than an actual presentation. It's manageable in the first half of the semester because most of the material is just working with vectors and parametric equations, but after that, we get into more advanced topics involving shaders, ray tracing, and meshes. I kept waiting for everything we learned to come together, which did not happen because the materials we learned somehow were so disjointed. A lack of homeworks between exams makes practice difficult. The labs (coding projects) are okay and are generally easy A's but they're not very helpful because the lectures are mostly about the math behind the implementations we do in the labs. Overall, I would take this class again, but probably not with Eastman. Great guy, though
Roger Eastman CMSC427 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/12/2025	Pros: - easy A if you do everything - provides practice material for exams that are close to the exams - nice guy - records lectures but often forgets to post them or forgets to record the screen/document camera Cons: - lectures were extremely dry. he seems to be experienced in the material but teaches it assuming we have the same background knowledge as him, so it is difficult to follow along with. lectures are very disorganized, slides are outdated or not even made by him, he doesn't even seem to have planned out which slides he will cover during each lecture, so he scrolls through and skips slides during lecture. lecture topics are not connected well with each other. - he is not on top of assignments. he said we would have weekly homeworks but we probably had about 3 or 4 the entire semester, and they were not evenly distributed. there was only one homework in the second half, and the rest were in the first half, not because there was less material, just because the instructor is very slow with writing the homeworks. additionally, one of the homework's answer keys was mostly incorrect. students had to post on piazza corrections for the instructor's answer key. - he doesn't teach what we need to know to complete the labs. we are pretty much expected to look up how to do things on our own and find solutions online. what's the point of paying for these classes if the instructor directs us to free online sources for learning and solutions for the assignments? I remember struggling with a lab until a few days before the lab was due, until the instructor posted on piazza that we can use solutions we find online if we cite them, and that we were actually expected to find solutions online? what's even the point of doing them then?
Roger Eastman CMSC427 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/23/2024	I like Reastman as a person, he's knowledgable about the subject and has clear experience in the area, and he's pretty nice and likes to joke around in class too, but man is he a hassle to take as a professor. There have been a lot of issues with the administrative aspects and assignments of the class, all small things by themselves but add up to be pretty significant. Here's some of the things that happened: - The syllabus had outdated information - Most if not all of the homeworks and labs had their due date postponed because we were behind on class content. - Instructions and questions on the hws and labs had typos and straight missing information and unfinished sentences that made doing the assignments more difficult than it needed to be. - About 6 weeks before the end of the semester, Reastman said we had a project without a due date to be submitted before the end of the semester. He showed us the assignment page in class but never made the assignment public, and the pdf was nowhere to be found on ELMS. We never heard anything else about that project. - Continuing off that last point, he would forget to post important resources in the modules and a lot of the piazza posts were asking him to post them. Sometimes he would post the solutions to assignments/practice exams, but the assignment pdf and solution pdf would have different questions on them. - Grades took a while to get back, and the TAs would release homework grades before they were done being graded, so often times you would get a notification saying you got a 10/50 on your homework when only 20% of the questions were actually graded. In the end they always had the right grade but the first time it happened there was a bit of panic. All of these things were easy to manage though, it was just more frustrating than anything else. The class itself was very interesting and if you look past the errors in the labs and homeworks, they aligned pretty closely to what we were learning in class. The exams were a bit tough but he provides past and practice exams that are very very similar to what he has for the exams, and he makes it clear what content can and won't be on the exam. If you want to learn more about computer graphics and you don't mind having a bit of a chaotic class, I would recommend Reastman.
Roger Eastman CMSC427 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/11/2024	I agree with the people that say he can be a bit scatterbrained. I had some grading issues with some of my homework and it took him a long while to regrade, and he would also say that we'd review something in the next lecture but didn't. But I haven't really found that this impacted the class itself. It was a relatively easy class overall, and I would also say that it was a fun class in some regard because you learn some applications of the mathematics behind computer graphics. If you like video games, this class might be for you. Professor Eastman himself is super nice and clearly passionate about the subject. It's a class in which you can learn a lot without much head-banging.
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.

