Pamela Abshire

This professor has taught: EDSP652, ENCE688D, ENEE408D, ENEE411, ENEE419A, ENEE614, ENSE698E, ENSE799, GEMS296, GEMS297, GEMS396, GEMS397, GEMS496, GEMS497

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Pamela Abshire ENEE411 Expecting an A- Anonymous 01/20/2022	Professor Abshire is a decent professor as in all the information is on her slides. Her slides are exactly like the textbook so if you dont like reading the textbook, all the info is on her slides. However, her class is heavy in workload and she grades very harshly. I would not recommend taking her class, She grades extemely slowly. Our midterms were graded one day before the last day of classes! So you wont know how you are truly doing. Quizzes are hard. Homework is extremely difficult. She does not communicate with her TA so sometimes the TA will give you the wrong answer or will be different than her expectations. She is a nice person...when her personal life isnt getting in the way of her attitude. She gets easily frustrated if you come to her with a question when her personal life is in a crisis so beware. you may be demoralized. Her grading scheme though is extremely fair. You will pass this class as long as you put in effort. You will learn a lot, but that learning is dependent on the effort YOU put in, she does NOT hold your hand and you need to understand the matieral inside and out otherwise you will fail. This class should be 4 credits and will take up and consume your life.
Pamela Abshire ENEE411 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/14/2021	Professor Abshire is a great teacher in class and is pretty helpful outside of class. She also held a review session for all the exams we had (and ordered pizza for us). She was very approachable and was generous with giving help to those who needed it. If it weren't for the downsides, I would probably take her again. I didn't like how the quizzes and homework assignments would sometimes require knowledge of material that she hadn't covered yet (I assume she wrote all of them before the start of the semester). She never changed any quizzes or homeworks to reflect where she had actually gotten to in class. So if she got a bit behind in class, then the homework would be much harder to complete. The class was very heavy in workload (long homework assignments for most weeks) and had pretty challenging exams. On the exams, there were some short answer questions followed by 2 pairs of long-answer questions. For the long-answer questions, you could just pick one from each pair, and do the other ones for extra credit. I appreciated the extra credit, because I would have gotten a much lower score without it. As others have said before me, she is very, very slow at grading. Our homework assignments were graded by the TA, so they were usually in within 1-2 weeks. However, the midterm (graded by her) was given on October 20th, and was not graded until the last day of class. A minor-to-medium gripe I had while we were giving presentations was that she initially said she would cut people off after 5 minutes, in order to leave enough time for everyone to present before the end of class. However, several people gave presentations that were much longer (10 minutes), and she did not cut any of them off. This led to the last 3-4 people having to present after class. I just didn't like how she was generally bad at keeping her word. You will learn a lot from this course, but expect to be spending a lot of time and effort on it. Her grading cutoffs are pretty generous though (80 percent for A-, 50 percent for C-).
Pamela Abshire ENEE411 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/11/2018	Professor Abshire is a pretty good professor. She teaches with PowerPoint slides (which some people prefer), so you're better off not taking notes but instead printing out the slides and annotating them during the lecture. I can definitely say that I learned a lot from this course. The biggest complaint I have about her is the grading. She took over a month to grade the midterm, and three weeks to grade the final exam. By the time of the final day to withdraw from a course with a W, we only had quiz grades (automatically graded) and one or two homework grades. Basically, you had no idea where you were in the course until near the end.
Pamela Abshire Expecting an A+ Anonymous 03/04/2015	Abshire is a pretty good professor. She lectures off of powerpoint so you don't really have to go to class, but lectures are valuable because she does a good job at giving new ways of thinking about the material. This class wasn't too hard if you did well in ENEE303. A lot of the course material is "review" in the sense that most of it is built off of what you learned in 303. Don't expect the homework's and exams to be graded for a while though.
Pamela Abshire Expecting an A- koffe55 12/31/2014	Note: ENEE419A is now ENEE411. Abshire is a great teacher who wants nothing more than for students to understand the material. She uses powerpoint slides, which aren't my favorite, but I'll admit that they're probably the right way to go to convey the large amount of material in the course. The class is tough, and the homeworks are super challenging. The tests are doable but you're expected to do several pretty big problems per exam / final, so come practiced and prepared. Partial credit is important on the exams, so write down everything you know. She does an ELMS quiz per lecture. Overall, one of the most fun and useful EE classes I've taken so far.
Pamela Abshire ENEE408D Expecting an A Anonymous 05/23/2014	Abshire is great at teaching the material and answering questions. She is very knowledgeable and extremely nice, however she is a horrible professor. She doesn't grade anything despite making promises every lecture that grades will be in. Reports and presentations built off of each other in 408D but she stopped grading two months before the semester ended. She also fell asleep during the final presentations of our class even though the majority of the class had pulled an all nighter and managed to stay awake. Take this class with Abshire if you do not care if you know your grade and if you are fine with a professor who blatantly does not care about the course. That being said you can learn Cadence on your own, this capstone is not necessary for anyone interested in microelectronics.
Pamela Abshire Expecting an A JZhou 01/11/2012	I believe she taught this course very well. She assigns comprehensive homeworks that would require a lot of time to complete, fortunately, she makes herself available to students almost everyday for questions relating to homeworks and projects. The tests are fairly straight forward. The average on our first midterm was in the low 70s, and the average on the final was also in the 70s. The only problem I have with this class is that she would sometimes go over slides too quickly, and this would result in learning the material on your own through the book (not the easiest read). Overall, I recommend taking this course if you enjoy topics in microelectronics/Integrated circuits.
Pamela Abshire Expecting an A swieneck 04/18/2010	Overall, she's been one of my favorite professors here at UMD. Prof. Abshire's a very good lecturer, and she tries very hard to make herself available to students with questions about the course material. The only slightly negative thing about her is that she will sometimes go a little fast through her Power Point slides. If you are ever unclear on something, or just want to stall so you can grasp the concept she just presented, just ask her a question. She usually gives really good explanations, and this will slow the pace of the class. Moreover, she happens to be a really nice person and her research is really cool, so if you ever want to do a 499 with someone, I would definitely recommend her over most other professors.