Reviews for ENME371

Information Review
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
06/02/2025
Okay. There is a lot to unpack for this class, and I will not go over it all since the previous reviews explain it quite well, but I will go over some. Firstly, I want to give Vince some credit. He gives a lot of easy extra credit opportunities and I want to say was actually quite fair with his grading IF REFLECTING THE PURPOSE OF THIS CLASS (he was my lab instructor so he graded my reports). This class is a necessary evil since knowing how to write reports is important, even if very annoying, in real jobs. Real jobs don't tell you all they are looking for because the purpose of a design report is to give as much impressive and full-coverage information as possible without them feeling like something is missing. The issue is more with the structure of the class with how we need to do seven reports which each take a crazy long time. Most of them have to do with different aspects of power drills, so we are really just getting practice on writing reports but through the lens of different technical knowledge we need to know, which is graded on accuracy. So, that is where the purpose of the class becomes too much since we need to write a full-coverage report (not as easy as just putting down easy information) and knowing what to look for technically. If it were one or the other that would be fine, but not all in one class, or not with seven reports total. Keep in mind, I almost spent more time doing work for this class than the rest combined. So, if they just had like five reports instead that would be great, or give us the websites we should focus on for the information and determine what is relevant to include in reports. It is the fact that Vince expects us to do all of this and know all of the information for the sake of the reports that I'm not giving five stars, but four stars fit since he is just going with the structure of the class, is clearly knowledgeable, has extra credit opportunities, and is genuinely willing to help. Although, these may not be everybody's opinions.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/29/2025
Vincent talks a lot during lecture but it's kinda all just blurb. I didn't have him for lab but the other reviews suggest to switch out of his section if you have him. The class did have clickers (which you have to pay for) so attendance is mandatory (10% of the grade). Lectures are BORING so it really was a struggle to get the attendance grade. Some of the material in lecture though was important to the labs. Especially the power, thermal, and DSM labs. The majority of the class is 7 group projects (you get assigned a group from your lab section for all the semester) with the 7th being a product redesign of your team's choice. The large issue I had with this class is that if your team members don't care for the grade, then you will do bad in the reports. It's impossible for just one member to carry since it's a lot of work. Some reports were up to 100 slides. So it's really a test of how well your team wants to do well. Another difficulty in the class is that the report guides are vague by design, since there probably won't be a detailed report guide in the real work place. And that's kinda the point of the class, to throw you in a real world work setting where you have to do some kind of engineering product testing with a "random" group of people and all come together to do well. We were also only given 2 days to implement feedback for our final product redesign which would make or break the report grade being either an A or a C. My lab section instructor, Eric, was nice and gave help when asked but graded kinda harshly. If you felt you checked all the boxes on the report guide but didn't do much else, then you'd probably get around a B. You have to put in a lot of work to get an A, like making sure you apply what was reviewed in lecture, thinking of every possible thing to cover, and including it in the report is a lot for an individual and hard to coordinate within a group of 6.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/04/2025
Let me start by saying I am judging Dr. Vince's rating more on his ability as a professor rather than just the structure of the class, which I think needs to be massively overhauled if not fully changed, but that will come later. Dr. Vince is a professor that believes in the success of all his students. You can tell during lecture that he really cares about this class and puts a lot of effort into trying to make this class meaningful to everyone. Don't worry if you are doing subpar on the lab reports as there will be many opportunities to earn back points for the class. Unfortunately, this is about where the positives end. First off, although I was not in his section for labs, I have heard that he is a very harsh grader and for the whole class in general I think he expects way too much. This does not feel like a 3 credit class and I truly believe that a non-negligible percent of people will spend more time in this class alone than they will every other class they are taking that semester COMBINED. Though I believe he is simply a symptom of the class's problems, he certainly does not help in that department. Moving on to the course structure, this class has BY FAR the most torturous structure out of any class I have taken. In-person lectures are mandatory on top of the annoying homework questions on gradescope and the extremely long lab reports. On top of that, they use clickers which require you to pay $27 FOR A SINGLE SEMESTER'S USE. For us that was $10.80 PER PERCENT OF YOUR GRADE FOR CLICKERS. Lectures do sometimes have some topics that people gloss over too much and should actually learn, but the lectures are so boring it is more productive to do work on other things than it is trying to fully listen to what he is saying as you will not remember most of it at the end of the day. As for labs, I really think the majority of them were genuinely useless. There were so many issues I can point out with each lab but that would take entire essays to write about. Also why are we dipping a running thermistor into hot water for one of the labs??? There is no way that isn't full on DANGEROUS? To DeWalt, the company sponsoring this class, what was the thought process behind making a class like this? First of all, I don't think creating a class of suffering will make anyone in particular want to join the company. And second, we were made to sign NDAs because a lot of your parts designs are confidential, in which you are trusting random COLLEGE STUDENTS to handle. There is bound to be some guy who just completely disregards this NDA and your company would have a lot of trouble on their hands and on top of that suing said person wouldn't even matter when the average college student has a net worth in the NEGATIVES. Keep that in mind the next time you are looking back at this class. Shout out to my instructor Alex for putting in a lot of effort to help us though. He is a good instructor (at least for our group, some groups had more mixed thoughts on him but they mostly lean on the positive side) and he gave our section notes that he wrote up to help everyone understand the lab better and what to do, which was genuinely very helpful a lot of the time. Although it is practically impossible to fail this class, for me the biggest thing I would change about this class is what the topics are actually on. I thought up of an idea that if I want this class to be something else, I would much rather this be a CAD2 class of some sorts. Although me and I think most others have experience with CAD and 3D printing, they never technically taught us anything about 3D printing and ENME272 to me was too simple of a class. It would also be great if they focused more on finite element analysis (I know that is already a class, but I think most Mechanical Engineers should learn this content) and applying it to the physical world, which everyone I have talked to about this idea say they would much rather have had this over what we have now. And the best part is you can definitely apply the majority of important concepts in this class to a class like what I mentioned above. This is definitely a fever dream but it is definitely something I wished future students would have.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/22/2024
Was going to write all the problems, but it's not really worth the time. Problems with the class: Bad groupmates aren't held accountable if your group doesn't fully agree on what to do. If you're the only doing work, you're out of luck. Cheating is crazy. The PDP questions and lab reports do not change between semester, so lots of cheating happens (unfortunate). This means if you don't get high grades on these, the section curve won't help much. The workload is too high for a 3 credit course. Especially if you're in Dr. Nguyen's section. He expects way more than other instructors. This means grading between instructors isn't close to the same (inequity). Plenty of more complaints, but again, waste of time. ADVICE!!!!!!!!!!! 1. Switch out of Dr. Nguyen's section if you get him (you can't know until you see the instructor for each lab section on the canvas page) MECHE gospel atp 2. Make a good team contract that discusses how you will split contribution grades 3. Make your availability at the same time as your friends (at like 3AM for one hour). This is how he assigns groups, so if you want to dodge bad groupmates, this is a good shot.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Anonymous
10/16/2024
He says a lot of words but means nothing at all. He just talks to fill blank space.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Anonymous
08/22/2024
Pros: You learn how to work as a team and Vince loves to give help. Really hard to fail ENME371 Cons: Vince is a really harsh grader. (His definition of a perfect assignment is 90% and to earn more points you need to go beyond his expectations) The time spent in this class. (10-25 hours per week)
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/27/2023
The thing about this class is it's really hard to get an A or A+ but it's also really hard to get a C and literally no one fails. If you want in A you're going to have to put in a frankly ridiculous amount of work. I'd regularly put in 25-30 hours on top of lecture and lab time on each lab assignment. Honestly you're probably better off putting in less work and just being happy with a B and focusing on your other classes. I pulled way to many all-nighters for this stupid class. Not worth it. Also do anything you can to avoid having him as your section teacher, he grades super super harshly compared to the others. I don't think we had a single assignment where the lowest grade in the entire class wasn't someone in our section.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
05/22/2023
This class should be at least a 4 or 5 credits class in terms of the course load. Even though Dr. Vince is a very knowledgeable guy, he does not know what kind of pain students are going through while taking his class. He will assign as many reports as possible so that you will have to at least dedicate 8-10 hours outside of lecture time for the reports. The grading for his sections is especially tough and not reasonable compared to other groups.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting a P
Anonymous
04/22/2023
teacher demands too much out of students. class drains my time and mental capacity. idk how this is allowed. he has absolutely no guilt either. id love to see him put 10 hrs a week on top of lecture ...
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting a P
Anonymous
03/15/2023
horrible , has no respect for students time. He must legitmatley think his course is the only course we are taking. probabaly have to dedicate 20 -25 hours a week for this class a week a report is due... which is every week
Mohammad Fazelpour
ENME371