Roger Eastman
CMSC427

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
05/14/2025

I came into this class with no experience in anything graphics-related, regardless I was optimistic that I could learn a lot. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed. Eastman likes what he teaches, but it's very hard to follow his thought process. He has slides, yet somehow his teaching has no direction. I find him consistently flipping back and forth to make a point that doesn't seem to tie into the greater topic we're being taught. It's almost like he uses the slides as a bunch of flashcards rather than an actual presentation. It's manageable in the first half of the semester because most of the material is just working with vectors and parametric equations, but after that, we get into more advanced topics involving shaders, ray tracing, and meshes. I kept waiting for everything we learned to come together, which did not happen because the materials we learned somehow were so disjointed. A lack of homeworks between exams makes practice difficult. The labs (coding projects) are okay and are generally easy A's but they're not very helpful because the lectures are mostly about the math behind the implementations we do in the labs. Overall, I would take this class again, but probably not with Eastman. Great guy, though

Roger Eastman
CMSC427

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
05/12/2025

Pros: - easy A if you do everything - provides practice material for exams that are close to the exams - nice guy - records lectures but often forgets to post them or forgets to record the screen/document camera Cons: - lectures were extremely dry. he seems to be experienced in the material but teaches it assuming we have the same background knowledge as him, so it is difficult to follow along with. lectures are very disorganized, slides are outdated or not even made by him, he doesn't even seem to have planned out which slides he will cover during each lecture, so he scrolls through and skips slides during lecture. lecture topics are not connected well with each other. - he is not on top of assignments. he said we would have weekly homeworks but we probably had about 3 or 4 the entire semester, and they were not evenly distributed. there was only one homework in the second half, and the rest were in the first half, not because there was less material, just because the instructor is very slow with writing the homeworks. additionally, one of the homework's answer keys was mostly incorrect. students had to post on piazza corrections for the instructor's answer key. - he doesn't teach what we need to know to complete the labs. we are pretty much expected to look up how to do things on our own and find solutions online. what's the point of paying for these classes if the instructor directs us to free online sources for learning and solutions for the assignments? I remember struggling with a lab until a few days before the lab was due, until the instructor posted on piazza that we can use solutions we find online if we cite them, and that we were actually expected to find solutions online? what's even the point of doing them then?

Roger Eastman
CMSC427

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
05/23/2024

I like Reastman as a person, he's knowledgable about the subject and has clear experience in the area, and he's pretty nice and likes to joke around in class too, but man is he a hassle to take as a professor. There have been a lot of issues with the administrative aspects and assignments of the class, all small things by themselves but add up to be pretty significant. Here's some of the things that happened: - The syllabus had outdated information - Most if not all of the homeworks and labs had their due date postponed because we were behind on class content. - Instructions and questions on the hws and labs had typos and straight missing information and unfinished sentences that made doing the assignments more difficult than it needed to be. - About 6 weeks before the end of the semester, Reastman said we had a project without a due date to be submitted before the end of the semester. He showed us the assignment page in class but never made the assignment public, and the pdf was nowhere to be found on ELMS. We never heard anything else about that project. - Continuing off that last point, he would forget to post important resources in the modules and a lot of the piazza posts were asking him to post them. Sometimes he would post the solutions to assignments/practice exams, but the assignment pdf and solution pdf would have different questions on them. - Grades took a while to get back, and the TAs would release homework grades before they were done being graded, so often times you would get a notification saying you got a 10/50 on your homework when only 20% of the questions were actually graded. In the end they always had the right grade but the first time it happened there was a bit of panic. All of these things were easy to manage though, it was just more frustrating than anything else. The class itself was very interesting and if you look past the errors in the labs and homeworks, they aligned pretty closely to what we were learning in class. The exams were a bit tough but he provides past and practice exams that are very very similar to what he has for the exams, and he makes it clear what content can and won't be on the exam. If you want to learn more about computer graphics and you don't mind having a bit of a chaotic class, I would recommend Reastman.

Roger Eastman
CMSC427

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
05/11/2024

I agree with the people that say he can be a bit scatterbrained. I had some grading issues with some of my homework and it took him a long while to regrade, and he would also say that we'd review something in the next lecture but didn't. But I haven't really found that this impacted the class itself. It was a relatively easy class overall, and I would also say that it was a fun class in some regard because you learn some applications of the mathematics behind computer graphics. If you like video games, this class might be for you. Professor Eastman himself is super nice and clearly passionate about the subject. It's a class in which you can learn a lot without much head-banging.

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.

Reviews for CMSC427