HACS100 | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Michel Cukier HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/19/2024	Ah, Michel Cukier—the name that strikes fear into the hearts of ACES students everywhere. This professor has achieved a level of notoriety that could only be described as "infamous." Let’s start with his punctuality (or lack thereof). Show up late to his class? Come in a minute late? "FLAG THEM!" he’ll bellow, sending you spiraling into existential dread. But don’t worry, because while you’re getting berated, Cukier will probably be absent anyway—he has a mysterious talent for not showing up to his own classes. But hey, it’s not all bad! Cukier's career is a testament to resilience. Despite every review calling for his resignation, he’s still here, teaching more courses than most people can handle in a lifetime. He must be doing something right... right? Actually, he’s probably just stubborn. So, if you like the idea of trudging through a semester filled with confusion, frustration, and trauma-bonding, Cukier is the perfect choice for you.
Michel Cukier HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 11/24/2024	Dr. Cukier did not show up to class more than twice for the whole semester, and most definitely is forced to do teaching and isn't afraid to show it. And when he did come to class, he spoke very quietly for 5 minutes (no one past the second row could hear him), and then sat down and forced the TA to teach everything. He does not teach at all either, he just sends out videos of another professor teaching the technical material. He's done a handful of videos of him teaching the material, but all those videos have extremely poor quality and the command line code he types is blurry so the videos are virtually useless. He also humiliates students who come in even 1 minute late, like shouting "FLAG THEM". Unfortunately he is the only person who teaches the ACES core classes. Big thanks to the TAs who seem to have very little help in teaching the class.
Michel Cukier HACS100 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/20/2024	This man fails to realize that it is not even remotely ethical to have idealistic expectations about the dedication that students have to the University. Due to this, he belittles students who come in. He thinks he can change you and your overall drive to be the stereotypical "good student" by injecting a fear of failure and a fear of criticism within you. Although that may be the only alternative for students who really don't care anymore about excelling and just want to pass the course and get life over with, he doesn't seem to consider how inconsiderate it is to force your drive on someone else. This man is a priest. His religion is research, and his god is his ego and money. He screams at those who violate his commandment to absolute obedience. For the sake of analogy, I described this, but this is truly the spirit of how this man walks. I'd say: don't take him.
Mohammad Islam HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/08/2024	Loved him. Very down-to-earth.
Mohammad Islam HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 02/27/2024	very chill
Mohammad Islam HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 02/20/2024	Guy has no idea what he's doing. Not sure how he got picked for this position.
Mohammad Islam HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 02/18/2024	Gives great life advice! Very open and communicative! W Professor!
Mohammad Islam HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 02/02/2024	bro is so cool. only class i attend
Anthony Pellicone HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 04/25/2023	He's a nice guy overall. Reads directly from his slides when he's "lecturing". The class itself is an easy A. Not very enthusiastic and has dull emotions. He doesn't teach. I don't think I learned anything from other than the fact that "when working in cybersecurity...you have to be ethical".
Anthony Pellicone HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 04/22/2023	I thought Dr. Pellicone's part of this class was actually interesting, as opposed to the technical side, in which we didn't really learn anything. To be fair, we didn't learn much in this half of the class either, and he didn't teach much, just provided articles for us to read. I thought the debates were actually pretty enjoyable and fairly low-stress, since you didn't have to do much to get a good grade. However, the readings took up a lot of time, and overall the class was way too much work to be just 2 credits.
Michel Cukier HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 04/22/2023	I don't know why he's listed as an instructor for this course since I have never seen him. He doesn't teach anything, we just watch prerecorded lectures from another individual. These videos are not very informative, and quite a few of the homework assignments had errors in the instructions. Everything was graded by TAs who didn't really know what they were doing, and I feel like I didn't really learn anything from this course.
Anthony Pellicone HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/26/2022	Pretty easy and straightforward class as long as you stayed on top of weekly assignments. Weekly discussions were okay but felt like a little too much time for the topics so conversation would fizzle out. The weekly UNIX assignments were good as a skill to learn for the future. Overall okay class and pretty nice professor but sometimes tedious and might be closer to a 3 credit class for amount of time spent on the two sets of work.
Michel Cukier HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/18/2022	He does not actually teach this class - everything he is supposed to be teaching is taught through asynchronous videos that don't cover everything you need to know to complete the assignments. The person in the videos isn't even him - it is another professor that you never meet.
Anthony Pellicone HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/17/2022	This class was extremely easy, but the lectures were not that useful and there was way too much work for only 2 credits. Every week we had to watch a lecture recording on UNIX and do a (usually very long and frustrating) assignment and a quiz on canvas, and then also to read several different articles. In class we had discussions about the articles and debated various general topics in cybersecurity. It was okay, but I really would rather have swapped it and had the UNIX stuff in class and the article stuff as a canvas discussion post for homework, as the UNIX assignments were what taught me the most in the class. Pellicone is nice, I just didn't love the class though it is required for ACES
