CMSC474 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting a B Anonymous 01/11/2024	The professor could not have made it more clear that he does not care for the students taking the class in any way. Refusing to upload lecture recordings pertaining to projects out of spite, not releasing topic lists for exams, not showing up for review sessions, and consistently showing up 15-20 minutes late for lecture just to start. The projects were technically released a month in advance, but the topics were not covered until about a week before the due date. There were also questions on the first exam on topics we had not covered, which made the fact that no topic list/study resources were made available other than the slides. Also, most of the 5 star reviews on this page are from the professor, which obfuscates his true rating. Please avoid at all costs.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Anonymous 01/05/2024	- Unclear with grading on the syllabus. When asked about how participation would be factored into our grade (6%) he would not give the class a clear answer. This also was an issue with the quizzes, where we were supposed to have 2 pop quizzes (1 of them for extra credit) throughout the semester but only received one. When asked what will happen with the second quiz, he seemed like he was also unsure of how the grading for quizzes would work. He wouldn't respond to emails about how our final grade would be calculated. - Did not even bother to show up for our exams. - On the midterm, there was a 3-part question that many people did not know how to solve because it wasn't even taught yet. The material was taught later in the semester. - Claimed that we had over 3 weeks to work on projects and homework, but in reality, all the assignments were assigned all at once and the complete material was taught a week before the deadline. - Overall, he shows a lack of care for students, which is unfortunate since the content itself is very interesting.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting a D Anonymous 01/02/2024	I don't know how previous years went, but his semester teaching CMSC474 was an absolute disaster. The projects graded in a ranked scale where the students competed against each other for the better grades, he barely put anything on ELMS so we had no idea how we were doing in the class at any point, and most of us didn't even get our final grades unless we asked. He also gave us zero help in studying for the exams that were 60% of our grade. There was no topics sheet, there was no practice exams, there was no Piazza, and there was one review session for the midterm (and none for the final) that he didn't even attend. He also told us we should listen to his 12 hour podcast because it may be tested as extra credit... which never happened. And every time someone goes to him to ask for any clarification, he just tells us to "not worry about our grades". Well, I "didn't worry about my grades" and I got a D, so thanks for that.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/24/2023	I expected the course to be more interesting than this. The only thing that was fun in the course was the group project. We had to implement the game to play against other groups, so in order to get a high grade, you have to win over other people. That's the only opportunity that we could actually apply the concept, I did want to play more games! But it was dry, all about theory. The first individual project was a nightmare for us because we weren't taught or given enough information to be able to do it. It turned out a lot of people decided to skip it. Professor Hajiaghayi is nice, he's responsive. But the lectures were too boring to follow, so I decided to learn the concepts myself. I wish we could have a piazza for Q&A, but seems like the staff didn't have time for it. The grading scheme was generous with some extra credits. There was no helpful practice exam or study guide, so you will have to understand the topics to do well on the midterm. Remember to read the slides. I remember there was a midterm question that wasn't covered to test our problem-solving skills. However, if we read the slide about that, we could get it done very easily. Overall, if you can teach yourself, feel free to take this course because you can't rely on the Professor or TAs. The concepts aren't too hard, and they are interesting tbh. I just don't like the way the course was organized.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/21/2023	Content is interesting, but his lecturing is very bad
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Anonymous 12/20/2023	Course has a lot of interesting concepts, but it is clear the professor is checked out. This was unfortunate since I was really passionate about Game Theory as it was my favorite topic from AP Econ, but I feel like the execution of instruction was demoralizing.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Anonymous 12/13/2023	His lectures are difficult to follow at times, but really my issue comes with the fact that his homework assignments and projects have so little to do with each other and with the lectures (he keeps saying we should just learn from google and chatgpt for some topics). I'm fine with being pushed to learn, but it's unsure whether or not things connect with each other. Also, I have no idea what to put for expected grade because he doesn't grade things, and everything's really disorganized. He told us there are two in-class quizzes and turns out there were only one which graded based on completion. With that said I do think he's a nice person.