ENEE324 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Mark Shayman ENEE324 Expecting a D Anonymous 05/21/2024	Gives absolutely no partial credit and is discouraging when you seek help.
Mark Shayman ENEE324 Anonymous 05/19/2024	He mostly just sits in his chair and talks, while slowly dragging a mouse across a PDF document of slides that he borrowed from an MIT professor. This makes the lectures very monotonous and hard to follow. The homework assignments he gives out are incredibly long and time-consuming, often requiring hours of effort to complete. On top of that, his exams are extremely difficult, with questions that are much more challenging than the material covered in class. Many students struggled to keep up and find it hard to do well in his class. Overall, I would strongly recommend avoiding this professor if you can.
Mark Shayman ENEE324 Anonymous 05/12/2024	The lectures are reused from an open source MIT course. The textbook noted in the syllabus was not utilized, not even for homework. Also, homework was assigned weekly, it was time consuming, and you could automatically receive an F if your homework grade dropped below 50%. The exams were surprisingly difficult too, there’s little to no partial credit, and you need to prepare by practicing less time consuming problems that you’ve may have never seen before. The challenging part to this was getting through the homework load first and finding additional reference material. The final is worth 30%. I would recommend going to office hours for help.
Nuno Martins ENEE324 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/09/2024	Very professional. Lectures do overcomplicate things - I eventually stopped going to lecture and just went to TA office hours (which for some reason nobody went to) where he usually could explain everything taught that week in about 10 minutes. He seems to have made exams easier (first exam this semester there were 6 100%s and the avg was an 80, 2nd exam a few 100s and avg 70). The exams this semester were fair, although he did mark a question wrong that I got correct just because he didn't recognize my method. But since he actually hands back exams in class and asks you to check that the grading seems fair, I didn't mind.
Richard La ENEE324 Anonymous 12/20/2023	This professor is what they call a “gatekeeper”. He takes simple concepts and explains them in over complicated ways. You’ll have to work hard to even survive in his class… Many like the idea that he’s curves heavy, but this doesn’t mean he makes things easier... I recommend avoiding this professor at all cost.
Nuno Martins ENEE324 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/25/2023	Out of all of the 300-level ENEE courses, I suffered the most in this class. Part of that is due to the rigor of the topics covered in 324, but a large part is due to Martins. The one big positive I can share is that he is actually a pretty good lecturer. He is charismatic and funny while he presents, is rather organized with the topics he presents, and teaches at a good rate. His lectures, however, will not save you from the deteriorating experience throughout the semester. Homework assignments are ROUGH! Homework will take you the span of a few days, so definitely find people to work with; a number of questions were designed for Ph. D. electrical engineering students. He did implement a policy later in the semester where he would drop the lowest homework, which was nice but didn't address the difficulty of the homeworks. The worst parts of the course were the exams. There were two midterms and a final, the averages being 71%, 47%, and 56% respectively. Martins is the only grader for the exams, and he graded incredibly ruthlessly and REALLY slowly. The midterms consisted of 3 T/F questions on the front and 2-3 quantitative questions on the back. For some crazy reason, the professor decided to make each T/F question worth 10% of the exam grade; if you picked F and it was F, you had to provide a counter-example or else you would get half credit on the question. Again, he was really particular about the counter-examples, so it was more likely that you would get half credit than full credit. It doesn't help that the T/F questions were designed to trick you. On the back side, he would only grade based on the answers you wrote in the allocated answer boxes and wouldn't look at any supplemental work on the paper, so don't expect any partial credit on the exams. There was a slight curve but was less than I expected. While Martins is a relatively nice and fun guy, his research tended to conflict with the class. Exams would be graded longer and homework would be assigned later than he would promise; on the contrary, he was pretty lenient on extending homework deadlines when most students were struggling with them. Something else to fit in at the end of this review is that some of my friends had issues with the professor because he was not very understanding towards changing deadlines/giving makeup exams due to personal issues outside of class (family, illness, etc). Among the 324 professors, he may be one of the "better" ones, but this course will be rough no matter who you take it with.
Nuno Martins ENEE324 belowocean 03/13/2023	I think you can disregard a lot of the things that have been said in the past. His admits that his exam style during COVID was not good and already has changed it back to a standard exam format (problems, not MC). He explains concepts clearly and you can tell he cares about his students. He extends deadlines when students tell him that the homeworks are difficult because he wants you to be able to do them earnestly. He cracks jokes and teaches in a very reasonable pace (if not a bit slow sometimes).
Thomas Murphy ENEE324 Anonymous 05/24/2022	I agree with most of the other reviews. Dr. Murphy is a brilliant guy who is a wonderful lecturer. He made this course, which is notoriously challenging, very accessible. His transitions between topics during lecture are seamless, and he truly broke down concepts well. As others have said, his homework assignments occasionally featured questions that were not covered in lecture yet, making it difficult to complete. But, his exams are fair and he provides plenty of practice material (as well as other resources) to help students succeed in the course. I recommend students take Dr. Murphy if they truly want to learn this difficult course. You'll certainly have to work for a good grade, since he doesn't curve (to my knowledge), but it'll be worth it!
