ENEE222 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Alejandra Mercado ENEE222 Expecting a B Anonymous 06/09/2024	Mercado is a solid prof. I personally didn't enjoy her lectures that much and stopped going (hence the reason I got a B), but she tried her best to convey the material in an interesting way. The homeworks were pretty hard and labs too, but the content and math is interesting so she is definitely a solid option.
Alejandra Mercado ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/20/2024	Overall, love Mercado. She definitely cared about us and wanted us to succeed. She did implement a slightly odd grading system which is hard to explain but did mean that you couldn’t really tell your grade during the semester but it did help in the end (her version of a curve). She was a pretty good lecturer and also posted old Papamarcou videos and paper notes for if you don’t understand something/miss something/miss class that pretty much go directly with her notes (I watched both- occasionally something slightly different but nothing that should affect class performance- mostly Mercado focused more on explaining applications than Papamarcou in an attempt to make us more interested) Grading was hit or miss depending on TA for hw and labs (MATLAB assignments) (they gave me full points on some stuff I missed but then took off a ton for small errors), but exams were generally graded pretty fairly. But, as a forewarning, THIS CLASS IS A FUCKTON OF WORK. If you want to do well, 15hr/week is like the bare minimum. I pretty regularly spent 20hr/week at the beginning of the semester and is the only reason I was able to keep my A as my grade went down while I was no longer doing that due to other classes. Homeworks were ridiculous time commitments (like 6hr per assignment with one a week) plus like 2 hr labs once a week, lecture quizzes after every lecture, and then I was also watching the lecture videos and taking notes, not to mention general studying. Also, labs are a disproportionately percentage of your grade so make sure you double check them before submitting. She posts lots of practice problems like a week and a half before exams (though I think it would be better to spread them out to their respective modules) but they were pretty helpful and then went over questions in class that were often pretty close to the exam questions. So overall good teacher but the class sucked
Howard Ye ENEE222 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 02/29/2024	My goat
Howard Ye ENEE222 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 02/29/2024	My goat
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/29/2023	Papamarcou is a really good lecturer and explains all the topics clearly. He could always answer students questions about the concepts clearly in a way that we could understand, his homeworks were always fair, the exams were always straightforward and very similar to the practice exams. He made it very easy for anyone who wanted to succeed to be able to with a reasonable amount of effort and paying attention in lecture. He made 222, an undeniably hard class, quite manageable and even easy at times.
Alejandra Mercado ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/31/2023	This semester was Mercado's first time teaching 222. She followed Papa's curriculum very closely, providing all the same resources and assigning the same labs and homework assignments. This was a good call because Papa is goated with the sauce. Notably, they did not co-teach and Mercado's exams tended to emphasize different aspects of the material. Her lecture style is very engaging and I feel like I learned a lot in her class. Overall, I found Mercado to be very invested in the success of her students. She frequently checked in with the class to ensure that material was being paced well and calculated final grades by creating five different category weightings at the end of the semester. Her philosophy is that students who understand all the material should earn As, even if they don't perform equally well on all types of assignments. Lecture quizzes acted as a free 10% of your grade in the default weighting as well. I am not leaving a perfect review for three reasons: 1. It was very difficult to determine what your grade in the class was at any point in the semester, as Mercado locked ELMS grade calculations and the weightings were unclear anyway. 2. Exams had a very long turnaround time for grading. 3. Although I appreciated how Mercado highlighted aspects of the course that she felt were more important for practical understanding, this unfortunately led to her exams being different from the homework in the framing of some concepts. As somebody who learns from practice, I felt that there was no good way to prepare for these differences. More could have been done to reconcile Papa's course materials with Mercado's flair.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/12/2023	Honestly, I really liked this professor. He did pretty much everything to make this class suitable for virtual learning, and even asynchronous learning, but I still found myself consistently going to lecture regardless. Sometimes he skips over steps in derivations, but he gets the main points across in a very understandable way. The homework can be difficult, but I feel they reinforce the main concepts well. The exams can also be difficult, but the professor provides ample resources to study for them. He's also very good with communication. At the end of the day, I felt that I have learned a lot from this class. I highly recommend Dr. Papamarcou. Even though this course is challenging, and you should plan to spend significant time on it, he sets you up for success as much as he can.
