Reviews for ENEE150

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Mamadou Wade ENEE150 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/01/2023	Dr. Wade is very lenient and understanding. He has given our class multiple extensions on our projects and homework so that everyone has enough time to complete them all. Anytime someone has asked, he has extended deadlines for everyone. However, Dr. Wade's teaching style is not for me. Every class, it is just him reading off slides upon slides of information pulled right from the textbook. All of the exam content will be pulled directly from the 500+ slides he posts throughout the semester. I personally have found it really hard to focus in his class, but other people might not have that issue. From what I've seen, a good amount of people just skip his lectures as he posts them all on Canvas and doesn't really elaborate too much on anything on the slides. He does curve the midterms so that he has an 80% mean grade on the midterms. Homework and Projects are simple, specifications and test vectors are given by the TAs, and are pretty much a free grade. By the end of this semester, we will have had 3 Homework assignments (15%), 2 Projects (15%), 2 Quizzes (10%), 2 Midterms (20% each), and the Final (20%), which isn't a lot of assignments in my opinion. Overall, pretty easy class, boring but really kind professor, and boring content. If you skipped ENEE140 with the AP Java Credit like I did, definitely pay attention for the first few weeks, as I struggled in the switch from Java to C.
Mamadou Wade ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/18/2023	From Spring Semester 2023: Dr. Wade is a very kind professor who will give ample time for students to complete their assignments and posts all the slides he uses to Canvas. However that’s about where the positives end, the class is pretty disorganized and extremely repetitive. It is a very rare occurrence for a lecture to start and the first 20 minutes to not be the exact same slides from the end of the last class. The exam content is from the slides, however they don’t really make sense. You will learn about pointers early but we weren’t tested on them until the second exam. Instead 20% of that first exam was multiple choice on Dr. Wades personal opinions on testing and debugging from 2 slides on syllabus day. Unlike enee140 the HW does not feel like practice, it feels like busy work. The projects are uninspiring and will teach you almost nothing. And instead of a concise lecture where you learn a topic a week and get better at C, you will be drip fed random snippets of information in a sea of side tangents. He will frequently use the whiteboards in addition to his slides. But he will not add anything new or explain it any better, he will just rewrite whatever is on the slides. All these issues are not a fault with enee150 but entirely caused by Dr. Wades teaching style. Ultimately take this professor if you would prefer boring busy work that might be less time consuming than actually learning something.
Pruthav Patel ENEE150 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/09/2023	bro curved me down from a 97 to a 92.9 cause i said he was mid like wtf
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 06/05/2023	I personally found his lectures too long (1 hour and 15 minutes), and it felt like he would keep repeating the same information. But, he does cover everything that needs to be covered and explains things pretty well. There are 2 midterms and a final, 4 projects, and 4 quizzes. Quizzes aren't too bad, and I found the second midterm to not be that bad. But the first midterm and final were fairly challenging. If you put in the effort, you can get the grade you want, but it is hard. I had an 83.62% and ended with a B+, so the curve is also pretty decent. You'll definitely learn what you need to and a little extra. Just be prepared to always have an assignment to work on or a test to study for.
Mamadou Wade ENEE150 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/14/2023	Wade was incredibly thorough in lecture, he explained every single example or concept in incredible detail, to the point where often it felt like overkill and was somewhat boring when you already understood what he was saying. Though his teaching could get very repetitive and boring, being confused is certainly not a problem in his class. He was also really lenient with grading and deadlines, with regular deadline extensions and generous curves on exams. Homework and projects often had really vague directions, leaving students to have to guess about what he wants us to do. The exams and quizzes, though, were very much based heavily on the slides, and he told us this at pretty much every point. Bottom line, everything you need to know in the course is on the slides which he goes very in depth on.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/08/2023	Really good teacher. Class is hard but you learn a lot and come out a MUCH better programmer. Yeung is really knowledgeable, charismatic, and very helpful, especially if you go to his office hours. Really cares about his students and helps you be successful, especially on the projects. If you have the choice, take it with him.
