CMSC460 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Shixin Zheng CMSC460 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/21/2025	Interestingly, this professor was substituted into teaching this class at the last minute; I had registered for Anurag Dey just to walk in on the first day and instead see this dripped out mess of a man. Anyways, his first crime was making the first homework due after the schedule adjustment period ended. As someone who doesn't touch homework until the day it was due, I would have probably dropped the class if I had known it would be like that. Consistently, the homework had very conceptual questions, and at least one proof each. Eventually I wised up and realized that these are all well explained proofs and that I could just go to MathStackExchange or https://statproofbook.github.io and copy from there. These proofs were never on the exams except for one time we were asked to derive the pmf of a negative hypergeometric distribution based on our knowledge of negative binomial and hypergeometric. That was criminal. The quizzes were easy except for the two or three times that they were not. My TA was very unorganized (had an excused absence and turned a HW in one day late by emailing him, it took him a long time to reply). Also, at least this semester, all the grades were on Gradescope and did not account for the curves and weighting, so you had to calculate your actual grade by hand; somewhat annoying. After the first midterm, he got coerced (bullied?) into having a curve, giving extra credit opportunities on the HW, and giving a formula sheet for the second midterm, along with posting more helpful practice problems. The EC questions were always ridiculously difficult, so I'm not sure how many people benefitted from this. At least for the final, I thought the practice problems were reflective of what was on the exam, and instead of a formula sheet, we were allowed to bring a cheat sheet with whatever we wanted on it. Despite the number of times I cried over the class (mostly the homework), I also literally jumped for joy when I would get a 100% on the homework. This class had me going through it. Not to mention that his lectures are just abysmal, see below re bad handwriting, tangents, not to mention the weeks we spent wondering what symbol he was drawing and talking about ("co-see"). Finally, a book I was reading during one of Zheng's lectures for my English class said something about xi and the mystery was solved. Lecture was best spent taking notes from the "class text", the draft of notes by two other UMD stats professors, while occasionally looking up to see what he was talking about. He has a way of explaining easy concepts in the worst way possible. Instead of saying "turn right", he would say "turn left three times". Also, he doesn't post a link to the class text anywhere, so you have to hope you can look it up or a friend sends it to you. Just poorly organized, but it's his first semester, so maybe he'll lock in soon like he does on his fits.
Stefan Doboszczak CMSC460 Anonymous 07/09/2022	Professor Doboszczak is a great professor. As an engineering major I have taken just a few math courses throughout my degree.... and Stefan is definitely one of the best I've had. He doesn't just go over the most basic example in lecture and give you the hardest problems to solve for homework. He gives a great balance of examples and theoretical explanations and gives challenging but solvable homework problems. He gives great practice exams and plenty of additional resources to learn the material. The only downside is that he doesn't release answer keys to the practice exams. So you should work on them well before the exam so you can get assistance from him or the TA's if you're stuck. The course, though being titled computational methods, has a lot of cool information regarding the IEEE floating point standard, how computers store numbers, and how to figure out how accurate your answer can be on a given machine (single precision vs double precision). The second half of the course I found to be more challenging as it is the more theoretical mathematical concepts you see on the course description (interpolation, quadrature, differentiation, etc). I was weary to take this class after being required to take so many math courses -- but I actually enjoyed every lecture I watched because of Stefans teaching. I would 100% recommend this course to anyone that has the option to take it.
Tobias von Petersdorff CMSC460 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/21/2021	The professor does have some pretty bad anxiety at times and it can be really uncomfortable for the students, but overall he is a great professor. His explanations can be extremely in depth and hard to follow but he does not expect you to be able to derive those explanations for yourself, just to build some intuition as to why things work. His homework’s were pretty difficult but he would give out tips and answers when students were really struggling, his exams were extremely fair and very similar to his sample exams. I recommend taking this class with Dr Petersdorff.
Vladimir Yushutin CMSC460 Anonymous 03/11/2020	It is enough to say that he needs a lot of things to be a good professor.