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE324 Anonymous 05/24/2022	This was Papamarcou's teaching 324 in a couple of years and it showed. However, the class was well structured and organized. He teaches the material well. If you have taken probability before, this class should be a breeze. He provides plenty examples in his lecture notes. Homework are extremely long and lecture alone are not enough to figure out what the homework asks for. The exams and practice exams were very similar, but he still threw curveballs. He is a harsh grader. Some problems on the exams, more points could have been given. The average on the exams were: around 75 for the first exam, around 66 for the second exam, and 63 for the final. He was alarmed to see how low the second average was, so he made the final best four out of five problems, which was nice. 60% was a passing grade and 85% was an A-. I would recommend this class with Papamarcou as he cares about his students. However, this class isn't as curved compared to other 324 professors. A 60% in other 324 course would be considered an A- or a B+ in some scenarios.
Mark Shayman ENEE324 Anonymous 05/27/2021	My biggest complaint with Dr. Shayman would be the homework/exam content. Lectures are mainly based off of concepts/definitions but the homework is generally tedious and barely covered by lecture. Discussion is essential to be able to even start some of the homework problems. Exams were not terrible but are similar to the homework with some question topics only being taught conceptually with little to no prior practice. To succeed you'll probably need to grind out problems similar to the ones on the homework.
Nuno Martins ENEE324 Expecting a P Anonymous 05/14/2021	First time reviewing a professor because the structure of this course and exam format is so bad that I had to say something. The format of the exams is covered in other reviews and I can confirm they are as bad as people said. Exams are worth 75% of your final grade, but about 60-70% of the exam is true or false problems that seem to be designed to trick you. That means that roughly 50% of your final grade is determined by 21 true or false questions that you may as well guess on. The actual problems are very different from what is taught in class and the homework assignments so it is hard to study for the exams as some of it is stuff that is vaguely related to what you've been doing, so doing practice problems from the book doesn't seem to help. He is a pretty decent professor, however, but he does not prepare you for what is on the exams. Since classes are going back to being in person the exam format will probably change so it could be better the following semesters. I would not recommend taking this course with Martins with his current course structure and exam format.
Nuno Martins ENEE324 Expecting a P Anonymous 05/11/2021	I took this class online and his grading criteria is a strange, to say the least. He mentions how it is based on what the class on average gets, so there are no hard traditional cutoffs like 70% being a C-. So the cutoffs can move up. The exams are unreasonable. There are 10 true/false and multiple choice problems worth 10 points each, and missing one problem means losing 2-2.5% of your entire grade, which is silly. There is no partial credit so it may as well be you just guessing an answer (which is pretty ironic for a class on probability). You don't know your grade throughout the semester, so even if you have an 85%, that doesn't really mean you have a B if the rest of the class was doing better than you. In terms of teaching, it is easy to follow what he teaches in the class. He is a decent lecturer. But what he asks on the exams is very different from what he teaches. Lectures are usually derivations of formulas but the exams require you to make a lot of assumptions to use those formulas, but those assumptions were not covered in the lecture. Problems during discussion sessions were examples from the textbook, so they don't do an adequate job of preparing you for what Martins is going to ask you on the exam. Only take this class with him if you have don't have a lot of workload so you can study a lot of probability material outside of class to do well.
Nuno Martins ENEE324 Anonymous 05/11/2021	It's the last day of classes, and we have just been told that grade cutoffs have still not been determined; not even a vague prediction was given. Since this is the last day to decide whether you want to drop or do p/f, this is a little problematic. At the very least, it would be good to have some expectation of the C- cutoff, but even that is too much. The way exams in this class go, I don't even have an idea of whether the final will end up with me getting an A or D. In short, this is the most uncertain grading system I've ever had to deal with, which has caused me some frustration. The only clue I have is that we're graded based on how the overall class does, but that's not enough to work with. Does the average performance in this class merit a B? A C? Who knows? I don't even know if the minimum for a C- might somehow end up being higher than a 70%. In my opinion, the concepts we are tested on are not always adequately explained in class. I understand that these concepts are difficult, but you'd expect midterms consisting of 10-11 multiple choice questions, 6-7 of which are true/false, to go fairly well. This was not my experience. Some questions certainly feel unfair in the topics they cover or the edge cases we need to consider for the true/false questions. This is already a difficult class to conceptualize, so this does not help matters. Ironically, luck is a significant factor on these exams. I'm not certain why Martins believes a large grade distribution is a good indicator of people's knowledge relative to each other when even he acknowledged that the benefit of all-or-nothing multiple choice questions is the ability to guess.
Prakash Narayan ENEE324 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/24/2020	ENEE324 with Professor Narayan was a wild ride. This was also during an online semester with open note tests. The difficulty for tests varied widely, from easy to hard to incredibly hard between our first midterm, second midterm, and final exam. However, his curve is very fair (I got rounded from a 77% to an A-. For reference, I performed a bit, but not considerably, better than the average overall). Professor Narayan has a very clear lecture style, though I would argue that it is slightly convoluted at times (some details are unnecessary to be constantly repeated, such as the fact that a probability must be positive, which is repeated every time a new equation is derived). I wish that the tests were restructured a bit, but I am overall just happy to get through this notoriously difficult class with an A-, and I greatly appreciate Narayan's ability to teach well and give difficult but instructive homework. I learned a lot, and that's all I can really ask for.