Pruthav Patel ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/30/2023	Good TA
Mamadou Wade ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 02/28/2023	Wade clearly cares about his students. He is very thorough with his lectures and if you go to office hours, you can get extra help. Because it was his first semester (fall 2022) teaching at UMD, I believe he had little time to prepare for ENEE 150 and 244. While his class for 150 wasn't as challenging as previous professors, he was still very knowledgeable and educational. I am taking 244 with him right now and he has definitely gotten the hang of teaching ENEE 244. We are almost halfway through the course, meaning he is pacing himself well this semester. I genuinely believe that he is a good professor but wasn't given enough time last semester to prepare.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/25/2022	Dr. Yeung is definitely one of my favorite ECE professors. For starters, he's really personable and enthusiastic when you talk to him and when he teaches. He goes above and beyond to try to help his students, and he encourages you to reach out and talk to him. He is also very knowledgeable on the course he teaches, which is definitely reassuring. In terms of the course, our lecture portion of the course was designated in covering the concepts needed for our assignments. My only critique about the lectures is that he would spend quite a lot of time talking through pre-coded examples, which some might find beneficial (but for me it wasn't). The examples were helpful for the assignments given to us, many of which you could take the code directly from. We had 4 projects, 4 pop quizzes and 3 homework assignments over the semester. We used discussion section time to cover the lecture's content again, the TA's offering a lot of assistance in clarifying concepts while providing helpful examples for assignments. With all of this being said, ENEE150 is a tough course. As someone who took ENEE150 without taking ENEE140 (credits covered by another course), I had no background in C, but by the end of the course I felt relatively comfortable with most of the concepts. However, this experience might not be shared by everyone. Projects had a 2-week deadline, but they were pretty time-consuming. I would normally spend about a week on each project, but thankfully, I thought all of them were pretty cool and interesting. Some were easier than others, but completion of them relied a lot on learning outside of class. One really great thing about Dr. Yeung is that he would hold additional office hours for the projects close to their due dates; this would include weekend office hours and multiple office hours on the same day. Exams were probably the most feared part of the course. Practice exams were not offered, so in order to study, you would be dependent on the coding examples from lectures and from the TA's. While exams were open-notes, the averages for the midterms and final were in the 60's. The reassuring part of all of this is that Dr. Yeung heavily curves the final grade for this course; it was probably an 8-10% curve, which was surprising even for me. Overall, I would highly recommend Dr. Yeung. You are going to have to work a lot for this course, but you will definitely leave the course with a lot of knowledge about C.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 02/02/2021	I didn't get a bad grade in this course because of professor yeung, I got a bad grade because I suck at coding. That being said, it was because of Dr yeung that I did not get a worse grade than what I got. He was an extremely good lecturer. I could tell he was very passionate about what he does. Unfortunately, the online environment hindered him because he wasn't really able to ask questions and interact with his class, but this is not a reason to rate him any less than a 5. He was always willing to help out if you reached out, and held additional office hours at opportune times. Homeworks and projects don't overlap, so you aren't dying with assignments. Projects were fairly hard, but also prepared you well for exams, and overall, I felt like I learned a lot and did better than I thought I would
Gang Qu ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/07/2020	Lectures were fine. Tests weren't as hard as expected. However, especially during the transition to online format, we were left in completely the dark about our grades and how the course would be adapted.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/29/2019	I have mixed feelings about Dr. Yeung's teaching style. I respect him immensely, as his passion for the subject is very clear in his lectures and through the involved and engaging classwork that he assigns, however after finishing 150 I don't feel that it was taught as well as it could've been. I might be an odd person out here, but I found it incredibly hard to focus during his lectures. Especially when getting into the meat of the class - data types - I felt that his lectures were a little too high level for me to stay focused. By this I mean that he did a good job explaining conceptually what different data types and structures represent, and especially how they integrate with computer hardware, but I feel that he didn't focus enough on software implementation. He did use many code examples to try to make up for this, but personally I felt that the examples he used were way too complicated for a lecture in terms of gaining a quick understanding of implementing a new data type. They are useful for studying at home when one can dive deep into understanding the programs, but they're often too involved for the purposes of an intro lecture. Maybe other people could follow the code examples better than I could, but I consider myself to be a pretty bright guy and I could absolutely never pick up on the real-time code examples fast enough to follow. I loved his projects. They were hard, but really rewarding. The projects are actually useful extensions of what we learned in class and almost every exam problem can be traced back to something on a project. I probably spent about 8-15 hours on each project, usually in two or three days, and ended up with high A's on all of them. If you work with and pass his given test vectors you're basically guaranteed an A, but it does take a lot of time and effort to do so. The exams are fair. They are difficult though. Thankfully, the midterms and final only count for 35% of the final grade, so these aren't major stressors throughout the course. In the end, I have mixed feelings about this course. Yeung certainly does a great job running this class, and you'll end up with a lot of knowledge about C. I mainly just wish that his lectures could be restructured to be more engaging, by focusing on easy-to-grasp examples for coding implementation of new concepts. For reference of difficulty in this course, I found it to be more difficult and time-consuming than ENEE222 (Papa) and ENEE205 (Murphy) to get an A in.