Michel Cukier HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/15/2022	He doesn't actually teach this class, he just takes credit for it
Anthony Pellicone HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/05/2022	Way too much work for a 2 credit course. Each week has two entirely separate sets of work to do, one of which is learning UNIX which is just completely unnecessary for the course and should be cut out entirely (and wasn't even taught in person but instead was asynchronous recycled panopto recordings from 2 years ago). Classroom activities are only marginally interesting but about what you would expect from a 2 credit course outside of major which only serves the purpose of keeping you in the ACES program. Final project was, like the rest of the class, not hard to get a good grade in but tedious and requiring more work than it needed to. While the final project was happening we still had UNIX assignments which was annoying. All in all the class is not good in any way but not bad enough to leave ACES and Prince Frederick over.
Anthony Pellicone HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/30/2022	He's not great. The class is awfully boring and he doesn't teach anything. The class consists of an in-person part where "class debates and discussions" are hyped up for like four weeks and we end up having like four debates until we move on to the final project. The asynchronous element of class is useful, where we just learn UNIX, but the in-person section is a waste of time. The class is easy though, and being a part of ACES makes up for it.
Anthony Pellicone HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 02/18/2022	I didn't like him. He was nice enough, but very low energy and held "debates" that were just asking a couple of people how they felt about the weekly readings. The portion of the class that he was responsible for was easy enough but very boring. I also didn't like the structure of the class, but that's not his fault.
Anthony Pellicone HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/25/2021	He kind of sucks, and just seems like he doesn't want to be in class. He didn't really teach anything since the class is just us doing the weekly readings, discussing them during the in-person part of the class, and him just standing around in the classroom awkwardly. The class itself is boring, and way too much work for 2 credits, but you need it to stay in ACES i guess :/
Ciro Pinto-Coelho HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 02/07/2021	If you have good friends and/or good coding experience, this class will be annoying but easy. There is quite a bit of work assigned but if you're any good, it does not take much effort and the time commitment is fine if you work efficiently. However, Ciro is a very nice person who tries very hard. Talk to him out of class and you'll see that he genuinely cares and is easy to talk to. Unfortunately, the class itself forces me to give him a 4 rather than a 5.
Ciro Pinto-Coelho HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/12/2021	This class required an excessive amount of work for 2 credits. As stated in other reviews, the weekly assignments were often redundant. We were often assigned 40+ pages or dense slides of reading on which we had to write a reflection. After this reflection was due, he would present the same slides that we had read for homework. On the positive side, the TAs were helpful, and I did learn some new things from this course.
Ciro Pinto-Coelho HACS100 Anonymous 12/16/2020	TLDR: Avoid this professor at all costs - if you can. Sorry ACES freshmen. As a preface, since I'm the only reviewer currently, I will advise you that I have also seen and heard other students complain about this professor as well, and some considered dropping out of ACES because this was their first impression of the program. Classes were overall boring and therefore nobody spoke. To counteract this, he made us do a 'discussion' each week where we were placed into groups and had to answer questions about content we had already learned through the weekly summaries we were supposed to do. This made the class overall redundant. Sometimes, these weekly summaries also required reading documents over 100 pages long. There were also large projects assigned that were difficult to understand the requirements for, therefore resulting in lowered grades. Even after students asked for clarification, requirements remained unclear. These projects could take 6 hours total, on top of the other required work for the week which could take about 1-2 hours. For a 2 credit class, this is excessive. And as another incentive to participate, 10% of the grade was based on participation. This would be acceptable if it were simply showing up to class and participating in the 'discussions' mentioned previously, but we were also expected to ask questions and have a real conversation about these topics. To me, this seems excessive considering this was the first semester of online classes at UMD, with the pandemic going on. Everyone has enough on their plate already. Another section of the participation grade was known as 'Where in Maryland' - we had to email a TA each week with the location of a picture that was placed in the weekly slides. I already showed up to class. Why do I have to go through the effort of finding some location in Maryland for an actual participation grade in a class about cybersecurity? Don't get me wrong, the teacher himself isn't a bad person. I just thought I'd be done with all of the terrible teachers from high school, considering ACES is supposed to be good.
Ciro Pinto-Coelho HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/29/2020	Very bad professor. He doesn't teach anything in class and lifts some of his slides from Wikipedia. The professor rarely gives good answers to questions and has a very confusing style of grading which means you won't know your grade until the last week of school.
Jandelyn Plane HACS100 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 06/24/2020	She's nice and tries hard for her class. If you don't understand, send her an email or go to office hours. Lectures are mostly off the powerpoint and giving examples, but it'll take time on your own to understand usually if you don't already know the material. I took both HACS100 and HACS101 with her -- the classes themselves weren't my favorite, but Jan is great.

