Reviews for XPER433

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Martha Wang XPER433 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 05/20/2024	(Co-teaching with Gerald Suarez and Christina Hnatov) Would give zero if I could. DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE! xFoundry is both a time sink and a grade sink and there are better outlets for entrepreneurship than this program, for reasons I'll list below. More specifically for XPER433: 1) The class is not organized - Understandable for a new program, but you walk in every day not knowing what to expect, they randomly assign large assignments with very quick due dates, and don't accommodate when asked. They randomly emailed one week before a presentation saying that we had to mandatorily be there for a "surprise presentation". I've often asked one of the professors a question, only to be answered with "I don't know ask Professor XYZ" with none of them actually having a definitive answer to my question or request. 2) Assignments are never described well - Under the guise of "oh sometimes you'll be asked to do things on the spot in industry", they're assignments are very vague for what they are actually looking for. For 50% of our grade being determined by Design Reviews, we were given only 5 sentences of things to address in them, which in it's own is not the problem, but then they expect other things not mentioned in the rubric given, but what we're graded on is harsher. 3) Assignments are graded harshly, also not on time - Corresponding to number 2, 50% of our grade was not determined until the week before finals week, on which they gave most of the class 50% or under. They tried to remedy it, but in the end, their grading remained harsh on the final assignment as well. They gave us five questions to go off of, but graded us on a 6 page rubric. Graded on their feelings?? A satisfactory submission yields you a 8/16, or failing grade, and only going "above and beyond" will get you the 16/16. They dock for points you have covered, and then complain when the class "didn't meet their standards" I would've taken a W on the class if I knew this was going to happen, but 80% of this course was spent on reflections and community posts, and they released these two final assignments in the week before, taking away from that opportunity as well. 4) Time commitment is not worth it! - Aside from this class's 4 hour per week commitment (all for a C+ btw), they expect you to come in outside of class to work on major assignments, and had us also give an additional 2 hours per week for a month for "additional resources". All for honestly very little progress and useless slides. 4 hours + sometimes additional is not worth it for a class only yielding 3 credits and honestly being a gpa sink. Overall, I was so excited for this program as an entrepreneurial competition, but I see mismanagement, overloaded time commitment, gpa sink, bad use of resources, and a lack of care for the students taking this course. The only thing this course had was being well funded, but those funds were wasted on randomly printing out colored pictures of animals and bringing in "networking opportunities". Just join startup shell, take another UMD entrepreneurial business course, or join clubs with the time you'd save.