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/11/2023	I enrolled in this class with the expectation of it being a relatively straightforward course with interesting content. Unfortunately, that hasn't been my experience. While Mohammad Hajiaghayi is pleasant, his teaching approach leaves much to be desired. The organization of the course is lacking, with unclear explanations of important topics. During lectures, Hajiaghayi tends to spend the initial 20 minutes discussing unrelated matters, such as chatgpt, before delving into incomprehensible explanations of the actual subject. The provided slide decks are often insufficient, and when the professor writes on them, the text is illegible. All assignments, including tests, projects, and homework, suffer from numerous spelling and grammar issues and are poorly worded. Completing homework assignments becomes a self-guided endeavor, as the necessary information is rarely covered in class. Project 1, in particular, was exceptionally challenging, with a vague three-sentence explanation that resulted in many students receiving zeros. The grading system for the other projects is based on a tournament thus heavily reliant on your bracket. The midterm was generally manageable, except for a last question which he neglected to teach us to do. When asked about it he claimed that this question was to "encourage you to read ahead" which isn't something he has discussed before. In summary, the learning experience in this class has been limited, but the lenient grading offers a silver lining.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/11/2023	avoid this teacher. He is bad. I wanna fall asleep every lecture. To his credit, he actually follows his syllabus (nothing gets delayed)
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/10/2023	Hajiaghyi has been a nightmare as a professor. When exams don't match class material and your grades are determined by how well you do against others, it feels a little bit contradictory to his constant talk about wanting everybody to succeed as that is literally impossible when a third of the class is guaranteed to get a 50% on two of the three total projects. The exams are maybe 50% content and 50% think about this problem and write a solution you think works. The midterm had no partial credit for line of thought. Exams also include a section that is basically "are you subscribed to my social media and have you watched my content." This also feels like something that a professor should not do. His lectures are, for the most part, off the slide. Anything said in lecture has been generally learned better on my own. I would not take this class again.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 11/30/2023	I do not agree with this professor's approach to teaching this class. Oftentimes materials were poorly explained/glossed over in lecture, as he read mostly off the slides then went on tangents about how he worked at Google or how you can make a lot of money in big tech (ugh). Assignments were released far in advance, but the material on the assignments was often taught much closer to the due date, making the actual window to complete them much lower if you didn't want to flip through lecture slides from 3 weeks out. He expects you to teach yourself a lot of the material to be able to perform on projects and exams, which makes some sense for the real world, but he was unforgiving and not understanding in my communication with him, seeming dismissive of my difficulty with the class. Oftentimes he would point to external materials to build "problem-solving" skills for the course, which were graduate level course recordings on his YouTube channel, which were confusing and convoluted to my feeble undergrad brain. We also received grades nearly a month after homeworks/exams were completed which increased my salt levels a bit. If you have trouble teaching yourself a good chunk of a course, then I would not recommend this professor, since it's an expectation that you not only show up to lecture and take notes, but also put in multiple hours making sense of difficult external materials to get to the level he expects. It's a shame this class was managed the way it was, because I found the material we were learning very interesting when I actually understood it, but this class was definitely a trip on the struggle bus for me. Maybe the C- "recommendation" in CMSC351 (which is a requirement for the CS degree so idk why that's a recommendation when it's required) should be raised to B+ or A- so that people understand how smart you should be to succeed in this class with Prof. Hajiaghayi.
Mohammad Hajiaghayi CMSC474 Expecting an A Anonymous 10/25/2023	Prof. Hajiaghayi is great. Enthusiastic, good lecturer, and responsive to questions. Lectures feel like a math class with definitions and theorems. Projects are hard and require learning stuff not taught in lecture, but assigned very early (1+ months) and are very applicable to computational game theory. HWs are easy and straightforward. Grading includes 2 in class quizzes, a midterm and final (with midterm replaced with final if it improves your grade), 4 HWs, and 3 projects. You'll learn a lot.
Dana Nau CMSC474 CamelCase 01/20/2015	Nice enough person, but a poor instructor. His teaching style is to read over his lecture slides (which, granted, are packed with information) pretty much word for word. I found in-class lectures pretty pointless unless you managed to immediately digest and comprehend information at the (pretty quick) rate at which he presents it, and ask tons of questions. You'd be better off pulling up the lecture slides on your own and working through the examples during class time. Homework sets took a bit of time to do, since there was a fair amount of having to review the slides repeatedly and first trying to understand the examples and reverse engineer them. Practice Midterm and Final Exams were given, but were much easier than the actual ones. Nau's justification was that they were all of 'easy' difficulty for him, so he didn't realize ours was harder. Final grades in this class were curved, in my opinion heavily (~8-10%). The projects are not of complex difficulty and ended up bringing up most people's grades in this class, at least a little bit.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting a B
Anonymous
01/11/2024