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 09/18/2019	God I took his class last semester. I had my fair share of mental breakdowns, but I made it through. I honestly feel bad for anyone genuinely trying to learn C. His projects are insane for the time that's given. The exams are hard, the projects are hard, where do I get the break? The TAs. The TAs are your life saver and having a good one is essential. Most times TAs will tell you how to solve a problem and leave it to you to code it which makes it a lot easier. would rate 10/10 would cry again
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting a C Anonymous 04/26/2019	The guy's cool and all, and the topics we cover are pretty useful to learn, the only issue is that they're seemingly impossible.
Gang Qu ENEE150 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/18/2018	Qu was just an ok lecturer. I didn't feel like I picked up a lot during class, but programming is generally a self-taught class so it wasn't a big deal. Reasonable grading scales and doable exams/projects. I wasn't great at the class but programming isn't my bag.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 soulelite 09/30/2016	It seems that every course that Yeung teaches is very challenging, but he is also a very good professor that is able to explain concepts very well. Do not procrastinate on the projects or you won't finish, seriously.
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting an A+ jjjnmk 11/13/2015	The expectations that he has of you in this class are pretty high. Homework assignments and projects tend to be at different level than the material that you're going over in class (which is usually an 8am lecture by the way). When I took this class, I just felt that the projects would be near impossible with the material we learned in just lecture. There was an enormous amount of time spent each project just googling concepts and learning them on my own. Depending on your TA, you might get out of this class with a good grade regardless, as some TAs tend to sympathize with your situation. No one got above a D on the final for my class, but as you can see that got pretty heavily curved. I had a C-average in exams and a 80% at the end of semester in the class, and that was curved up to an A+. If you put in some work and maybe get a good TA, it is possible to get out of this class with an A, but if you want to actually learn C and have a good understanding of C-programming, I'd recommend Qu or Yeung.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting a B Anonymous 06/29/2015	By far my favorite professor! He cares so much about his students and will always make time for you! Take Yeung for every course that you possibly can.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting a B nbadami 05/06/2014	I'll start of by giving the downsides of professor Yeung. His 150 class is HARD. I took 140 my first semester and had no trouble at all in that class. I thought 150 would be roughly the same but its not. He usually gives 2 weeks per project and the projects usually take that amount of time. I think I only completed one project in it's entirety, not because I didn't know how to do them, but because they are that time consuming and I ran out of time. Whenever you get a project in this class, make your best effort to start it on day 1. Aside from that, Yeung is a great professor. He explains the content really well and is really REALLY helpful. I cannot stress that enough. This guy is like the C whisperer. He makes his best effort to help all students who come to him for help on projects, and almost every time does a good job of finding your problem and helping you fix it. If you send him problems early enough, he will even de-bug your code for you, saving you a lot of time. He is also quite reasonable. I missed two of the four quizzes, and he allowed me to take the average of the third and fourth quiz as my grades for the first two. His midterms are also reasonable. They aren't difficult, just there to make sure that you know the material. If you do, you will usually get at least a B, even with minimal studying. Overall, don't expect to get an easy A in this class. If you want an easy A, look to Hawkins (though I hear hes a terrible professor). If you're looking to learn how to program in C, then Yeung is your guy. Even if you don't get an A in the class, you will come out of the semester with a really strong understanding of the language.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/21/2013	Yeung is a great teacher and explains the material pretty well. His lectures can get a bit boring at times, but overall very solid at teaching the content.
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting a ? grizzlyman 05/09/2013	The things that were expected of me and my classmates from this course were impossible. From the beginning, the homework assignments were exceedingly difficult and they only got worse. Nobody could figure out what we were supposed to learn and retain from this class. This was an intermediate programming class, which was supposed to be a continuation of the C-programming class we took last semester; our final homework assignments involved using Javascript and webservers at a level that Professor Hawkins openly acknowledged was above our level of understanding. Whenever we had something we needed help figuring out, his default response was to Google it. That is an incredibly unhelpful assertion when we didn't even fundamentally know where to look to have a hope of beginning his assignments. He seemed like a very nice guy and he was also pretty knowledgeable but he just expected way too much from this class of freshmen and sophomores.