Alejandra Mercado ENEE222 Anonymous 05/01/2023	Professor Mercado's ENEE222 was pretty good. Lectures were clear, tests and labs were well organized. My only complaint was that the homeworks were unnecessarily hard, especially compared to test problems.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/25/2023	Absolutely amazing professor for people who self-study. Basically gives you the entire course materials in convenient modules in ELMS, including practice problems, example solutions and old exams. Exams are VERY similar to past exams. He doesn’t give “gotcha” questions. He records all lectures and posts them quickly (including his digital notes during the lecture). Homework is a little tedious, but not too bad. 222 with Papa is an Easy A if you put in the work.
Danilo Romero ENEE222 Anonymous 11/16/2022	A good professor, sometimes a little muddle.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Anonymous 11/09/2022	Very organized and gives the most material I've ever had a professor give. Weekly homework problems, short pre-lecture videos, practice problems (video and text) for each lecture, and plenty of exam review material. The only thing is he runs through his lectures and never really explains why something is "x*y/m" he just says it is which I found very annoying.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Anonymous 05/05/2022	Papamarcou himself is a decent lecturer and takes pride in his knowledge and willingness to teach others. The material he teaches is just hard and confusing in its own way, but he makes it bearable. There are always 2-3 homeworks to do each week, except during exam weeks then there is still one to do, along with a lab each week in matlab. The class is very time consuming and difficult but taking it with Papamarcou helps relieve some of the stress.
Richard La ENEE222 Anonymous 12/26/2021	Not a very good lecturer. Gives students little in study resources, especially for the final, which is most of the grade. Stressful.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Anonymous 05/21/2021	He is really nice and a good lecturer. As others have mentioned he uses a flipped lecture style which might not work for everyone. Exams are pretty straightforward and the questions are mostly taken from worksheets or past exams.
Gilmer Blankenship ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/18/2021	I would only take this professor for 222 if you are already comfortable with some of the basics of signals and systems and want to really challenge yourself. His problem sets are challenging and require lots of outside research to finish, which he will warn you of during his lectures. The tests are also very challenging and for my semester all of the averages were in the 50s. The curve he gives is substantial and he expects the grades to be low on most of what he assigns. I was very frustrated about this at first, but compared to the students who took other professors for 222 my understanding of signals is much higher. The professor is also very accommodating and gave reasonable timelines for assignments and extensions when asked for. If you are interested in feedback and controls and actually being good when you get to the real world this is your guy, if you just want to pass because it is a required course you should probably steer clear of him.
Gilmer Blankenship ENEE222 Expecting a B Anonymous 02/02/2021	He was objectively a nice person, but at the end of the day, his class was one of the hardest classes I've ever had, at an unreasonable rate. I currently have a different professor for 322, and we are currently doing 222 review, all of which I did not learn in Blankenship's class. Yet, the remaining topics in 322 after the first 3 weeks is stuff we did in Blankenships 222 class, no wonder it was so unreasonably hard. His exams were ridiculous diff eq and lin alg heavy and homeworks were near impossible.
Eyad Abed ENEE222 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/30/2020	He's a very kind person, but he doesn't explain so well in lecture. He also doesn't do so many examples so it's not clear how to do the homework. Midterm and final grades were very low so there was a massive curve.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/29/2019	I have such mixed feelings about this professor. Clearly very intelligent and passionate about his work, however he just doesn't teach this class well. His new flipped-classroom-esque style is inefficient at best, and flawed at worst. I feel if he just did lectures in class instead it would be much easier to pick up on concepts. However, this is not my main beef with this class... You don't need to study. Period. You can, but it won't give you a significant advantage over anyone else with a good memory and 6 hours the night before a test. He gives carbon copy midterms and finals every single year, and he gives you four to study from. I know multiple people who, after figuring out this trick, didn't study at all during the semester until the day before the second midterm and the day before the second final, where we just grinded and memorized how to complete the previous tests. And that's all you need to do, as we all ended up with A's. In my opinion, this is unfair as I feel like I came out of the semester not learning anything and with a grade that I don't deserve. It's just that if I'm handed a slice of cake, I'm not gonna run circles around it for three hours a day when instead I could just grab it and go do something else. Papamarcou, in my opinion, could restructure this class into something very useful if he changed the format of the exams and instead made them about understanding of material instead of solving memorization puzzles. But hey, if you can memorize stuff easily and want a free A in a weed-out course, take Papa.