Shixin Zheng
CMSC460

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/21/2025

Interestingly, this professor was substituted into teaching this class at the last minute; I had registered for Anurag Dey just to walk in on the first day and instead see this dripped out mess of a man. Anyways, his first crime was making the first homework due after the schedule adjustment period ended. As someone who doesn't touch homework until the day it was due, I would have probably dropped the class if I had known it would be like that. Consistently, the homework had very conceptual questions, and at least one proof each. Eventually I wised up and realized that these are all well explained proofs and that I could just go to MathStackExchange or https://statproofbook.github.io and copy from there. These proofs were never on the exams except for one time we were asked to derive the pmf of a negative hypergeometric distribution based on our knowledge of negative binomial and hypergeometric. That was criminal. The quizzes were easy except for the two or three times that they were not. My TA was very unorganized (had an excused absence and turned a HW in one day late by emailing him, it took him a long time to reply). Also, at least this semester, all the grades were on Gradescope and did not account for the curves and weighting, so you had to calculate your actual grade by hand; somewhat annoying. After the first midterm, he got coerced (bullied?) into having a curve, giving extra credit opportunities on the HW, and giving a formula sheet for the second midterm, along with posting more helpful practice problems. The EC questions were always ridiculously difficult, so I'm not sure how many people benefitted from this. At least for the final, I thought the practice problems were reflective of what was on the exam, and instead of a formula sheet, we were allowed to bring a cheat sheet with whatever we wanted on it. Despite the number of times I cried over the class (mostly the homework), I also literally jumped for joy when I would get a 100% on the homework. This class had me going through it. Not to mention that his lectures are just abysmal, see below re bad handwriting, tangents, not to mention the weeks we spent wondering what symbol he was drawing and talking about ("co-see"). Finally, a book I was reading during one of Zheng's lectures for my English class said something about xi and the mystery was solved. Lecture was best spent taking notes from the "class text", the draft of notes by two other UMD stats professors, while occasionally looking up to see what he was talking about. He has a way of explaining easy concepts in the worst way possible. Instead of saying "turn right", he would say "turn left three times". Also, he doesn't post a link to the class text anywhere, so you have to hope you can look it up or a friend sends it to you. Just poorly organized, but it's his first semester, so maybe he'll lock in soon like he does on his fits.

Stefan Doboszczak
CMSC460

Anonymous
07/09/2022

Professor Doboszczak is a great professor. As an engineering major I have taken just a few math courses throughout my degree.... and Stefan is definitely one of the best I've had. He doesn't just go over the most basic example in lecture and give you the hardest problems to solve for homework. He gives a great balance of examples and theoretical explanations and gives challenging but solvable homework problems. He gives great practice exams and plenty of additional resources to learn the material. The only downside is that he doesn't release answer keys to the practice exams. So you should work on them well before the exam so you can get assistance from him or the TA's if you're stuck. The course, though being titled computational methods, has a lot of cool information regarding the IEEE floating point standard, how computers store numbers, and how to figure out how accurate your answer can be on a given machine (single precision vs double precision). The second half of the course I found to be more challenging as it is the more theoretical mathematical concepts you see on the course description (interpolation, quadrature, differentiation, etc). I was weary to take this class after being required to take so many math courses -- but I actually enjoyed every lecture I watched because of Stefans teaching. I would 100% recommend this course to anyone that has the option to take it.

Tobias von Petersdorff
CMSC460

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/21/2021

The professor does have some pretty bad anxiety at times and it can be really uncomfortable for the students, but overall he is a great professor. His explanations can be extremely in depth and hard to follow but he does not expect you to be able to derive those explanations for yourself, just to build some intuition as to why things work. His homework’s were pretty difficult but he would give out tips and answers when students were really struggling, his exams were extremely fair and very similar to his sample exams. I recommend taking this class with Dr Petersdorff.

Vladimir Yushutin
CMSC460

Anonymous
03/11/2020

It is enough to say that he needs a lot of things to be a good professor.

Reviews for CMSC460