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting a D Anonymous 11/16/2012	Bad teacher. Don't take him.
William Hawkins ENEE150 Anonymous 05/11/2012	Hawkins Hawkins knows the material very well, but not well suited to teach an Introduction programming class. If you have no programming experience, you will suffer in this class. Lectures were not very note-taking friendly. He doesn’t make effective use of the chalkboard space. He jokes about giving us stuff we haven’t seen before on exams and labs. Also, his syllabus is horribly written, so nobody had a clue when stuff was due. The Labs for 140 can be difficult but definitely appropriate to the topics. The problem here is that if you having trouble, it is difficult to find help. He doesn’t give any other material besides the suggest book. I highly finding some external reference if you are having stuck and taking advantage of TA limited office hours. Fortunately, we have Hawkins for 1 day of the week, which mitigated the suffering we went through.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/21/2011	One of the best teachers I have ever seen when it comes to teaching. If you don't have much programming experience this class will be hard at first, and you'll need to put in some extra effort. That being said, his exams aren't tricky, they're just there to make sure you know concepts.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/07/2011	Best professor I have had at UMD. He is an amazing lecturer, who really cares about whether or not the students are learning. My best advice is go to lecture!..Start on projects early! You will get an a if you miss no lecture or discussion, and put in an effort. Overall, he makes this class a good/interesting learning experience
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/18/2011	Dr. Hawkins is a really nice guy and a solid teacher. He tries to come up with interesting homework problems, but can get ahead of himself considering you have only a week to do most assignments. Tests are difficult, and the homeworks even more difficult. If you work during the week, or are in a lot of extracurriculars, I'd try to avoid this class just because it is so much work. If you do end up in this class, put the effort in and pay attention in lecture. He gives helpful hints that make the assignments a lot easier. Even if you can't get your programs working fully, get them partially working and hand them in anyway. This will get you ahead of the curve, because a lot of people don't get it working at all, or turn in something that crashes instantly. Go to discussion, because homework is 50% of your grade and you will have questions. By the end of the class, if you have done the homework, you WILL know how to program in C. Try really hard at the beginning of the semester to get your programs fully working, because it only gets harder and it's nice to have some safety margin in your grade. You'll get to a point in the class where most people just give up, so if you do the work, you should be fine. If programming is your weakness, you should probably take an easier teacher. Otherwise, like the other guy said, if you have the time to put into the homework, you'll be fine.
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting an A frapis 11/16/2010	Very very very good. Take this professor. Avoid Hawkins. He is straightforward, clear, logical, and won't trip you up on the tests.
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 08/31/2010	If you have previous programming experience in C or Java, and are willing to devote the time necessary to all the homework you'll do fine. He oftentimes will ask ridiculous things on the homework after inadequately covering them in lecture, but if you can't do it chances are that nobody else can either. The last 2 or 3 assignments became arbitrary at the end since nobody could keep up. Getting a 76 on the first midterm when the average was around 50 secured me an A in the class.
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/26/2010	Absolutely an awful teacher. His homeworks are so hard that not even he can do them. His lectures are pointless. They have nothing to do with the basic idea of the homeworks. He don't prepare you for the midterm or final as well. I believe this is his first time teaching an intro course so he doesn't know how to teach it. Avoid him and if he is the only teacher available for ENEE 150, take it in another semester. The only thing you have to look forward to is a ridiculously high curve. The uncurved average in our class was a 44.6/100
Donald Yeung ENEE150 Expecting an A mdterp12 05/19/2010	Great professor. This is a really smart man who really knows how to run a class well. Fair quizes, very fair tests. Tough projects but I learned a lot from them. Will most definitely take this professor again if I come across him.
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting a C terpflo 04/13/2010	I cannot agree more with what the below person said about Hawkins. He's a nice guy, the TA's keep insisting he's reasonable when it comes to grades, but I am not buying it (maybe there will be a giant curve?) His homeworks are ridiculously hard, and he doesn't prepare you for them at all (good thing they make up 50% of your total grade!) The first week of homework I literally spent 20+ hours on my programs trying to get them to work, but to no avail. I got a B+ in ENEE140, too. His motto is that you should be able to find out how to do things on your own by using the internet. This class with Hawkins is flat out unreasonable - I get sick just thinking about it. DO NOT TAKE HIM!!!!