Nuno Martins ENEE324 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/15/2020	Very fair and reasonable professor. He extends deadlines if needed and pretty good at teaching the material. He is a little vague though on what is on exams sometimes until a few days before so you have to ask him. But if you end up taking him you will be fine. 324 is in general a hard class due to the concepts.
Sennur Ulukus ENEE324 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/28/2019	Most of the time her midterms/class content are straightforward and Dr. Ulukus is very approachable...even though her quizzes are all over the place.
Prakash Narayan ENEE324 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/19/2019	He is a good professor. He knows the material well. If you want to learn while getting a decent, then you should definitely take him.
Prakash Narayan ENEE324 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/21/2018	Good lecturer. ENEE324 Fall 2018. The highest grade for the final was a 53 percent. The average was about a 26 percent. Need I say more?
Anthony Ephremides ENEE324 Expecting a C- Anonymous 12/13/2018	Exams are terrible, thinks his way of doing things is the only right way. His notes are not sufficient enough to do well on the exams.
Armand Makowski ENEE324 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/26/2018	Here are the median grades for our tests this semester: Midterm 1: ~50% Midterm 2: ~25% Final: ~40% For overall grades, there was 1 A, 7 B's, 12 C's, and 6 D's. Spare yourself the trouble and avoid Makowski at all costs. He will tank your GPA, teach you little, and underhandedly insult the class when it inevitably does poorly. Test questions are typically either fairly easy or completely reliant on mathematical tricks that few people will get. Unfortunately, as should be clear from the grades, most questions are of the latter type, and he will not change that.
Mark Shayman ENEE324 soulelite 09/30/2016	Pretty good professor overall. Homeworks were very reasonable and he was very clear on what to expect on exams. Only downside is that his lectures will put you to sleep, although any professor teaching 324 might do the same.
Eyad Abed ENEE324 Anonymous 08/18/2015	Helpful professor who will do all he can to help you learn and succeed. Once me and another student met him in the hallway before an exam. We asked if he could give extra help but he was on the way to have a late lunch. So he invited us to join him, drove us to a restaurant, paid for our lunch, and helped us with problems and continued in his office after we got back. He is a good teacher and cares about his students. Highly recommended for undergrad courses in systems and probability (322, 324, 460,...)
Anthony Ephremides ENEE324 Anonymous 01/30/2015	Terrible professor. Does not know how to teach at all. Everyone does poorly on his exams. Avoid Ephremides at all costs.
Steven Marcus ENEE324 Expecting an A taqtaq 05/23/2014	He is by far the smartest, most helpful and interesting professor I've had at UMD. His exams are tough but fair. He has homework available online along with the solutions and the exams are based on material covered on homework. I took him for 322 and 324 and he was a wonderful teacher. Plenty of office hours, and his office hours are actually fun. Definitely take him.
Steven Marcus ENEE324 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/15/2014	Marcus is a very good professor that sets up the class for us to do well. He posts the homework and solutions at the same time so you get immediate feedback, which is nice because the homework problems would have been impossible without the solutions. But don't just blindly copy from the homework solutions, because you don't learn the material. He explains the material pretty well and VERY responsive to student feedback. He is one of the nicest and most dedicated professors when it comes to teaching. Exams aren't easy but aren't too terribly difficult if you work MIT sample exams. The grade distribution was scattered all over the place with averages in the 50's-60s. He tends to throw one or two problems from the homework or recitations. The exams are “doable” but sometimes they are long for the time given. I feel like they were hard to prepare for but just work a ton of problems to the point where you can approach a problem without really thinking how to do it. You really need to put in the time to do well. He is definitely one of the better professors in the ECE department, but you need to take advantage of the resources he provides/suggests to do well. Just don't make the mistake that just because he's very nice and responsive to student concerns means mean he will curve a lot; he doesn't
Armand Makowski ENEE324 Anonymous 12/13/2013	Makowski is a snooze fest. Yet for some reason this dude does not allow a single phone out otherwise you will be personally confronted about it. If you whisper at the beginning of the semester, he will never let you forget about it. So let's recap: he makes us sit with our eyes glued on him for an entire hour and way too many minutes while he's up there being boring. Then, he explains the information in a really complicated manner and throws in new variables that no one has ever seen before and no one actually needs to ever see, so we are more confused than ever. This is the one class I can say that not attending lectures may have actually helped on the exam, and my friends' exam grades proved this point. I will give him kudos for understanding this material probably better than he knows his wife and children. He just thinks about what he wants to talk about and the material appears for him, it's pretty amazing. He unfortunately expects that out of his students. He also expects us to read the chapters before going to class. My recommendation: don't go to class. I am glad that by attending class I learned that my 13 years of Hebrew School taught me nothing because I had no idea how to say zero in Hebrew. My temple really failed me on that, just to add on to the failure I already feel every day thinking about this class. If you somehow find yourself with him as a Professor, he claims to not curve the class. You do get one formula sheet on the exams, but they won't help. Talking to him may help if you think you will fail, but do not expect an A unless you are one of those naturally gifted types.
