Reviews for ENEE245

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Mamadou Wade ENEE245 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/28/2023	Wade is still not a great professor for 245. However, unlike 244 where all of the shortcomings of that class fall on the professor, 245 has been such an infamous class for several years that Wade might actually be an improvement for the class's direction... which is honestly really sad. First off, a few good things I have to say. This class, despite how much work it is week by week, is at least an easy A if you try. The TAs graded fairly and mostly gave everyone A's on assignments as denoted by most of the lab report averages. Additionally, I believe any overdue lab reports were accepted on the last day of classes for full credit. I would strongly recommend against abusing this for both your and the TAs' sake, but the option is there if you're struggling to get in the last few reports. Finally, being able to choose lab partners each week is a godsend for this class. With that out of the way, this class is an absolute mess. First off, lab 0 was almost completely useless for me, as we had no hands-on experience with using the equipment. We instead watched videos for most of the time, including an hour long review of the oscilloscope we used in lab, which didn't help me understand how to use it in the slightest (keep in mind this is the first time I've used an oscilloscope, and neither PHYS261 nor ENEE205 are prerequisites for this class). Speaking of the oscilloscope, literally every new piece of equipment for the class including the oscilloscope, OrCAD PSpice, the DLA software, and the FPGA software are all incredibly poorly documented. All of my skills with the oscilloscope and PSpice were gained from the 205 labs because those are at least properly documented. For instance, prelabs 2, 3, and 4 of 245 asked for PSpice simulations, and I didn't figure out how to get those simulations until it was cleared up in the 205 PSpice lab, as there is nowhere in the provided 245 documents which clears up how to get simulations working, and trying to look online either brought up corporate nonsense or documents which didn't help in getting started in the first place. For the DLA and FPGA software, we just had to flounder around aimlessly until something worked, as the TAs were almost completely untrained on the software we use. Even disregarding that, the class is just an unreasonable amount of work each week. I swear that this class is two credits, yet it sometimes feels like it's five. It gets really bad towards the end, where they throw weekly labs at us such as the vending machine controller, integer square root finder, and floating point adder on a weekly basis, where such labs feel much more like 2 week Verilog projects they cram into a week. It's probably even worse than it sounds because the labs essentially have to be fully completed in prelab, and every lab as an associated tedious lab report to fill out. Unfortunately I didn't really have a choice to pair this class and 205, and both combined nearly drove me insane this semester with the seemingly never-ending prelabs, labs, and lab reports nearly every single week. Finally, exams. They're not weighted a whole lot, but they're a mess. For exam 1, it takes place in lab 4 labs in. As far as I'm aware, the TAs write unique exams, and while this semester's exams weren't bad, I heard last semester's first exams varied wildly in difficulty and quality. I'm not sure the origins of exam 2, but I do know that its quality was terrible. The multiple choice were each 5% each and tested us on features of Verilog we never touched, such as obscure data types and scalar values. Meanwhile, the rest of the exam was just a bunch of Verilog feature checks and basic 244 stuff, which was easy, but at the same time things like parameters are things we haven't used for about 2 months. This class's reputation is deserved in every respect. It is by far the worst and most tedious major class I have taken so far, which is a shame since it could be so much better if the class was just toned down a bit and had better documentation. Do yourself a favor and if you can, do not take this class alongside 205. If you do end up with both in the same semester, all I can say is good luck.
Mamadou Wade ENEE245 Expecting an A xtermn8 05/05/2023	His teaching is acceptable but the class structure needs a lot of revamping. Not easy material but there's a lot that he could do to structure it better and help us out more. In the last lecture he did admit this, though, and there will be some changes made in coming semesters. I think he said this is his first or second semester teaching it, so I've got to cut him some slack. Your TA will make or break the course, though.
Mamadou Wade ENEE245 Anonymous 05/01/2023	Wade strikes back from 244, now in 245. His class is disorganized and requires a disproportionate amount of homework for a 2-credit class. Lab assignments are riddled with mistakes and inconsistencies, displaying a clear lack of effort from the class administration.
Mamadou Wade ENEE245 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/04/2023	He does his job. Many students find 245 difficult regardless of the instructor, and I think that he's doing decently with preparing us for the labs. Your mileage may vary significantly depending on your lab TA.
Mamadou Wade ENEE245 Expecting a B- Anonymous 03/01/2023	Easily the worst class and professor I have ever had. There are no resources, nothing is graded on a timely manner, and the course material is so complicated to the point where its hard to even find resources on the internet for it. There is not an ounce of teaching Wade has done, and the labs are insanely tedious. If you don't have extensive experience with circuits or breadboards going into this class, you are in for a horrible semester
Manoj Franklin ENEE245 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/12/2022	This class just sucked in general. But it is mandatory for engineering so suck it up.