Michel Cukier
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/19/2024

Ah, Michel Cukier—the name that strikes fear into the hearts of ACES students everywhere. This professor has achieved a level of notoriety that could only be described as "infamous." Let’s start with his punctuality (or lack thereof). Show up late to his class? Come in a minute late? "FLAG THEM!" he’ll bellow, sending you spiraling into existential dread. But don’t worry, because while you’re getting berated, Cukier will probably be absent anyway—he has a mysterious talent for not showing up to his own classes. But hey, it’s not all bad! Cukier's career is a testament to resilience. Despite every review calling for his resignation, he’s still here, teaching more courses than most people can handle in a lifetime. He must be doing something right... right? Actually, he’s probably just stubborn. So, if you like the idea of trudging through a semester filled with confusion, frustration, and trauma-bonding, Cukier is the perfect choice for you.

Michel Cukier
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
11/24/2024

Dr. Cukier did not show up to class more than twice for the whole semester, and most definitely is forced to do teaching and isn't afraid to show it. And when he did come to class, he spoke very quietly for 5 minutes (no one past the second row could hear him), and then sat down and forced the TA to teach everything. He does not teach at all either, he just sends out videos of another professor teaching the technical material. He's done a handful of videos of him teaching the material, but all those videos have extremely poor quality and the command line code he types is blurry so the videos are virtually useless. He also humiliates students who come in even 1 minute late, like shouting "FLAG THEM". Unfortunately he is the only person who teaches the ACES core classes. Big thanks to the TAs who seem to have very little help in teaching the class.

Michel Cukier
HACS100

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
11/20/2024

This man fails to realize that it is not even remotely ethical to have idealistic expectations about the dedication that students have to the University. Due to this, he belittles students who come in. He thinks he can change you and your overall drive to be the stereotypical "good student" by injecting a fear of failure and a fear of criticism within you. Although that may be the only alternative for students who really don't care anymore about excelling and just want to pass the course and get life over with, he doesn't seem to consider how inconsiderate it is to force your drive on someone else. This man is a priest. His religion is research, and his god is his ego and money. He screams at those who violate his commandment to absolute obedience. For the sake of analogy, I described this, but this is truly the spirit of how this man walks. I'd say: don't take him.