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
08/04/2022
Dr. Fazelpour was a section leader for 371, and he was one of the better one. In studios/lab, he more so just answered questions while the TF set up and knew the lab procedure. Dr. Fazelpour graded more so on formatting and consistency rather than content, unless there was a major issue with the data. Dr. Fazelpour was a fair grader and professor, so if you see him as a section leader, switch to his section!
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
08/04/2022
371 is broken up by having lecture taught by Vince and then studio sections led by other professors at UMD. Vince led lectures and these were very boring and long. He speaks very fast where he trips over his own words at times, but is a knowledgeable person. To ensure students attend lecture, he does clicker questions, but he will go over and give the answer as long as enough students attempt to answer and participate. Vince does lead one section for studios and you should AVOID him at all cost. His section normally has the lowest averages as Vince is a tough grader. There is a curve applied, but it varies across each section leader (each section has it's own curve). To do well in 371, it really depends on who your group is and who your section leader is. There is a lot of work to be done in studios and outside of class, so having a group of students that do not procrastinate is super helpful. The work is not too challenging, it just is a lot to do and is tedious, especially if you make a mistake in a lab and need to start over.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Anonymous
02/22/2021
Vince is very particular professor. He thinks he knows the best way for students to learn and ubiquitously applies that learning methodology across all of his students. For example, requiring students to attend lecture with clicker participation quizzes and then creating weekly quizzes that pretty much check that you went to lecture. He assigns a ton of work to keep you busy. He also speaks very loudly over Zoom. On the other hand, I think his exams are fair, though he is a very harsh grader and is definitely looking out to take off points.
Vincent Nguyen
ENME371