Armand Makowski ENEE222 Anonymous 11/20/2018	Makowski has personified the act of poor teaching. He focuses on the "big picture", which essentially means no concrete examples and instead you get proofs/the theory behind the approach. He expects a lot of mathematical know-how in order to do the homework/exams, so if you don't already have a B.S. in Mathematics, good luck. The textbook used was written by Adrianos Papamarcou, (whom you should register for ENEE222 with instead), and reading the textbook rarely helps when it comes to Makowski. Lecture is the equivalent of putting your brain in a blender and leaving it on pulse for a good hour and fifteen minutes. On the bright side, it has reaffirmed my faith, for now I know that there is indeed a hell and chastisement exists in the form of these exams. Advice: - Stay away, if you value anything in your life. - If you need this course and this is your only option, invest in a high-quality bedspread so when you cry yourself to sleep at night your sheets aren't ruined.
Armand Makowski ENEE222 Anonymous 11/19/2018	I heard that this course was hard but taking it with this Professor only made it harder. He likes teaching with little to no examples. It came time for him to teach some topics in Linear Algebra (a course I am familiar with) and he made it harder for others to understand by making easy tasks like LU factorization complicated. There are no practice exams for him in this course. He likes to form his own questions for exams which is good because it keeps you on your toes. He likes to ask exam questions that prove something. He kinda loses a little patience when you ask questions. If you have no choice but to take him, read ahead and practice a lot. It takes a certain kind of mind to understand what he wants from you during an exam so knowing how to do problems in the textbook won't just cut it. Pros: will let you retake a quiz Cons: Poor Teaching, Hard Tests, will cut you no slack about your grades (No extra credit, no dropped test, If you're failing before the drop date, drop it quick)
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting a B Anonymous 07/28/2018	Overall Papamarcous class is easy as you can do well in each exam by practicing his past exams which he posts on ELMS. However I feel like I havent really learnt anything from this class other than the MATLAB portion.
Gilmer Blankenship ENEE222 Expecting an A+ jjjnmk 11/13/2015	He seems like a very nice guy. From what I heard, he pretty much takes on any senior looking to do a project for ENEE499. There's a lot of learning that you have to do on your own for this course, so if you're afraid of that I'd recommend Papamarcou over Blankenship for that reason. Blankenship tends to teach like a graduate professor, in that it's not as organized and structured as some of the better Undergraduate professors in the department. If you take Blankenship for 222, you will be pretty much set for 322, because he kind of teaches 222 like it's 322. Homework problem sets involve a lot of Matlab, so if you weren't familiar with it before you will be after this course. Tests were a little tricky just because we weren't as familiar with the course material, but to be honest he told us a couple of the test questions in class..essentially word for word. You can also find some of his old exams online, and he tends to recycle exam questions.
Gilmer Blankenship ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/29/2015	Professor Blankenship is very fair. Although he does teach like a graduate professor, he takes into consideration every question the students have. I got an A+ in this class although I didn't do very well on the first exams. His final exam is pretty much the other exams put together, so study them. The homework is doable, and he definitely curves everything. I would take his class again.
Jonathan Simon ENEE222 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/23/2015	Avoid Simon for 222. He starts off the semester telling you how much of the class has a GPA below a 3.0 and other statistics to make you feel bad about yourself. He's an absolute AWFUL teacher. All he does is write equations up on the board with symbols that he never explains. He'll do examples for about 10% of the concepts but then usually the other 90% is on the homework and all you can do is hope that your TA knows it. The exams are very similar to the testbank but he always puts a different twist on the question and no one knows how to do it. The 2nd exam and the final had to be curved about 20%. The first couple of labs are very easy but after that, the provided information is no help and you just have to guess and hope for the best. I highly advise that you take Papamarcou.
Gilmer Blankenship ENEE222 soulelite 05/17/2015	DO NOT TAKE THIS GUY FOR ENEE222. I took 322 with Rotkowitz, and Blankenship basically taught everything I learned in 322, but in such a disorganized and unintelligible way. I highly recommend taking papamarcou or anybody else than blankenship for 222. This was my first course ever in signals, and Blankenship made it so convoluted and hard to understand. I hated signals after taking it with Blankenship, but after taking 322 Rotkowitz, I realize it's actually pretty interesting.
