Cliff Bakalian

This professor has taught: CMSC250, CMSC330, CMSC388T, CMSC389E, CMSC389T, CMSC398M, HDCC106, HDCC208P

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Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/28/2025	Cliff and Anwar typically are the only people who teach this. Material is the same but definitely take Anwar over Cliff. Cliff's lectures are about as boring as can be. Imagine a theatre kid mixed with a introverted CS nerd. I would have rather watched paint dry than attend another one of his lectures as it would've been more entertaining and helpful than his lectures. His notes and slides are a mess filled with snazzy little transitions that make it a nightmare to navigate. The class overall felt pretty unstructured with random topics thrown in for the s and g's. At least Anwar recorded his lectures and explained things better than Cliff's philosophical mumbling. Material is difficult but certainly doable. Start project 5 early. TA's were hit or miss. I think there were maybe one or two good ones but the rest seemed to be pretty rude, unhelpful, or overall useless. My discussion TA was late half the time and spent most of the time arguing with one student about different ways to do problems. That's all I remember until I stopped showing up to the discussion at all.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/24/2025	TLDR, if you have a choice between Anwar of Cliff, take Anwar (better overall lectures and more do able assessments). Cliff personally made this course much harder than it was supposed to be. I usually ended up reading Anwar's slides and examples, and eventually, watch his recordings instead to understand some weird concepts like lambda calculus. Cliff notes made it insanely harder to understand and grasp it in my opinion. The way he designed his slides is just so not intuitive at all, and makes it even harder when he doesn't record his lessons. He has philosopher style of teaching, which makes sense because he got a degree in that. But honestly, teaching cs in that kind of style just makes it harder and more complicated than it's supposed to be for students to understand this class. And remember, 330 is a required class as a cs major, so yeah this matter should be taken seriously rather than a joke. Now yes, keep in mind, 330 is a hard class (it's a 300 level course duh). So yeah regardless it wasn't going to be an easy class anyway. But I just felt like this course was insanely unstructured. They taught things too fast and concepts just felt out of place to grasp personally, especially when it's expected that many students are also taking this class with 351. I also felt like the projects were way too complicated and just weren't helpful in understanding the concepts that we learned in the course, especially project 5. And I also think we could've just learned Rust for the entire course rather than jumping into a new language after already a difficult language (OCaml) weeks before our final. Also, I despised the fact that the course used OCaml to teach us the concepts, honestly made things worse to click and understand... I just felt like if they assessed things with more structure, and actually know what kind of questions to ask on the exams, the course wouldn't have been to hard. Because honestly, the concepts were actually darn easy to grasp, and some of them were pretty cool and essential too (e.g. NFAs/DFAs).
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/24/2025	Only complaint is that he tends to mumble sometimes, so I would recommend sitting near the front so you can hear everything he says. Solid lecturer. Makes the topics about as engaging as they can be.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/23/2025	So you came here to decide whether you should take 330 with Cliff or Anwar. Well I'm here to tell you that you should just choose one that has a better schedule for you. In terms of course structure, the projects are the most demanding part of this course. Especially project 5 (you'll see it when you get there). I know this is said in every CS course review ever, but I cannot emphasize this enough when I say that you should start these projects THE DAY they are assigned. Now I will say there were some people who would start the projects with 2-3 days before due date (most people have other overlapping courses like 351) so they can be a bit constrained for time, but still would get it done somehow. However, like I said, the projects are the most important source of learning in the course. Rushing to do them just to pass the test cases is very counterproductive. Use the projects to master the concepts you learn in class (I did NOT do this, hypocrite much??Shh keep reading) and you will see that the exams and quizzes are SO much easier. Any sort of "coding" question you get in a quiz or exam is some permutation of a function you implemented for a relevant project. So if you're not a GPT warrior and actually implemented the functions by understanding what its asking for, those questions should be a breeze. I'll be the one to say it...OCaml is really not that bad to understand (cry about it yall just work with any code that isn't written like a pseudocode). The syntax is really trivial to grasp especially if you have worked with "let" expressions in JS. HOWEVER, the functional programming aspect of it is where it gets tricky. But once you have enough practice with the first two projects (really only the first project because it is designed to teach you how functional programming in OCaml works), you will spend less time worrying about the language itself rather implementing the necessary concepts into the projects. You will lightly go over Rust programming towards the last 20% of the course which is a much more traditional language, and is primarily used to teach concepts on type safety. All in all, it is very manageable. I'm still salty that I didn't perform up to my potential in this course because I felt like I really understood what was taught but sold on the exams because I'm a nervous wreck and tend to blank out during them. Use the practice they give you (exams and quizzes dating back to the days where CS wasn't a 40,863 student per class major) and redo them till you can recognize the type of questions on the exam and can get instantly started on solving them. Also, Friday discussions were not it because wtf but they're worth it if you need the additional practice and sometimes you have to go because they give quizzes (they'll tell you when they are so don't worry). So go to discussion. Or don't.
Cliff Bakalian Expecting a B Anonymous 05/19/2025	Class is not crazy hard, I just didn't invest as much time as needed. Cliff teaching style is very jumpy as he just codes and comes up with examples on the spot. The projects were detailed and made your work. Hardest ones in my opinion were 5,4, and 7 but others were fairly simple. Ample practice for quizzes and exams. Discussion practice was useful and I learned more there than in class.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2025	He mad the class way too hard because previous semesters people were cheating a lot, the exams were really hard, projects were fair, but challenging.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a C Anonymous 05/05/2025	Pretty okay! Cliff and Anwar co-teach so you have both their lectures and their notes. Cliff's notes are really nice! But Anwar slides are goated. He has a slight accent but not really; you'll be fine. - 2 midterms. - 1 final. - 7 projects (all weighted differently). - 4 quizzes (during discussion). - 11? 12? lecture quizzes (you do them at home, not during lecture). PLEASE START PROJECT 5 EARLY PLEASSSEEEEEEE E E EE
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/04/2025	Cliffs lectures can be boring sometimes but overall, he's a good and fair professor. I would recommend anyone to take him. You will do well if you put in the effort. The first exam was wayyyyyy worse than the second. The projects weren't too bad. Secret tests were annoying for some of them but you can easily get A's on most of the projects.