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
06/08/2020
Vince is nice and cares about his students BUT he's a tough grader.
Linda Schmidt
ENME371

Expecting a B+
cheesecake
12/22/2015
Dr. Schmidt is an extremely peppy and enthusiastic professor that really makes the class more enjoyable to take. She must have changed her teaching style since these last reviews because they don't seem like her at all. I will say she is very defensive of her opinions but I never say her "fighting with students". She does grade harder than the other 371 professors my semester, but if you follow her comments on the reports you should do well.
Linda Schmidt
ENME371

Expecting a B
Anonymous
11/25/2013
I totally agree with the above review. She is crazy. What kind of teacher is that obsessed with a course. Like calm down, for real. have some more professionalism when teaching a course. literally fighting with students sometimes in class. Please replace engineering department.
Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME371

Expecting an A-
kvizzle321
01/02/2012
The most important required ME class in my opinion. Thamire should be teaching this class forever, because he does a great job. Also i was SURE that i had a B+ in the class but managed to get an A, despite him saying that there is no curve in the class, he tends to bump you up if you are really close.
Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME371

Expecting an A
jwright5
06/10/2011
Prof. Thamire is an incredible professor. He is knowledgeable about an incredible variety of topics and is very dedicated to ensuring you learn the material in his courses well. Very nice man and an excellent professor.
Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME371

Anonymous
05/18/2011
Dr. Thamire has got to be one of the nicest professors. I had him for both ENME 371 and 221. He is incredibly intelligent, helpful and fair. He will work you hard but you'll learn alot. Oh, and the elephants that he draws are hilarious. Be warned, ENME371 is an incredibly demanding class, it's more like a 6 credit class. It's not necessarily hard, just time consuming and the reports can be somewhat tedious. Make sure you get a section leader who's there for you and fair. I have nothing against Dr. Das personally but he's far too occupied in other things to be a section leader for this class. His grading was largely unclear, unfair, and took FAR too long. The report and presentation grades for other sections were far higher... bear in mind that this class is not curved.
Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME371

Expecting an A
edlevin
12/09/2010
Dr. Thamire is one of the Best engineering teachers I have had at the University of Maryland. I would recommend him over and over to anyone looking to take his class. I wish he taught the lab portions of the class as well because he straight up front helps you with ANYTHING you can think of. He even will adjust the class schedule with what is going on in other classes during the semester. Hands down my favorite professor ever!!!
Chandrasekhar Thamire
ENME371

Expecting an A
jhaan
12/20/2009
The class is not hard, per se, but is extremely money and time intensive. You will find that 3-4 times during the semester you will be pulling all nighters to get papers done on time, or spending a large amount of time studying for quizzes on material that was briefly mentioned in class, never to be seen again. The review for the final was also lengthy, covering the majority of the 800 page textbook. The benefit of all this? You WILL be rewarded for all of your hard work. He grades quite generously and gives several opportunities to fix mistakes. Extra credit quizzes are nice too. The material was sort of iffy for me, but the design project was rewarding in the end. Good guy, good teacher. As an extra note, if you have the choice, get Thamire as your section teacher and not Aris Cleanthous. Aris knows what he is talking about and is knowledgeable, but is difficult to get a hold of and imposes his own arbitrary limitations to reports than what Thamire does. For example, on a Design for X presentation, Thamire's section only had to do a report on a single part, while Aris required two parts to do. The end result being each team rushed through the presentation and went well over the time limit. Not fun.