Armand Makowski ENEE324 Expecting a C- Anonymous 12/11/2013	I have used ourumd.com for many years, as a lurker, mostly. I have never felt the need to review professors, because most of them at UMD are not noteworthy, in my opinion (not to say there aren't GOOD professors, just none that motivated me to write a review). Until I had Makowski. You see, even the shitty teachers are tolerable. Kruskal made algorithms the biggest pain-in-the-ass topic I'd ever taken before, but I got a B. Why? The class was still tolerable and DO-ABLE. But the same cannot be said of Makowski; he is on an entirely different level of shitty. A level of shitty that is politely cruel, convoluted, and irrelevant. The worst part about all of these things is that you don't realize this during the class. For most of the class, it just seems like you're not studying hard enough. It just seems like the hours of reading and rereading the book and meticulously going through every homework step-by-step, isn't enough. You've been studying for hours a day every day for seven days and you walk into that exam and it's as if you didn't study ONE MINUTE. IT'S AS IF YOU DIDN'T EVEN STUDY FOR THE RIGHT CLASS. The level of math required for Makowski's exams goes beyond the prerequisite calc 2 level of math necessary for ENEE324. This is saddening to me, because I went the entire semester thinking I didn't study enough or didn't try hard enough, when the truth was that I didn't have the prerequisite bachelor's degree in math necessary for probability with Makowski. Probability with Makowski was a time in my life where I questioned the following things: - my major - my intelligence - my happiness - my ability to do anything If you have a minor in math or are double majoring in math, then this class should be a fun exercise of your skills. Otherwise, stay clear of Makowski if you value your sanity, happiness, and GPA. On the bright-side, he's a very nice guy, and genuinely enthusiastic about probability. This is actually refreshing, but significantly overshadowed by all the negative shit. This class is the reason I started going to the counseling center on a weekly basis.
Anthony Ephremides ENEE324 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/26/2012	Terrible teacher. Lectures are boring and does a poor job of explaining the material. Tests are straightforward but since he does a poor job explaining, it will be quite hard if you only go by his notes. Homework did not count as part of the grade so all your grade are from his exams. He doesn't seem to curve a lot even though a lot of the class does poorly on his exams so don't take his class if you're aiming for an A. Overall, he seems to teach with the sole purpose of lowering your GPA so I highly recommend choosing another professor.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE324 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/21/2012	Great professor. Had him for both 324 and 241. He can be a bit verbose (tends to speak like a textbook) but always precise, which can be very useful for simpler topics but confusing for more complex ones. He has a very fair grading scheme based on point values, which is nice since you know what you need to get going into the final. He is a very organized teacher, and studying for this class is not difficult due to his lecture notes and provided solutions. The only downside: if you don't understand how to do certain problems, his solutions can be hard to understand since he skips many steps, so they cannot be relied upon exclusively. Overall, highly recommended as long as you are able to keep up with material as he presents it in class. I wish I had looked at notes for lectures beforehand, as that would have helped immensely.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE324 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/08/2010	i had papamarcou for 241 and 324.. while he is a good enough teacher, and i think that he genuinely cares about students and how they do, i really really REALLY hate the subject matter for both 241 and 324. not papamarcou's fault, but maybe it biases my review a little. papamarcou teaches like he is reading a book so it takes a good bit to get used to the way he describes things. ive done a lot better in 324 than i did in 241 i think because of that. either way, i think he is a little overrated. he might be better than the alternative, but he is a very very difficult professor. the workload that he gives you is a little unreasonable i think, but i suppose that his grading scheme accounts for that a little.
Ramalingam Chellappa ENEE324 Expecting a B sithcon 12/17/2009	This guy is serious. My gripe with him is that he is not a great teacher, but aside from that, his workload and exams will test the thoroughness of your understanding of the material and really make you push your limits. I got a B because I didn't really do too much for the class, but to get an A you need to be exemplary. It's good, imo, it forces you to become a more analytical thinker and challenges you to rise above your comfort zone. BS'ing homeworks and studying the day before the exam is not going to fly here. I would, honestly, highly recommend this professor, but BE READY FOR SOME WORK!!!
Ramalingam Chellappa ENEE324 Anonymous 03/01/2009	This is just a horrible teacher but not a bad guy deal. He rushes through the material, never really takes any questions, and doesn't ever really involve the class. It's basically him just rushing through his lecture, in which he asks questions and answers them himself (though the questions really shouldn't be rhetorical). One blessing is that he lets you drop your lowest test grade, and the TAs are really helpful. He also lets you use a cheat sheet on the exam, but this is pretty worthless because every probability problem is different, and unless you get lucky enough to put an exact problem on your sheet that shows up on the exam, it won't help you at all. I thought the book was reasonably good for this class too, but it only helps so much. From things I've heard from other students in previous semesters, though, our problems were a lot harder than theirs. In brutal honesty, this is a class where you are going to either have to be born with the skill of probability or just do a shit ton of problems (over and above the homework) if you want an A. It's not a bad class, but the professor could definitely do more to involve students.