Jerry Wu ENEE245 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/27/2021	This was one of the most unnecessarily stressful classes I have ever taken, especially for a 2-credit lab. The professor definitely isn't a bad guy, but the way that the class was structured made it very stressful and painful for the students (and probably the TA's as well). Professor Wu was rather hard to understand during lectures (very muffled and hard to follow), and the lecture slides were not too helpful. They were littered with transitions parts that obscured content and contained a lot of information that we never used in the labs. In terms of the structure of the class, each week you would usually have a pre-lab and post-lab due. The pre-labs a lot of the time pretty much had you do the entire lab before coming into your lab section, and they tended to be time-consuming. We had one midterm (which pretty much counted as a final) worth 17% of our grade. With unclear instructions on how to prepare for it, the exam average ended up being 13/30. There was no curve for this exam, so many students' grades were put in jeopardy because of this exam. The professor tried to reduce the impact by dropping a pre-lab, lab, and quiz, but the effects were minimal. Our final project ended up being a mess due to the lab constantly being full because of the reliance of equipment in the lab. Overall, my experience taking this class was pretty bad. If I could describe this class in one word, it would be "chaotic."
Jerry Wu ENEE245 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/22/2021	Lectures were a hard to follow alone and in class. However, there were a decent amount of verilog examples related to the labs in the lecture. This lab course needs to be restructured. There's way too much going on! An absolute mess! Outside of this hell of a lab, Professor Wu is very caring and is concerned about his students. He ended up assigning a final project instead of doing a final exam. This was time consuming. I would've taken my chances with the final.
Jerry Wu ENEE245 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/19/2021	Easily the worst professor that I have had during college thus far. He understandably is very concerned about covid, but wears two masks during lectures and in addition to his thick accent is very hard to understand during lectures. The lectures are hard to follow his grammar isn't clear and the lectures themselves did not help me when completing the labs in the course at all. The only way I managed being able to get through the course was through help of the ECE departments tutor. He doesn't take time to answer students questions and often times skips over students questions when there are difficult concepts to understand. A lot of times assignments and expectations were unclear as well as the concepts being taught. The final exam was a mess the average for the exam was a 13/30 and he refused to curve the exam or final grades in any way. Additionally, instead of continuing with the format for this course that other professors have taken in the past of 12 labs he opted to have 10 labs and a final project in which the description for the final project was very confusing and unclear and the TAs had to constantly send out emails talking about how the requirements had changed. I spent two weeks straight working on the final project only to get a c on it skipping every class one week and calling out of work just to be able to complete this project only to be docked 27 points on formatting for the final lab report. Easily one of my least favorite professors of all time cannot reccomnd any less. If I could give 0 stars I would. Additionally these are struggles that a lot of other students faced as well.
Manoj Franklin ENEE245 Anonymous 05/26/2021	ENEE245 is not well-adapted to an online format in general, but Professor Franklin's lack of responsiveness makes it much more stressful. Extremely interesting content but the labs are way too long/confusing, especially as a 2-credit class. If you take Franklin for 245 then your TA will probably determine how you do. There was a severe lack of communication, with the most notable example being zero announcements about the date of the final exam except Franklin mentioning the date at the end of a single lecture two weeks beforehand.
Manoj Franklin ENEE245 Anonymous 05/21/2021	This class was a ton of work and he was pretty unhelpful sometimes. Still, most people did well and you'll be fine as long as you keep up with the work, go to office hours, talk to your TA, etc. There's an exam at the end which I'm pretty sure is just designed to lower everyone's grades by a letter.
Manoj Franklin ENEE245 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/25/2020	Dr. Franklin is just a really uncaring and messy professor. He cancelled lectures without notifying any of the students, he posted one practice exam from 2012 (which isn't helpful at all for the exam), and he's not good at using technology at all. Your grade in the class is also completely dependent on the TA you have.
Manoj Franklin ENEE245 Expecting an A- themachine 11/17/2019	It's a shame that this class is so poorly taught and managed, because it could be a really important, fundamental class for computer engineers. The lectures are just a review of some basic ENEE244 concepts, which is a complete waste of time. It is basically assumed that you come into the class with a foundation in Verilog, a very difficult language to pick up but a crucial one to learn for anyone interested in FPGAs. If lecture was changed to just teach Verilog and the lecture were actually informative and helpful (Franklin was not a good lecturer. He was vague and hard to understand), the class might have been one of my favorites.