Jonathan Simon ENEE222 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/06/2014	Professor Simon means well but he is not a good teacher. His lectures are boring, dense and often don't help at all in the understanding of the material. I had to look to the book to learn anything at all for this class, and even the book is not that helpful. His homework assignments are very difficult and are graded for completion AND are 30% of the final grade (this portion of the grade is not curved). What's worse, his solutions to the homework are often not helpful for some of the more difficult homework questions as they tend to skip steps and make assumptions about what you know, which is terrible when most of the material being taught in the class is new to pretty much all the students. You get weekly matlab assignments which are supposed to help demonstrate the concepts taught in class, but these are often difficult, and usually cannot be done based on what was covered in the lab or the lecture. I honestly haven't learned anything at all about matlab this past semester, and we've had 12 matlab assignments (and i didn't even fail any of these assignments; I averaged a B on all of them). The only redeeming quality about this professors class is that he gives a huge curve for the exams. There was as much as a 15pt curve for the first exam, and he usually reevaluates the curves for the exams after the final, meaning he makes them bigger. Overall, I would not recommend this professor if you can avoid him. Take papamarcou if you can, take Simon only if you have to.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A umdee 04/25/2014	Papa is a great lecturer and makes fair exams that can easily be aced by looking over practice and past exams. Only complaint is that he sounds like a book when lecturing (not a bad thing, but can be hard to understand sometimes with the terminology he uses).
Jonathan Simon ENEE222 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 02/23/2014	Simon is an okay professor. His class is set up exactly like Papamarcous. He uses the same exact exams as Papamarcou from the testbank, so run through those and you will do very well. I'd say his exams are as predictable as Silio's if you look at the testbank. Labs were unrelated to lecture, but they have some interesting applications. His lecture near the end can start becoming confusing.
Gilmer Blankenship ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 03/02/2013	Dr. Blankenship is pretty terrible. He teaches every semester differently and in an arbitrary manner. He confuses almost everyone in the class, and fails to teach in a remotely structured manner. If you want the easy A though, and you're decent at Math, he's the guy to take, since he grades on a really nice curve (makes cut offs on average so approximately 40% of people get As). You might find you learned a decent amount for ENEE322, though the class could be much better used for its 4 credits.
Gilmer Blankenship ENEE222 Expecting an A bigbabby 02/13/2012	Blankenship's teaching style is very different from other teachers in ECE. Unfortunately I could not learn very much from him. Lectures are very technical and hard to follow unless you have a prior knowledge of the topics before class. Blankenship has alot of background knowledge which he shares during lecture, but it goes so quickly so that you're not really sure what you just learned when you leave. I had to rely on outside sources and notes to figure out what was going on. He teaches off of a set of notes found online, which is equally hard to understand. Homeworks were assigned about every week (unless he forgot) and they took a good 5-7 hours to complete. Often times the homeworks would be on entirely new concepts, completely different from what was going on in class. Depending on your TA the hw could be graded rather harshly, or more for completion. Tests were...interesting. Blankenship himself says he likes to put new concepts on tests and the result is a combination of things you haven't seen before, and things that you thought you knew - except with a hidden trick or secret. Fortunately the class is graded on a curve so as long as you do slightly better than the rest of the class, you should be in good shape. I really wanted to like this class - I just couldn't do it. Blankenship's teaching style just isn't for me. I feel that if you know what you're doing already on the subject matter, take Blankenship, as he'll throw new concepts at you, but if you don't know the relationships between fourier transforms and fourier series out of the gate you might want to look elsewhere. Edit: He curves generously, but since the content in the course is referred in future classes, I don't feel as confident in much of the subject matter (complex numbers, fourier transforms, etc)
Gilmer Blankenship ENEE222 Anonymous 11/09/2011	First semester at UMCP This "genius" guy intimidated me so much. His lecture is .1% understandable. No guidelines whatsoever. Homework is literally impossible to finish. I feel like being in a PhD class. He lectures with so much confidence as if every one is totally understanding it. I know that I am not alone in this class who have such feelings. He seems like a good guy but knows nothing about teaching. He expects you to be a PhD before he lectures