Mark Shayman
ENEE324

Expecting a D
Anonymous
05/21/2024

Gives absolutely no partial credit and is discouraging when you seek help.

Mark Shayman
ENEE324

Anonymous
05/19/2024

He mostly just sits in his chair and talks, while slowly dragging a mouse across a PDF document of slides that he borrowed from an MIT professor. This makes the lectures very monotonous and hard to follow. The homework assignments he gives out are incredibly long and time-consuming, often requiring hours of effort to complete. On top of that, his exams are extremely difficult, with questions that are much more challenging than the material covered in class. Many students struggled to keep up and find it hard to do well in his class. Overall, I would strongly recommend avoiding this professor if you can.

Mark Shayman
ENEE324

Anonymous
05/12/2024

The lectures are reused from an open source MIT course. The textbook noted in the syllabus was not utilized, not even for homework. Also, homework was assigned weekly, it was time consuming, and you could automatically receive an F if your homework grade dropped below 50%. The exams were surprisingly difficult too, there’s little to no partial credit, and you need to prepare by practicing less time consuming problems that you’ve may have never seen before. The challenging part to this was getting through the homework load first and finding additional reference material. The final is worth 30%. I would recommend going to office hours for help.

Nuno Martins
ENEE324

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/09/2024

Very professional. Lectures do overcomplicate things - I eventually stopped going to lecture and just went to TA office hours (which for some reason nobody went to) where he usually could explain everything taught that week in about 10 minutes. He seems to have made exams easier (first exam this semester there were 6 100%s and the avg was an 80, 2nd exam a few 100s and avg 70). The exams this semester were fair, although he did mark a question wrong that I got correct just because he didn't recognize my method. But since he actually hands back exams in class and asks you to check that the grading seems fair, I didn't mind.

Richard La
ENEE324

Anonymous
12/20/2023

This professor is what they call a “gatekeeper”. He takes simple concepts and explains them in over complicated ways. You’ll have to work hard to even survive in his class… Many like the idea that he’s curves heavy, but this doesn’t mean he makes things easier... I recommend avoiding this professor at all cost.

Nuno Martins
ENEE324

Expecting a B
Anonymous
05/25/2023

Out of all of the 300-level ENEE courses, I suffered the most in this class. Part of that is due to the rigor of the topics covered in 324, but a large part is due to Martins. The one big positive I can share is that he is actually a pretty good lecturer. He is charismatic and funny while he presents, is rather organized with the topics he presents, and teaches at a good rate. His lectures, however, will not save you from the deteriorating experience throughout the semester. Homework assignments are ROUGH! Homework will take you the span of a few days, so definitely find people to work with; a number of questions were designed for Ph. D. electrical engineering students. He did implement a policy later in the semester where he would drop the lowest homework, which was nice but didn't address the difficulty of the homeworks. The worst parts of the course were the exams. There were two midterms and a final, the averages being 71%, 47%, and 56% respectively. Martins is the only grader for the exams, and he graded incredibly ruthlessly and REALLY slowly. The midterms consisted of 3 T/F questions on the front and 2-3 quantitative questions on the back. For some crazy reason, the professor decided to make each T/F question worth 10% of the exam grade; if you picked F and it was F, you had to provide a counter-example or else you would get half credit on the question. Again, he was really particular about the counter-examples, so it was more likely that you would get half credit than full credit. It doesn't help that the T/F questions were designed to trick you. On the back side, he would only grade based on the answers you wrote in the allocated answer boxes and wouldn't look at any supplemental work on the paper, so don't expect any partial credit on the exams. There was a slight curve but was less than I expected. While Martins is a relatively nice and fun guy, his research tended to conflict with the class. Exams would be graded longer and homework would be assigned later than he would promise; on the contrary, he was pretty lenient on extending homework deadlines when most students were struggling with them. Something else to fit in at the end of this review is that some of my friends had issues with the professor because he was not very understanding towards changing deadlines/giving makeup exams due to personal issues outside of class (family, illness, etc). Among the 324 professors, he may be one of the "better" ones, but this course will be rough no matter who you take it with.

Nuno Martins
ENEE324

belowocean
03/13/2023

I think you can disregard a lot of the things that have been said in the past. His admits that his exam style during COVID was not good and already has changed it back to a standard exam format (problems, not MC). He explains concepts clearly and you can tell he cares about his students. He extends deadlines when students tell him that the homeworks are difficult because he wants you to be able to do them earnestly. He cracks jokes and teaches in a very reasonable pace (if not a bit slow sometimes).

Thomas Murphy
ENEE324

Anonymous
05/24/2022

I agree with most of the other reviews. Dr. Murphy is a brilliant guy who is a wonderful lecturer. He made this course, which is notoriously challenging, very accessible. His transitions between topics during lecture are seamless, and he truly broke down concepts well. As others have said, his homework assignments occasionally featured questions that were not covered in lecture yet, making it difficult to complete. But, his exams are fair and he provides plenty of practice material (as well as other resources) to help students succeed in the course. I recommend students take Dr. Murphy if they truly want to learn this difficult course. You'll certainly have to work for a good grade, since he doesn't curve (to my knowledge), but it'll be worth it!