William Hawkins ENEE150 Anonymous 04/07/2010	By far the worst professor I've ever had. I understand that he has good reviews for the higher up courses because he definitely knows what he's talking about but he doesn't know how to introduce these concepts to new programmers. About a quarter of the people in my class dropped because of their low grades and the average for the first exam was 45%. Not only this but he also almost never returns emails and refuses to let up on homeworks a little or make them somewhat understandable even when everyone refuses to turn them in because no one has any idea how to start. He says in order to do the homeworks, we need to find the answers online but they don't exist online. Basically, programming experience or not, DO NOT TAKE THIS PROFESSOR
William Hawkins ENEE150 Expecting a C Anonymous 04/05/2010	DO NOT TAKE THIS PROFESSOR FOR ENEE150!!!!! His lectures are completely random and don't really have anything to do with the homework. He only gives homework, midterm & a final, all of which are nearly impossible. He comes into the lectures and expects the students to have a higher level of knowledge than is taught in ENEE140. Because the homeworks are impossible, it is very difficult to know what will be on the midterm or final. He basically expects you to be able to teach yourself all the material of the class from outside sources such as google, because the book that he recommends that you get doesn't have information on more than half of the material he talks about in class. Horrible professor for this class. DO NOT TAKE HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Shuvra Bhattacharyya ENEE150 armantheman 12/31/2009	Snore.......
Shuvra Bhattacharyya ENEE150 Xin 11/25/2009	He doesn't know how to teach. His lectures are extremely boring so don't even bother going to class. He is the only one who teaches ENEE150 though, so you're stuck with him if you take this course. He's not hard, just boring and incompetent.
Shuvra Bhattacharyya ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/12/2009	Make no mistake, it is not difficult to get a good grade in this class, however, be prepared to learn absolutely nothing. The course description on the EE website does not match up at all with what is actually taught in the class. The first half of the class is spent sitting through the dullest most dubious lectures you will ever suffer through on vim and unix syntax. (not programming) about half way through when something about programming is taught it is presented in such a way that it seems like it is coming straight from a textbook. It tends to be about as cryptic as anyone could possibly make a lecture. Part of this is simply the C programming language, but the way in which it is presented could be much better. I have had the fortune to have already taken many programming classes (in Java mostly) so I am at least a bit more familiar with the content of the course which barely makes it beyond the remedial mark. This is a very new class so I am quite sure that the content will change at least slightly over the coming semesters, but it does not change the fact that Bhattacharyya is a less than stellar professor that is difficult to understand. The projects, while not difficult have at least three places you have to go to get information on how to go about doing it, and no where is there a complete set of instructions. Some information is given in e-mails, some in power points online, some in other project descriptions on line, and finally, some in the .h file gotten via glue. It is as if he tries to make it more difficult to find the information. This is a required class for EE majors, and there are a small number of professors teaching this class so chances are you will be stuck with this guy, so good luck (its going to suck)
Shuvra Bhattacharyya ENEE150 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/23/2008	Shuvra is a very fair teacher. His tests usually take the whole time, but they are more than manageable if you just look over the material. Also, he will give extensions on projects if he sees many students are struggling with them. This happened 2 times in my class when we were all a little lost on certain parts of the projects and he extended the due dates by about half a week in each case which really helped. Shuvra is also a very annoying teacher though. He is a nice guy, but his teaching methods are all so tedious and dull that you will most certainly find yourself hating the projects and not paying attention a lot of the time in class. For each project you will have to write enormous amounts of automated tests for your code. These tests will sometimes be utterly useless, but you still have to take the ~15 minutes to make each one. This adds up to hours of complete boredom and busywork when you are required to make about 40 tests on the final project. Also, his lectures are very dull. He makes powerpoints the way everyone tells you not to make them by putting whole paragraphs on each slide. He will spend at least 20 minutes on each slide no matter how easy the material on it is. Furthermore, this causes him to never finish a lecture and you will leave this course feeling like you could have learned a lot more. Overall, this course is pretty easy and the actual coding of the projects is interesting. However, the lectures are boring, the automated tests are a pain to do, and we could have learned a lot more in the given time.