Reviews for GEOG276

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Rachel Marks GEOG276 Expecting an A Anonymous 07/05/2023	In terms of teaching, Rachel Marks is good at explaining the material. She's one of the nicest professors I've had at UMD and she's very understanding. However, I gave her 3 stars because she's not organized or on top of things. I took her class over the summer so maybe it was just because it's summer, but that shouldn't really be a good reason to be disorganized for class. She's also not very good at answering emails in a timely manner; it took her a couple of days to get to mine. There were issues a good amount of times with her in-class examples/code. She also had all the due dates for all the assignments set as the same due dates from 2022 which was confusing and every time I submitted an assignment, it said it was late. Even though she was aware of it, she didn't change the dates/forgot. She also said she would post all the recordings, but for the majority of the lectures, she did not post them, even though multiple students asked her multiple times. In general, she's a really nice person, but just not organized at all. In general, this class is very doable, but it's definitely better to take during the fall or spring semester because it's pretty fast-paced and can be hard to keep up with over the summer especially having 2 lab assignments due each week. Classes are also 3 and a half hours for 2 days a week, but you don't have to stay for the whole class. Either way, the class is pretty long, and especially during the summer, you have to dedicate a lot of time to the lecture itself.
Taylor Oshan GEOG276 Expecting a B- Anonymous 01/20/2022	At the start of the Fall 2021 semester, this class was pretty easy. The only things I had to focus on were lab assignments and modules. The lab assignment criteria was clear on what you had to do for the programming, and the lectures that the professor teaches in class alongside the problem sets given to you help you get an understanding on how to use/execute specific coding for each assignment. Even though the problem sets are not required to complete, it is better to do them before doing the assignment since they provide an overview on what you need to do for said assignment. The practice modules are rather straightforward and easy to complete since you go to Data Camps and watch videos of programming for different Python related topics, then complete basic assignments that follow up with the videos. The modules are rather simplistic to do and easy points to earn for the class, as well as providing knowledge on Python programming. Overall, the course was good during the beginning of the semester, however, things went bad when during the middle of the semester, the professor decided to do quizzes in a PROGRAMMING CLASS, and he said that this was the first time he ever attempted to do such a thing. There was only 5 quizzes, however, they were worth more than the lab assignments, as well as the fact that the quizzes are not multiple choice, rather they are composed of PROGRAMMING, where we had less than an hour to write and execute coding to complete specific requirements. What made it worse was the fact that all of the quizzes focused on the harder topics that we barely covered in class one week beforehand. By the end of the semester, a lot of students in the class had a significant drop in their grades (including myself) due to the quizzes killing all of our grades. Dr. Oshan should either remove the quizzes from the grading criteria altogether or make the quizzes be focused on the easier topics, otherwise, the course is not worth it unless it is mandatory for your specific major or you are a Python programming expert.