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE324

Anonymous
05/24/2022

This was Papamarcou's teaching 324 in a couple of years and it showed. However, the class was well structured and organized. He teaches the material well. If you have taken probability before, this class should be a breeze. He provides plenty examples in his lecture notes. Homework are extremely long and lecture alone are not enough to figure out what the homework asks for. The exams and practice exams were very similar, but he still threw curveballs. He is a harsh grader. Some problems on the exams, more points could have been given. The average on the exams were: around 75 for the first exam, around 66 for the second exam, and 63 for the final. He was alarmed to see how low the second average was, so he made the final best four out of five problems, which was nice. 60% was a passing grade and 85% was an A-. I would recommend this class with Papamarcou as he cares about his students. However, this class isn't as curved compared to other 324 professors. A 60% in other 324 course would be considered an A- or a B+ in some scenarios.

Mark Shayman
ENEE324

Anonymous
05/27/2021

My biggest complaint with Dr. Shayman would be the homework/exam content. Lectures are mainly based off of concepts/definitions but the homework is generally tedious and barely covered by lecture. Discussion is essential to be able to even start some of the homework problems. Exams were not terrible but are similar to the homework with some question topics only being taught conceptually with little to no prior practice. To succeed you'll probably need to grind out problems similar to the ones on the homework.

Nuno Martins
ENEE324

Expecting a P
Anonymous
05/14/2021

First time reviewing a professor because the structure of this course and exam format is so bad that I had to say something. The format of the exams is covered in other reviews and I can confirm they are as bad as people said. Exams are worth 75% of your final grade, but about 60-70% of the exam is true or false problems that seem to be designed to trick you. That means that roughly 50% of your final grade is determined by 21 true or false questions that you may as well guess on. The actual problems are very different from what is taught in class and the homework assignments so it is hard to study for the exams as some of it is stuff that is vaguely related to what you've been doing, so doing practice problems from the book doesn't seem to help. He is a pretty decent professor, however, but he does not prepare you for what is on the exams. Since classes are going back to being in person the exam format will probably change so it could be better the following semesters. I would not recommend taking this course with Martins with his current course structure and exam format.

Nuno Martins
ENEE324

Expecting a P
Anonymous
05/11/2021

I took this class online and his grading criteria is a strange, to say the least. He mentions how it is based on what the class on average gets, so there are no hard traditional cutoffs like 70% being a C-. So the cutoffs can move up. The exams are unreasonable. There are 10 true/false and multiple choice problems worth 10 points each, and missing one problem means losing 2-2.5% of your entire grade, which is silly. There is no partial credit so it may as well be you just guessing an answer (which is pretty ironic for a class on probability). You don't know your grade throughout the semester, so even if you have an 85%, that doesn't really mean you have a B if the rest of the class was doing better than you. In terms of teaching, it is easy to follow what he teaches in the class. He is a decent lecturer. But what he asks on the exams is very different from what he teaches. Lectures are usually derivations of formulas but the exams require you to make a lot of assumptions to use those formulas, but those assumptions were not covered in the lecture. Problems during discussion sessions were examples from the textbook, so they don't do an adequate job of preparing you for what Martins is going to ask you on the exam. Only take this class with him if you have don't have a lot of workload so you can study a lot of probability material outside of class to do well.

Nuno Martins
ENEE324

Anonymous
05/11/2021

It's the last day of classes, and we have just been told that grade cutoffs have still not been determined; not even a vague prediction was given. Since this is the last day to decide whether you want to drop or do p/f, this is a little problematic. At the very least, it would be good to have some expectation of the C- cutoff, but even that is too much. The way exams in this class go, I don't even have an idea of whether the final will end up with me getting an A or D. In short, this is the most uncertain grading system I've ever had to deal with, which has caused me some frustration. The only clue I have is that we're graded based on how the overall class does, but that's not enough to work with. Does the average performance in this class merit a B? A C? Who knows? I don't even know if the minimum for a C- might somehow end up being higher than a 70%. In my opinion, the concepts we are tested on are not always adequately explained in class. I understand that these concepts are difficult, but you'd expect midterms consisting of 10-11 multiple choice questions, 6-7 of which are true/false, to go fairly well. This was not my experience. Some questions certainly feel unfair in the topics they cover or the edge cases we need to consider for the true/false questions. This is already a difficult class to conceptualize, so this does not help matters. Ironically, luck is a significant factor on these exams. I'm not certain why Martins believes a large grade distribution is a good indicator of people's knowledge relative to each other when even he acknowledged that the benefit of all-or-nothing multiple choice questions is the ability to guess.

Prakash Narayan
ENEE324

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
12/24/2020

ENEE324 with Professor Narayan was a wild ride. This was also during an online semester with open note tests. The difficulty for tests varied widely, from easy to hard to incredibly hard between our first midterm, second midterm, and final exam. However, his curve is very fair (I got rounded from a 77% to an A-. For reference, I performed a bit, but not considerably, better than the average overall). Professor Narayan has a very clear lecture style, though I would argue that it is slightly convoluted at times (some details are unnecessary to be constantly repeated, such as the fact that a probability must be positive, which is repeated every time a new equation is derived). I wish that the tests were restructured a bit, but I am overall just happy to get through this notoriously difficult class with an A-, and I greatly appreciate Narayan's ability to teach well and give difficult but instructive homework. I learned a lot, and that's all I can really ask for.