Mohammad Islam
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/08/2024

Loved him. Very down-to-earth.

Mohammad Islam
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
02/27/2024

very chill

Mohammad Islam
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
02/20/2024

Guy has no idea what he's doing. Not sure how he got picked for this position.

Mohammad Islam
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
02/18/2024

Gives great life advice! Very open and communicative! W Professor!

Mohammad Islam
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
02/02/2024

bro is so cool. only class i attend

Anthony Pellicone
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
04/25/2023

He's a nice guy overall. Reads directly from his slides when he's "lecturing". The class itself is an easy A. Not very enthusiastic and has dull emotions. He doesn't teach. I don't think I learned anything from other than the fact that "when working in cybersecurity...you have to be ethical".

Anthony Pellicone
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
04/22/2023

I thought Dr. Pellicone's part of this class was actually interesting, as opposed to the technical side, in which we didn't really learn anything. To be fair, we didn't learn much in this half of the class either, and he didn't teach much, just provided articles for us to read. I thought the debates were actually pretty enjoyable and fairly low-stress, since you didn't have to do much to get a good grade. However, the readings took up a lot of time, and overall the class was way too much work to be just 2 credits.

Michel Cukier
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
04/22/2023

I don't know why he's listed as an instructor for this course since I have never seen him. He doesn't teach anything, we just watch prerecorded lectures from another individual. These videos are not very informative, and quite a few of the homework assignments had errors in the instructions. Everything was graded by TAs who didn't really know what they were doing, and I feel like I didn't really learn anything from this course.

Anthony Pellicone
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/26/2022

Pretty easy and straightforward class as long as you stayed on top of weekly assignments. Weekly discussions were okay but felt like a little too much time for the topics so conversation would fizzle out. The weekly UNIX assignments were good as a skill to learn for the future. Overall okay class and pretty nice professor but sometimes tedious and might be closer to a 3 credit class for amount of time spent on the two sets of work.

Michel Cukier
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/18/2022

He does not actually teach this class - everything he is supposed to be teaching is taught through asynchronous videos that don't cover everything you need to know to complete the assignments. The person in the videos isn't even him - it is another professor that you never meet.

Anthony Pellicone
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/17/2022

This class was extremely easy, but the lectures were not that useful and there was way too much work for only 2 credits. Every week we had to watch a lecture recording on UNIX and do a (usually very long and frustrating) assignment and a quiz on canvas, and then also to read several different articles. In class we had discussions about the articles and debated various general topics in cybersecurity. It was okay, but I really would rather have swapped it and had the UNIX stuff in class and the article stuff as a canvas discussion post for homework, as the UNIX assignments were what taught me the most in the class. Pellicone is nice, I just didn't love the class though it is required for ACES

Michel Cukier
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/15/2022

He doesn't actually teach this class, he just takes credit for it

Anthony Pellicone
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/05/2022

Way too much work for a 2 credit course. Each week has two entirely separate sets of work to do, one of which is learning UNIX which is just completely unnecessary for the course and should be cut out entirely (and wasn't even taught in person but instead was asynchronous recycled panopto recordings from 2 years ago). Classroom activities are only marginally interesting but about what you would expect from a 2 credit course outside of major which only serves the purpose of keeping you in the ACES program. Final project was, like the rest of the class, not hard to get a good grade in but tedious and requiring more work than it needed to. While the final project was happening we still had UNIX assignments which was annoying. All in all the class is not good in any way but not bad enough to leave ACES and Prince Frederick over.