Alejandra Mercado
ENEE222

Expecting a B
Anonymous
06/09/2024

Mercado is a solid prof. I personally didn't enjoy her lectures that much and stopped going (hence the reason I got a B), but she tried her best to convey the material in an interesting way. The homeworks were pretty hard and labs too, but the content and math is interesting so she is definitely a solid option.

Alejandra Mercado
ENEE222

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/20/2024

Overall, love Mercado. She definitely cared about us and wanted us to succeed. She did implement a slightly odd grading system which is hard to explain but did mean that you couldn’t really tell your grade during the semester but it did help in the end (her version of a curve). She was a pretty good lecturer and also posted old Papamarcou videos and paper notes for if you don’t understand something/miss something/miss class that pretty much go directly with her notes (I watched both- occasionally something slightly different but nothing that should affect class performance- mostly Mercado focused more on explaining applications than Papamarcou in an attempt to make us more interested) Grading was hit or miss depending on TA for hw and labs (MATLAB assignments) (they gave me full points on some stuff I missed but then took off a ton for small errors), but exams were generally graded pretty fairly. But, as a forewarning, THIS CLASS IS A FUCKTON OF WORK. If you want to do well, 15hr/week is like the bare minimum. I pretty regularly spent 20hr/week at the beginning of the semester and is the only reason I was able to keep my A as my grade went down while I was no longer doing that due to other classes. Homeworks were ridiculous time commitments (like 6hr per assignment with one a week) plus like 2 hr labs once a week, lecture quizzes after every lecture, and then I was also watching the lecture videos and taking notes, not to mention general studying. Also, labs are a disproportionately percentage of your grade so make sure you double check them before submitting. She posts lots of practice problems like a week and a half before exams (though I think it would be better to spread them out to their respective modules) but they were pretty helpful and then went over questions in class that were often pretty close to the exam questions. So overall good teacher but the class sucked

Howard Ye
ENEE222

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
02/29/2024

My goat

Howard Ye
ENEE222

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
02/29/2024

My goat

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Expecting an A
Anonymous
11/29/2023

Papamarcou is a really good lecturer and explains all the topics clearly. He could always answer students questions about the concepts clearly in a way that we could understand, his homeworks were always fair, the exams were always straightforward and very similar to the practice exams. He made it very easy for anyone who wanted to succeed to be able to with a reasonable amount of effort and paying attention in lecture. He made 222, an undeniably hard class, quite manageable and even easy at times.

Alejandra Mercado
ENEE222

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/31/2023

This semester was Mercado's first time teaching 222. She followed Papa's curriculum very closely, providing all the same resources and assigning the same labs and homework assignments. This was a good call because Papa is goated with the sauce. Notably, they did not co-teach and Mercado's exams tended to emphasize different aspects of the material. Her lecture style is very engaging and I feel like I learned a lot in her class. Overall, I found Mercado to be very invested in the success of her students. She frequently checked in with the class to ensure that material was being paced well and calculated final grades by creating five different category weightings at the end of the semester. Her philosophy is that students who understand all the material should earn As, even if they don't perform equally well on all types of assignments. Lecture quizzes acted as a free 10% of your grade in the default weighting as well. I am not leaving a perfect review for three reasons: 1. It was very difficult to determine what your grade in the class was at any point in the semester, as Mercado locked ELMS grade calculations and the weightings were unclear anyway. 2. Exams had a very long turnaround time for grading. 3. Although I appreciated how Mercado highlighted aspects of the course that she felt were more important for practical understanding, this unfortunately led to her exams being different from the homework in the framing of some concepts. As somebody who learns from practice, I felt that there was no good way to prepare for these differences. More could have been done to reconcile Papa's course materials with Mercado's flair.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/12/2023

Honestly, I really liked this professor. He did pretty much everything to make this class suitable for virtual learning, and even asynchronous learning, but I still found myself consistently going to lecture regardless. Sometimes he skips over steps in derivations, but he gets the main points across in a very understandable way. The homework can be difficult, but I feel they reinforce the main concepts well. The exams can also be difficult, but the professor provides ample resources to study for them. He's also very good with communication. At the end of the day, I felt that I have learned a lot from this class. I highly recommend Dr. Papamarcou. Even though this course is challenging, and you should plan to spend significant time on it, he sets you up for success as much as he can.