Nuno Martins
ENEE324

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
05/15/2020

Very fair and reasonable professor. He extends deadlines if needed and pretty good at teaching the material. He is a little vague though on what is on exams sometimes until a few days before so you have to ask him. But if you end up taking him you will be fine. 324 is in general a hard class due to the concepts.

Sennur Ulukus
ENEE324

Expecting a B-
Anonymous
05/28/2019

Most of the time her midterms/class content are straightforward and Dr. Ulukus is very approachable...even though her quizzes are all over the place.

Prakash Narayan
ENEE324

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
05/19/2019

He is a good professor. He knows the material well. If you want to learn while getting a decent, then you should definitely take him.

Prakash Narayan
ENEE324

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/21/2018

Good lecturer. ENEE324 Fall 2018. The highest grade for the final was a 53 percent. The average was about a 26 percent. Need I say more?

Anthony Ephremides
ENEE324

Expecting a C-
Anonymous
12/13/2018

Exams are terrible, thinks his way of doing things is the only right way. His notes are not sufficient enough to do well on the exams.

Armand Makowski
ENEE324

Expecting a B
Anonymous
05/26/2018

Here are the median grades for our tests this semester: Midterm 1: ~50% Midterm 2: ~25% Final: ~40% For overall grades, there was 1 A, 7 B's, 12 C's, and 6 D's. Spare yourself the trouble and avoid Makowski at all costs. He will tank your GPA, teach you little, and underhandedly insult the class when it inevitably does poorly. Test questions are typically either fairly easy or completely reliant on mathematical tricks that few people will get. Unfortunately, as should be clear from the grades, most questions are of the latter type, and he will not change that.

Mark Shayman
ENEE324

soulelite
09/30/2016

Pretty good professor overall. Homeworks were very reasonable and he was very clear on what to expect on exams. Only downside is that his lectures will put you to sleep, although any professor teaching 324 might do the same.

Eyad Abed
ENEE324

Anonymous
08/18/2015

Helpful professor who will do all he can to help you learn and succeed. Once me and another student met him in the hallway before an exam. We asked if he could give extra help but he was on the way to have a late lunch. So he invited us to join him, drove us to a restaurant, paid for our lunch, and helped us with problems and continued in his office after we got back. He is a good teacher and cares about his students. Highly recommended for undergrad courses in systems and probability (322, 324, 460,...)

Anthony Ephremides
ENEE324

Anonymous
01/30/2015

Terrible professor. Does not know how to teach at all. Everyone does poorly on his exams. Avoid Ephremides at all costs.

Steven Marcus
ENEE324

Expecting an A
taqtaq
05/23/2014

He is by far the smartest, most helpful and interesting professor I've had at UMD. His exams are tough but fair. He has homework available online along with the solutions and the exams are based on material covered on homework. I took him for 322 and 324 and he was a wonderful teacher. Plenty of office hours, and his office hours are actually fun. Definitely take him.

Steven Marcus
ENEE324

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
05/15/2014

Marcus is a very good professor that sets up the class for us to do well. He posts the homework and solutions at the same time so you get immediate feedback, which is nice because the homework problems would have been impossible without the solutions. But don't just blindly copy from the homework solutions, because you don't learn the material. He explains the material pretty well and VERY responsive to student feedback. He is one of the nicest and most dedicated professors when it comes to teaching. Exams aren't easy but aren't too terribly difficult if you work MIT sample exams. The grade distribution was scattered all over the place with averages in the 50's-60s. He tends to throw one or two problems from the homework or recitations. The exams are “doable” but sometimes they are long for the time given. I feel like they were hard to prepare for but just work a ton of problems to the point where you can approach a problem without really thinking how to do it. You really need to put in the time to do well. He is definitely one of the better professors in the ECE department, but you need to take advantage of the resources he provides/suggests to do well. Just don't make the mistake that just because he's very nice and responsive to student concerns means mean he will curve a lot; he doesn't

Armand Makowski
ENEE324

Anonymous
12/13/2013

Makowski is a snooze fest. Yet for some reason this dude does not allow a single phone out otherwise you will be personally confronted about it. If you whisper at the beginning of the semester, he will never let you forget about it. So let's recap: he makes us sit with our eyes glued on him for an entire hour and way too many minutes while he's up there being boring. Then, he explains the information in a really complicated manner and throws in new variables that no one has ever seen before and no one actually needs to ever see, so we are more confused than ever. This is the one class I can say that not attending lectures may have actually helped on the exam, and my friends' exam grades proved this point. I will give him kudos for understanding this material probably better than he knows his wife and children. He just thinks about what he wants to talk about and the material appears for him, it's pretty amazing. He unfortunately expects that out of his students. He also expects us to read the chapters before going to class. My recommendation: don't go to class. I am glad that by attending class I learned that my 13 years of Hebrew School taught me nothing because I had no idea how to say zero in Hebrew. My temple really failed me on that, just to add on to the failure I already feel every day thinking about this class. If you somehow find yourself with him as a Professor, he claims to not curve the class. You do get one formula sheet on the exams, but they won't help. Talking to him may help if you think you will fail, but do not expect an A unless you are one of those naturally gifted types.