The professor could not have made it more clear that he does not care for the students taking the class in any way. Refusing to upload lecture recordings pertaining to projects out of spite, not releasing topic lists for exams, not showing up for review sessions, and consistently showing up 15-20 minutes late for lecture just to start. The projects were technically released a month in advance, but the topics were not covered until about a week before the due date. There were also questions on the first exam on topics we had not covered, which made the fact that no topic list/study resources were made available other than the slides. Also, most of the 5 star reviews on this page are from the professor, which obfuscates his true rating. Please avoid at all costs.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Anonymous
01/05/2024

- Unclear with grading on the syllabus. When asked about how participation would be factored into our grade (6%) he would not give the class a clear answer. This also was an issue with the quizzes, where we were supposed to have 2 pop quizzes (1 of them for extra credit) throughout the semester but only received one. When asked what will happen with the second quiz, he seemed like he was also unsure of how the grading for quizzes would work. He wouldn't respond to emails about how our final grade would be calculated. - Did not even bother to show up for our exams. - On the midterm, there was a 3-part question that many people did not know how to solve because it wasn't even taught yet. The material was taught later in the semester. - Claimed that we had over 3 weeks to work on projects and homework, but in reality, all the assignments were assigned all at once and the complete material was taught a week before the deadline. - Overall, he shows a lack of care for students, which is unfortunate since the content itself is very interesting.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting a D
Anonymous
01/02/2024

I don't know how previous years went, but his semester teaching CMSC474 was an absolute disaster. The projects graded in a ranked scale where the students competed against each other for the better grades, he barely put anything on ELMS so we had no idea how we were doing in the class at any point, and most of us didn't even get our final grades unless we asked. He also gave us zero help in studying for the exams that were 60% of our grade. There was no topics sheet, there was no practice exams, there was no Piazza, and there was one review session for the midterm (and none for the final) that he didn't even attend. He also told us we should listen to his 12 hour podcast because it may be tested as extra credit... which never happened. And every time someone goes to him to ask for any clarification, he just tells us to "not worry about our grades". Well, I "didn't worry about my grades" and I got a D, so thanks for that.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/24/2023

I expected the course to be more interesting than this. The only thing that was fun in the course was the group project. We had to implement the game to play against other groups, so in order to get a high grade, you have to win over other people. That's the only opportunity that we could actually apply the concept, I did want to play more games! But it was dry, all about theory. The first individual project was a nightmare for us because we weren't taught or given enough information to be able to do it. It turned out a lot of people decided to skip it. Professor Hajiaghayi is nice, he's responsive. But the lectures were too boring to follow, so I decided to learn the concepts myself. I wish we could have a piazza for Q&A, but seems like the staff didn't have time for it. The grading scheme was generous with some extra credits. There was no helpful practice exam or study guide, so you will have to understand the topics to do well on the midterm. Remember to read the slides. I remember there was a midterm question that wasn't covered to test our problem-solving skills. However, if we read the slide about that, we could get it done very easily. Overall, if you can teach yourself, feel free to take this course because you can't rely on the Professor or TAs. The concepts aren't too hard, and they are interesting tbh. I just don't like the way the course was organized.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/21/2023

Content is interesting, but his lecturing is very bad

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Anonymous
12/20/2023

Course has a lot of interesting concepts, but it is clear the professor is checked out. This was unfortunate since I was really passionate about Game Theory as it was my favorite topic from AP Econ, but I feel like the execution of instruction was demoralizing.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Anonymous
12/13/2023

His lectures are difficult to follow at times, but really my issue comes with the fact that his homework assignments and projects have so little to do with each other and with the lectures (he keeps saying we should just learn from google and chatgpt for some topics). I'm fine with being pushed to learn, but it's unsure whether or not things connect with each other. Also, I have no idea what to put for expected grade because he doesn't grade things, and everything's really disorganized. He told us there are two in-class quizzes and turns out there were only one which graded based on completion. With that said I do think he's a nice person.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/11/2023