Anthony Pellicone
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
11/30/2022

He's not great. The class is awfully boring and he doesn't teach anything. The class consists of an in-person part where "class debates and discussions" are hyped up for like four weeks and we end up having like four debates until we move on to the final project. The asynchronous element of class is useful, where we just learn UNIX, but the in-person section is a waste of time. The class is easy though, and being a part of ACES makes up for it.

Anthony Pellicone
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
02/18/2022

I didn't like him. He was nice enough, but very low energy and held "debates" that were just asking a couple of people how they felt about the weekly readings. The portion of the class that he was responsible for was easy enough but very boring. I also didn't like the structure of the class, but that's not his fault.

Anthony Pellicone
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/25/2021

He kind of sucks, and just seems like he doesn't want to be in class. He didn't really teach anything since the class is just us doing the weekly readings, discussing them during the in-person part of the class, and him just standing around in the classroom awkwardly. The class itself is boring, and way too much work for 2 credits, but you need it to stay in ACES i guess :/

Ciro Pinto-Coelho
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
02/07/2021

If you have good friends and/or good coding experience, this class will be annoying but easy. There is quite a bit of work assigned but if you're any good, it does not take much effort and the time commitment is fine if you work efficiently. However, Ciro is a very nice person who tries very hard. Talk to him out of class and you'll see that he genuinely cares and is easy to talk to. Unfortunately, the class itself forces me to give him a 4 rather than a 5.

Ciro Pinto-Coelho
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
01/12/2021

This class required an excessive amount of work for 2 credits. As stated in other reviews, the weekly assignments were often redundant. We were often assigned 40+ pages or dense slides of reading on which we had to write a reflection. After this reflection was due, he would present the same slides that we had read for homework. On the positive side, the TAs were helpful, and I did learn some new things from this course.

Ciro Pinto-Coelho
HACS100

Anonymous
12/16/2020

TLDR: Avoid this professor at all costs - if you can. Sorry ACES freshmen. As a preface, since I'm the only reviewer currently, I will advise you that I have also seen and heard other students complain about this professor as well, and some considered dropping out of ACES because this was their first impression of the program. Classes were overall boring and therefore nobody spoke. To counteract this, he made us do a 'discussion' each week where we were placed into groups and had to answer questions about content we had already learned through the weekly summaries we were supposed to do. This made the class overall redundant. Sometimes, these weekly summaries also required reading documents over 100 pages long. There were also large projects assigned that were difficult to understand the requirements for, therefore resulting in lowered grades. Even after students asked for clarification, requirements remained unclear. These projects could take 6 hours total, on top of the other required work for the week which could take about 1-2 hours. For a 2 credit class, this is excessive. And as another incentive to participate, 10% of the grade was based on participation. This would be acceptable if it were simply showing up to class and participating in the 'discussions' mentioned previously, but we were also expected to ask questions and have a real conversation about these topics. To me, this seems excessive considering this was the first semester of online classes at UMD, with the pandemic going on. Everyone has enough on their plate already. Another section of the participation grade was known as 'Where in Maryland' - we had to email a TA each week with the location of a picture that was placed in the weekly slides. I already showed up to class. Why do I have to go through the effort of finding some location in Maryland for an actual participation grade in a class about cybersecurity? Don't get me wrong, the teacher himself isn't a bad person. I just thought I'd be done with all of the terrible teachers from high school, considering ACES is supposed to be good.

Ciro Pinto-Coelho
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
11/29/2020

Very bad professor. He doesn't teach anything in class and lifts some of his slides from Wikipedia. The professor rarely gives good answers to questions and has a very confusing style of grading which means you won't know your grade until the last week of school.

Jandelyn Plane
HACS100

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
06/24/2020

She's nice and tries hard for her class. If you don't understand, send her an email or go to office hours. Lectures are mostly off the powerpoint and giving examples, but it'll take time on your own to understand usually if you don't already know the material. I took both HACS100 and HACS101 with her -- the classes themselves weren't my favorite, but Jan is great.

Reviews for HACS100