Armand Makowski
ENEE324

Expecting a C-
Anonymous
12/11/2013

I have used ourumd.com for many years, as a lurker, mostly. I have never felt the need to review professors, because most of them at UMD are not noteworthy, in my opinion (not to say there aren't GOOD professors, just none that motivated me to write a review). Until I had Makowski. You see, even the shitty teachers are tolerable. Kruskal made algorithms the biggest pain-in-the-ass topic I'd ever taken before, but I got a B. Why? The class was still tolerable and DO-ABLE. But the same cannot be said of Makowski; he is on an entirely different level of shitty. A level of shitty that is politely cruel, convoluted, and irrelevant. The worst part about all of these things is that you don't realize this during the class. For most of the class, it just seems like you're not studying hard enough. It just seems like the hours of reading and rereading the book and meticulously going through every homework step-by-step, isn't enough. You've been studying for hours a day every day for seven days and you walk into that exam and it's as if you didn't study ONE MINUTE. IT'S AS IF YOU DIDN'T EVEN STUDY FOR THE RIGHT CLASS. The level of math required for Makowski's exams goes beyond the prerequisite calc 2 level of math necessary for ENEE324. This is saddening to me, because I went the entire semester thinking I didn't study enough or didn't try hard enough, when the truth was that I didn't have the prerequisite bachelor's degree in math necessary for probability with Makowski. Probability with Makowski was a time in my life where I questioned the following things: - my major - my intelligence - my happiness - my ability to do anything If you have a minor in math or are double majoring in math, then this class should be a fun exercise of your skills. Otherwise, stay clear of Makowski if you value your sanity, happiness, and GPA. On the bright-side, he's a very nice guy, and genuinely enthusiastic about probability. This is actually refreshing, but significantly overshadowed by all the negative shit. This class is the reason I started going to the counseling center on a weekly basis.

Anthony Ephremides
ENEE324

Expecting a B
Anonymous
12/26/2012

Terrible teacher. Lectures are boring and does a poor job of explaining the material. Tests are straightforward but since he does a poor job explaining, it will be quite hard if you only go by his notes. Homework did not count as part of the grade so all your grade are from his exams. He doesn't seem to curve a lot even though a lot of the class does poorly on his exams so don't take his class if you're aiming for an A. Overall, he seems to teach with the sole purpose of lowering your GPA so I highly recommend choosing another professor.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE324

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/21/2012

Great professor. Had him for both 324 and 241. He can be a bit verbose (tends to speak like a textbook) but always precise, which can be very useful for simpler topics but confusing for more complex ones. He has a very fair grading scheme based on point values, which is nice since you know what you need to get going into the final. He is a very organized teacher, and studying for this class is not difficult due to his lecture notes and provided solutions. The only downside: if you don't understand how to do certain problems, his solutions can be hard to understand since he skips many steps, so they cannot be relied upon exclusively. Overall, highly recommended as long as you are able to keep up with material as he presents it in class. I wish I had looked at notes for lectures beforehand, as that would have helped immensely.

Adrianos Papamarcou
ENEE324

Expecting an A
Anonymous
04/08/2010

i had papamarcou for 241 and 324.. while he is a good enough teacher, and i think that he genuinely cares about students and how they do, i really really REALLY hate the subject matter for both 241 and 324. not papamarcou's fault, but maybe it biases my review a little. papamarcou teaches like he is reading a book so it takes a good bit to get used to the way he describes things. ive done a lot better in 324 than i did in 241 i think because of that. either way, i think he is a little overrated. he might be better than the alternative, but he is a very very difficult professor. the workload that he gives you is a little unreasonable i think, but i suppose that his grading scheme accounts for that a little.

Ramalingam Chellappa
ENEE324

Expecting a B
sithcon
12/17/2009

This guy is serious. My gripe with him is that he is not a great teacher, but aside from that, his workload and exams will test the thoroughness of your understanding of the material and really make you push your limits. I got a B because I didn't really do too much for the class, but to get an A you need to be exemplary. It's good, imo, it forces you to become a more analytical thinker and challenges you to rise above your comfort zone. BS'ing homeworks and studying the day before the exam is not going to fly here. I would, honestly, highly recommend this professor, but BE READY FOR SOME WORK!!!

Ramalingam Chellappa
ENEE324

Anonymous
03/01/2009

This is just a horrible teacher but not a bad guy deal. He rushes through the material, never really takes any questions, and doesn't ever really involve the class. It's basically him just rushing through his lecture, in which he asks questions and answers them himself (though the questions really shouldn't be rhetorical). One blessing is that he lets you drop your lowest test grade, and the TAs are really helpful. He also lets you use a cheat sheet on the exam, but this is pretty worthless because every probability problem is different, and unless you get lucky enough to put an exact problem on your sheet that shows up on the exam, it won't help you at all. I thought the book was reasonably good for this class too, but it only helps so much. From things I've heard from other students in previous semesters, though, our problems were a lot harder than theirs. In brutal honesty, this is a class where you are going to either have to be born with the skill of probability or just do a shit ton of problems (over and above the homework) if you want an A. It's not a bad class, but the professor could definitely do more to involve students.

Reviews for ENEE324