Alejandra Mercado
ENEE222

Anonymous
05/01/2023

Professor Mercado's ENEE222 was pretty good. Lectures were clear, tests and labs were well organized. My only complaint was that the homeworks were unnecessarily hard, especially compared to test problems.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Expecting an A
Anonymous
01/25/2023

Absolutely amazing professor for people who self-study. Basically gives you the entire course materials in convenient modules in ELMS, including practice problems, example solutions and old exams. Exams are VERY similar to past exams. He doesn’t give “gotcha” questions. He records all lectures and posts them quickly (including his digital notes during the lecture). Homework is a little tedious, but not too bad. 222 with Papa is an Easy A if you put in the work.

Danilo Romero
ENEE222

Anonymous
11/16/2022

A good professor, sometimes a little muddle.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Anonymous
11/09/2022

Very organized and gives the most material I've ever had a professor give. Weekly homework problems, short pre-lecture videos, practice problems (video and text) for each lecture, and plenty of exam review material. The only thing is he runs through his lectures and never really explains why something is "x*y/m" he just says it is which I found very annoying.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Anonymous
05/05/2022

Papamarcou himself is a decent lecturer and takes pride in his knowledge and willingness to teach others. The material he teaches is just hard and confusing in its own way, but he makes it bearable. There are always 2-3 homeworks to do each week, except during exam weeks then there is still one to do, along with a lab each week in matlab. The class is very time consuming and difficult but taking it with Papamarcou helps relieve some of the stress.

Richard La
ENEE222

Anonymous
12/26/2021

Not a very good lecturer. Gives students little in study resources, especially for the final, which is most of the grade. Stressful.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Anonymous
05/21/2021

He is really nice and a good lecturer. As others have mentioned he uses a flipped lecture style which might not work for everyone. Exams are pretty straightforward and the questions are mostly taken from worksheets or past exams.

Gilmer Blankenship
ENEE222

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/18/2021

I would only take this professor for 222 if you are already comfortable with some of the basics of signals and systems and want to really challenge yourself. His problem sets are challenging and require lots of outside research to finish, which he will warn you of during his lectures. The tests are also very challenging and for my semester all of the averages were in the 50s. The curve he gives is substantial and he expects the grades to be low on most of what he assigns. I was very frustrated about this at first, but compared to the students who took other professors for 222 my understanding of signals is much higher. The professor is also very accommodating and gave reasonable timelines for assignments and extensions when asked for. If you are interested in feedback and controls and actually being good when you get to the real world this is your guy, if you just want to pass because it is a required course you should probably steer clear of him.

Gilmer Blankenship
ENEE222

Expecting a B
Anonymous
02/02/2021

He was objectively a nice person, but at the end of the day, his class was one of the hardest classes I've ever had, at an unreasonable rate. I currently have a different professor for 322, and we are currently doing 222 review, all of which I did not learn in Blankenship's class. Yet, the remaining topics in 322 after the first 3 weeks is stuff we did in Blankenships 222 class, no wonder it was so unreasonably hard. His exams were ridiculous diff eq and lin alg heavy and homeworks were near impossible.

Eyad Abed
ENEE222

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
01/30/2020

He's a very kind person, but he doesn't explain so well in lecture. He also doesn't do so many examples so it's not clear how to do the homework. Midterm and final grades were very low so there was a massive curve.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/29/2019

I have such mixed feelings about this professor. Clearly very intelligent and passionate about his work, however he just doesn't teach this class well. His new flipped-classroom-esque style is inefficient at best, and flawed at worst. I feel if he just did lectures in class instead it would be much easier to pick up on concepts. However, this is not my main beef with this class... You don't need to study. Period. You can, but it won't give you a significant advantage over anyone else with a good memory and 6 hours the night before a test. He gives carbon copy midterms and finals every single year, and he gives you four to study from. I know multiple people who, after figuring out this trick, didn't study at all during the semester until the day before the second midterm and the day before the second final, where we just grinded and memorized how to complete the previous tests. And that's all you need to do, as we all ended up with A's. In my opinion, this is unfair as I feel like I came out of the semester not learning anything and with a grade that I don't deserve. It's just that if I'm handed a slice of cake, I'm not gonna run circles around it for three hours a day when instead I could just grab it and go do something else. Papamarcou, in my opinion, could restructure this class into something very useful if he changed the format of the exams and instead made them about understanding of material instead of solving memorization puzzles. But hey, if you can memorize stuff easily and want a free A in a weed-out course, take Papa.