I enrolled in this class with the expectation of it being a relatively straightforward course with interesting content. Unfortunately, that hasn't been my experience. While Mohammad Hajiaghayi is pleasant, his teaching approach leaves much to be desired. The organization of the course is lacking, with unclear explanations of important topics. During lectures, Hajiaghayi tends to spend the initial 20 minutes discussing unrelated matters, such as chatgpt, before delving into incomprehensible explanations of the actual subject. The provided slide decks are often insufficient, and when the professor writes on them, the text is illegible. All assignments, including tests, projects, and homework, suffer from numerous spelling and grammar issues and are poorly worded. Completing homework assignments becomes a self-guided endeavor, as the necessary information is rarely covered in class. Project 1, in particular, was exceptionally challenging, with a vague three-sentence explanation that resulted in many students receiving zeros. The grading system for the other projects is based on a tournament thus heavily reliant on your bracket. The midterm was generally manageable, except for a last question which he neglected to teach us to do. When asked about it he claimed that this question was to "encourage you to read ahead" which isn't something he has discussed before. In summary, the learning experience in this class has been limited, but the lenient grading offers a silver lining.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/11/2023

avoid this teacher. He is bad. I wanna fall asleep every lecture. To his credit, he actually follows his syllabus (nothing gets delayed)

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting a B-
Anonymous
12/10/2023

Hajiaghyi has been a nightmare as a professor. When exams don't match class material and your grades are determined by how well you do against others, it feels a little bit contradictory to his constant talk about wanting everybody to succeed as that is literally impossible when a third of the class is guaranteed to get a 50% on two of the three total projects. The exams are maybe 50% content and 50% think about this problem and write a solution you think works. The midterm had no partial credit for line of thought. Exams also include a section that is basically "are you subscribed to my social media and have you watched my content." This also feels like something that a professor should not do. His lectures are, for the most part, off the slide. Anything said in lecture has been generally learned better on my own. I would not take this class again.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting a C+
Anonymous
11/30/2023

I do not agree with this professor's approach to teaching this class. Oftentimes materials were poorly explained/glossed over in lecture, as he read mostly off the slides then went on tangents about how he worked at Google or how you can make a lot of money in big tech (ugh). Assignments were released far in advance, but the material on the assignments was often taught much closer to the due date, making the actual window to complete them much lower if you didn't want to flip through lecture slides from 3 weeks out. He expects you to teach yourself a lot of the material to be able to perform on projects and exams, which makes some sense for the real world, but he was unforgiving and not understanding in my communication with him, seeming dismissive of my difficulty with the class. Oftentimes he would point to external materials to build "problem-solving" skills for the course, which were graduate level course recordings on his YouTube channel, which were confusing and convoluted to my feeble undergrad brain. We also received grades nearly a month after homeworks/exams were completed which increased my salt levels a bit. If you have trouble teaching yourself a good chunk of a course, then I would not recommend this professor, since it's an expectation that you not only show up to lecture and take notes, but also put in multiple hours making sense of difficult external materials to get to the level he expects. It's a shame this class was managed the way it was, because I found the material we were learning very interesting when I actually understood it, but this class was definitely a trip on the struggle bus for me. Maybe the C- "recommendation" in CMSC351 (which is a requirement for the CS degree so idk why that's a recommendation when it's required) should be raised to B+ or A- so that people understand how smart you should be to succeed in this class with Prof. Hajiaghayi.

Mohammad Hajiaghayi
CMSC474

Expecting an A
Anonymous
10/25/2023

Prof. Hajiaghayi is great. Enthusiastic, good lecturer, and responsive to questions. Lectures feel like a math class with definitions and theorems. Projects are hard and require learning stuff not taught in lecture, but assigned very early (1+ months) and are very applicable to computational game theory. HWs are easy and straightforward. Grading includes 2 in class quizzes, a midterm and final (with midterm replaced with final if it improves your grade), 4 HWs, and 3 projects. You'll learn a lot.

Dana Nau
CMSC474

CamelCase
01/20/2015

Nice enough person, but a poor instructor. His teaching style is to read over his lecture slides (which, granted, are packed with information) pretty much word for word. I found in-class lectures pretty pointless unless you managed to immediately digest and comprehend information at the (pretty quick) rate at which he presents it, and ask tons of questions. You'd be better off pulling up the lecture slides on your own and working through the examples during class time. Homework sets took a bit of time to do, since there was a fair amount of having to review the slides repeatedly and first trying to understand the examples and reverse engineer them. Practice Midterm and Final Exams were given, but were much easier than the actual ones. Nau's justification was that they were all of 'easy' difficulty for him, so he didn't realize ours was harder. Final grades in this class were curved, in my opinion heavily (~8-10%). The projects are not of complex difficulty and ended up bringing up most people's grades in this class, at least a little bit.

Reviews for CMSC474