Manoj Franklin ENEE245 Expecting an A+ jjjnmk 11/13/2015	To be honest, I didn't go to many lectures of 245, because I didn't think it was that necessary. The way that 245 is structured with Franklin, you can get away with just going over the slides and the prelab before your lab, because that's pretty much what Franklin does in lecture. That being said, the lectures that I did go to were pretty alright. I'm sure you've heard that he's got the most amazing handwriting in the department, which makes taking notes from him very nice. If you're thinking of taking him for 245, I'd say go for it. His labs are relatively straight forward.
William Hawkins ENEE245 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/08/2014	This is my First review for a teacher because I felt I had to warn other students about this professor. If you have the option do not take him.! His class WILL stress you out. Projects are almost impossible. All the other reviews are completely accurate in describing him. You will probably get an A because he gives out A's to anyone who tries but you will have a stressful time count on it
Manoj Franklin ENEE245 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/21/2013	Beautiful handwriting.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE245 Expecting an A LadyS 02/02/2013	The labs are difficult but doable (with help from your TA). Dr. Nakajima kept scaring students by telling them that they should drop/withdraw and that they may fail but grading was pretty lenient. I think he did that in order to motivate students to work harder. I believe that the only way to fail his class was to not show up for a lab and not do any work at all (but then you will fail a lab taught by any professor). He curves final grades but to get an A (or above) you need to work hard. I had no problem understanding his accent (which is pretty thick) but I am too not a native speaker of English myself:>
Manoj Franklin ENEE245 bigbabby 05/15/2012	This was his first semester teaching 245, and it shows. Lectures would consist of him basically reading the lab specification to us. About halfway into the semester, the labs go from telling you exactly what to do to telling you no information at all. The last lab was copied off of the internet, but only the useless information. The final was okay, not representative of the semester at all, but the TAs graded fairly leniently.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE245 Anonymous 05/11/2012	Easily the worst professor I've ever had. Organized the class so poorly and gave way too much work for a 2-credit class. He also enforced super-harsh grading and had absolutely zero leniency for minor mistakes. WARNING: Never write on the back of an exam page, he won't count it and won't even entertain the idea of giving a few points back. In general, I never went to lecture and learned the majority of the class material from Google (since almost every assignment is online somewhere). I was lucky enough to have an awesome TA who taught me everything I didn't pick up from Google. If it wasn't for Nakajima's super-harsh grading policies I would have almost 100% in this class, so it isn't hard material, he just makes it nearly impossible to do that well.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE245 Expecting an A+ 245Student 04/06/2012	When taking Nakajima's class, just keep this in mind, "Nakajima is a robot programmed to be your teacher". If you do not give him a valid input, he will not give you your desired output, no matter what you do. He has no feelings. If you are ever in his class, make sure you are very very very careful. He will not tolerate anything; like I said he has no feelings. He is like a "Segfault". Please do not be deceived; he laughs and smiles all the time in class, but deep down inside he is as cold as zero degrees Kelvin. All that smiling and laughing that he puts up is just a camouflage. About Lectures and Lab: His lectures are hard to understand due to the way he speaks, but if you can understand what he is saying, you will get so much out of it. For the lab, please make sure you start your prelab early as possible, so you can utilize your lab assistant's office hours. Make sure to ask Nakajima to post how to write lab reports before the first lab report. He waits after three lab reports to post that, and by that time most people have lost so many points because they did not know what he wants. For the first exam, make sure you know everything about the labs and memorize the "Testbench" format even though it is generated by the computer. Overall, Nakajima wants you to learn and make your parents proud from what I see. However his approach to doing this is hellish.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE245 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/27/2011	Dr. Nakajima actually impressed me as a professor. You won't find many professors around here as dedicated and organized as he is. The lab assignments can be tough, but he didn't make them and they should be the same regardless of the professor. He was pretty good about extending the due date for assignments that a lot of students didn't finish. The way it worked out is that for any given week, the lab assignment is usually about 90% of your grade, and the prelab was the other 10%. We had two quizzes throughout the course, which were 50-100 points each, but they weren't too bad. The course was worth ~1500 points total, so the impact of the quizzes was minimal. Prelabs generally entail a Verilog coding assignment where you design something that may be helpful for that weeks lab. They are usually not too bad, but there were a few towards the end of the course which were difficult. The lab each week was a 3 hour block which was usually just Verilog coding, simulation, and testing the design on an FPGA. If you know what you're doing, you might get out of lab early pretty often. The grading for this class was very lenient, and if you got your lab working, you usually received pretty close to 100% on your report. Lab reports are long and take a while, but they shouldn't be difficult if you got your design working. Lectures are once a week for 50 minutes, and he tries to cover the upcoming prelab or introduce a few ideas that you need to know for the lab. There was no final exam for our class, but he did mention the possibility of adding one for future semesters. Overall, I would take another class with this professor.