Armand Makowski
ENEE222

Anonymous
11/20/2018

Makowski has personified the act of poor teaching. He focuses on the "big picture", which essentially means no concrete examples and instead you get proofs/the theory behind the approach. He expects a lot of mathematical know-how in order to do the homework/exams, so if you don't already have a B.S. in Mathematics, good luck. The textbook used was written by Adrianos Papamarcou, (whom you should register for ENEE222 with instead), and reading the textbook rarely helps when it comes to Makowski. Lecture is the equivalent of putting your brain in a blender and leaving it on pulse for a good hour and fifteen minutes. On the bright side, it has reaffirmed my faith, for now I know that there is indeed a hell and chastisement exists in the form of these exams. Advice: - Stay away, if you value anything in your life. - If you need this course and this is your only option, invest in a high-quality bedspread so when you cry yourself to sleep at night your sheets aren't ruined.

Armand Makowski
ENEE222

Anonymous
11/19/2018

I heard that this course was hard but taking it with this Professor only made it harder. He likes teaching with little to no examples. It came time for him to teach some topics in Linear Algebra (a course I am familiar with) and he made it harder for others to understand by making easy tasks like LU factorization complicated. There are no practice exams for him in this course. He likes to form his own questions for exams which is good because it keeps you on your toes. He likes to ask exam questions that prove something. He kinda loses a little patience when you ask questions. If you have no choice but to take him, read ahead and practice a lot. It takes a certain kind of mind to understand what he wants from you during an exam so knowing how to do problems in the textbook won't just cut it. Pros: will let you retake a quiz Cons: Poor Teaching, Hard Tests, will cut you no slack about your grades (No extra credit, no dropped test, If you're failing before the drop date, drop it quick)

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Expecting a B
Anonymous
07/28/2018

Overall Papamarcous class is easy as you can do well in each exam by practicing his past exams which he posts on ELMS. However I feel like I havent really learnt anything from this class other than the MATLAB portion.

Gilmer Blankenship
ENEE222

Expecting an A+
jjjnmk
11/13/2015

He seems like a very nice guy. From what I heard, he pretty much takes on any senior looking to do a project for ENEE499. There's a lot of learning that you have to do on your own for this course, so if you're afraid of that I'd recommend Papamarcou over Blankenship for that reason. Blankenship tends to teach like a graduate professor, in that it's not as organized and structured as some of the better Undergraduate professors in the department. If you take Blankenship for 222, you will be pretty much set for 322, because he kind of teaches 222 like it's 322. Homework problem sets involve a lot of Matlab, so if you weren't familiar with it before you will be after this course. Tests were a little tricky just because we weren't as familiar with the course material, but to be honest he told us a couple of the test questions in class..essentially word for word. You can also find some of his old exams online, and he tends to recycle exam questions.

Gilmer Blankenship
ENEE222

Expecting an A
Anonymous
06/29/2015

Professor Blankenship is very fair. Although he does teach like a graduate professor, he takes into consideration every question the students have. I got an A+ in this class although I didn't do very well on the first exams. His final exam is pretty much the other exams put together, so study them. The homework is doable, and he definitely curves everything. I would take his class again.

Jonathan Simon
ENEE222

Expecting a B
Anonymous
05/23/2015

Avoid Simon for 222. He starts off the semester telling you how much of the class has a GPA below a 3.0 and other statistics to make you feel bad about yourself. He's an absolute AWFUL teacher. All he does is write equations up on the board with symbols that he never explains. He'll do examples for about 10% of the concepts but then usually the other 90% is on the homework and all you can do is hope that your TA knows it. The exams are very similar to the testbank but he always puts a different twist on the question and no one knows how to do it. The 2nd exam and the final had to be curved about 20%. The first couple of labs are very easy but after that, the provided information is no help and you just have to guess and hope for the best. I highly advise that you take Papamarcou.

Gilmer Blankenship
ENEE222

soulelite
05/17/2015

DO NOT TAKE THIS GUY FOR ENEE222. I took 322 with Rotkowitz, and Blankenship basically taught everything I learned in 322, but in such a disorganized and unintelligible way. I highly recommend taking papamarcou or anybody else than blankenship for 222. This was my first course ever in signals, and Blankenship made it so convoluted and hard to understand. I hated signals after taking it with Blankenship, but after taking 322 Rotkowitz, I realize it's actually pretty interesting.

Jonathan Simon
ENEE222

Expecting a B
Anonymous
05/06/2014

Professor Simon means well but he is not a good teacher. His lectures are boring, dense and often don't help at all in the understanding of the material. I had to look to the book to learn anything at all for this class, and even the book is not that helpful. His homework assignments are very difficult and are graded for completion AND are 30% of the final grade (this portion of the grade is not curved). What's worse, his solutions to the homework are often not helpful for some of the more difficult homework questions as they tend to skip steps and make assumptions about what you know, which is terrible when most of the material being taught in the class is new to pretty much all the students. You get weekly matlab assignments which are supposed to help demonstrate the concepts taught in class, but these are often difficult, and usually cannot be done based on what was covered in the lab or the lecture. I honestly haven't learned anything at all about matlab this past semester, and we've had 12 matlab assignments (and i didn't even fail any of these assignments; I averaged a B on all of them). The only redeeming quality about this professors class is that he gives a huge curve for the exams. There was as much as a 15pt curve for the first exam, and he usually reevaluates the curves for the exams after the final, meaning he makes them bigger. Overall, I would not recommend this professor if you can avoid him. Take papamarcou if you can, take Simon only if you have to.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE222

Expecting an A
umdee
04/25/2014

Papa is a great lecturer and makes fair exams that can easily be aced by looking over practice and past exams. Only complaint is that he sounds like a book when lecturing (not a bad thing, but can be hard to understand sometimes with the terminology he uses).

Jonathan Simon
ENEE222

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
02/23/2014

Simon is an okay professor. His class is set up exactly like Papamarcous. He uses the same exact exams as Papamarcou from the testbank, so run through those and you will do very well. I'd say his exams are as predictable as Silio's if you look at the testbank. Labs were unrelated to lecture, but they have some interesting applications. His lecture near the end can start becoming confusing.

Gilmer Blankenship
ENEE222

Expecting an A
Anonymous
03/02/2013

Dr. Blankenship is pretty terrible. He teaches every semester differently and in an arbitrary manner. He confuses almost everyone in the class, and fails to teach in a remotely structured manner. If you want the easy A though, and you're decent at Math, he's the guy to take, since he grades on a really nice curve (makes cut offs on average so approximately 40% of people get As). You might find you learned a decent amount for ENEE322, though the class could be much better used for its 4 credits.

Gilmer Blankenship
ENEE222

Expecting an A
bigbabby
02/13/2012

Blankenship's teaching style is very different from other teachers in ECE. Unfortunately I could not learn very much from him. Lectures are very technical and hard to follow unless you have a prior knowledge of the topics before class. Blankenship has alot of background knowledge which he shares during lecture, but it goes so quickly so that you're not really sure what you just learned when you leave. I had to rely on outside sources and notes to figure out what was going on. He teaches off of a set of notes found online, which is equally hard to understand. Homeworks were assigned about every week (unless he forgot) and they took a good 5-7 hours to complete. Often times the homeworks would be on entirely new concepts, completely different from what was going on in class. Depending on your TA the hw could be graded rather harshly, or more for completion. Tests were...interesting. Blankenship himself says he likes to put new concepts on tests and the result is a combination of things you haven't seen before, and things that you thought you knew - except with a hidden trick or secret. Fortunately the class is graded on a curve so as long as you do slightly better than the rest of the class, you should be in good shape. I really wanted to like this class - I just couldn't do it. Blankenship's teaching style just isn't for me. I feel that if you know what you're doing already on the subject matter, take Blankenship, as he'll throw new concepts at you, but if you don't know the relationships between fourier transforms and fourier series out of the gate you might want to look elsewhere. Edit: He curves generously, but since the content in the course is referred in future classes, I don't feel as confident in much of the subject matter (complex numbers, fourier transforms, etc)

Gilmer Blankenship
ENEE222

Anonymous
11/09/2011

First semester at UMCP This "genius" guy intimidated me so much. His lecture is .1% understandable. No guidelines whatsoever. Homework is literally impossible to finish. I feel like being in a PhD class. He lectures with so much confidence as if every one is totally understanding it. I know that I am not alone in this class who have such feelings. He seems like a good guy but knows nothing about teaching. He expects you to be a PhD before he lectures

Reviews for ENEE222