Cliff Bakalian HDCC106 Expecting an A Anonymous 02/24/2025	🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐 Good at teaching compsci AND philosophy
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 02/06/2025	Cliff's lectures were kind of pointless. Between his notes, the lecture quizzes/projects, the discussions (which also honestly weren't too helpful), and the online documentation for OCaml and Rust, I don't think Cliff's lectures really provided that much more value. I think Cliff should strongly consider doing a flipped classroom. I think that would be a much better use of lecture time.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a C Anonymous 01/27/2025	Was okay, just do the work and pay attention, midterms were somewhat similar and the concepts are taught to the same degree.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/27/2025	sometimes i called him clifford baka Pros: Class overall is not as bad as the horror stories suggest Projects were interesting He's funny Exams were fair Cons: It was kinda funny how no one paid attention in lecture, he's not terrible but he's very monotone and it does get hard to pay attention Some of the projects were BRUTAL but looking back kinda straightforward, def go to office hours if you can snag a TA they are helpful Overall, you'll be fine, go to office hours
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/25/2025	TL;DR: Just take Cliff for 330 Pros: - The exams and quizzes were very similar in nature to the practice exams and quizzes we were given, and there were a TON of resources to study with, so I never really felt unprepared going into an exam or quiz. - We had a decent amount of time to complete projects, and there we were also given three 24 hour late tokens that we could use as extensions on the projects, so that was helpful. - Cliff has incredibly thorough notes to help with learning stuff for the projects, quizzes and exams. Cons: - Cliff's teaching style is not for most people. Lectures can feel disorganized and it's really easy to lose interest quickly. Most of my friends and I just learned the material by reading his and Anwar's notes, and doing the projects.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a D+ Anonymous 01/07/2025	Cliff is very hard to reach at times when you are trying to schedule office hours, barely interacts with the class during his lectures and worst of all he does not curve. If you take him, I recommend doing your best to get the percentage of the grade you want because he will not help you curve to the next letter grade. You're basically on your own. The quizzes were questionable in terms of difficulty, and his lectures barely covered them.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/30/2024	cliff is honestly a pretty good lecturer, all things considered. his quizzes tend to be on the tougher side, but his exams are all very fair. his projects were confusing to start due to the instructions providing little guidance, but i enjoyed them since they related back to the content we were learning in class (and as a result, strengthened my understanding of the content in the class). imo, he's decent at explaining concepts, but his public speaking skills are a little weak and as such, he talks very monotonously and his lectures feel more like he's talking to himself than to the class. that being said, he's also very funny, but he delivers his jokes in the same monotonous tone as the rest of his lecture so unless you're paying attention, you won't notice them. my main two complaints regarding the class were (1) i felt as if rust was not taught well because he only went over the theory of what makes rust different from other programming languages and the two rust projects were honestly free-for-alls, and (2) because of the content of the class changing frequently, studying from previous exams can only help so much. all in all though, i definitely enjoyed cliff's class and i think he's a solid professor for 330, and would be willing to take a class with him again. that being said, i believe that anwar has similar reviews to cliff and since they co-teach, my advice for choosing between the two is to first pick whoever works better for your schedule, and if they both work well, then choose cliff
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/24/2024	First, I'm just going to start by saying, for CMSC330, it really doesn't matter much who your professor is. The lecture quizzes, projects, discussion content, TAs, quizzes, and exam content are all exactly the same. The only difference between Cliff and Anwar's sections are which professor's lecture you can attend, but even then, you can just not go to lecture or go to the other professor's lecture (some people found that they didn't really like Cliff's lectures and attended Anwar's instead---the class is big enough that I don't think people would notice). Unlike CMSC351, the professor doesn't make that much of a difference for this class, so don't freak out too much. That being said, I do think Dr. Mamat has the better slides and also more experience in the field, so if you do have a choice, I would probably choose him. Here are my comments on the course in general (this applies for both Dr. Mamat and Cliff's sections): - All the class information is available here: https://bakalian.cs.umd.edu/330 - Literally 44% of your grade is free. Why do I say this? Projects make up 40% of your grade and you get around two weeks for each of them (give or take). You can ask questions, ask the TAs, look up documentation, submit as many times as you want, etc. within those two weeks. Each project took me between two and eight hours. There is literally no reason not to get 100% on every project as long as you don't procrastinate. The median on every project was between 97% to 100%. So again, there's literally no reason not to get 100% on every project, and they make up 40% of your grade. - 4% of your grade is lecture quizzes, which are completely open internet. You can run the code on your own machine, and the lowest couple of lecture quizzes get dropped. So between the lecture quizzes and the projects, 44% of your grade should be completely free (as long as you don't procrastinate). - The quiz medians were: Quiz 1: 14.5/20, Quiz 2: 15/20, Quiz 3: 17.25/20, Quiz 4: 16/20. You get access to all of the course's quizzes and solutions from previous semesters, which is helpful for studying. I honestly found the quizzes to be harder than the midterms. I will say, though, that I didn't do very well on the first two quizzes, but after that, I started buckling down and really studying and I got 100s on the last two quizzes. You'll be fine as long as you study and really understand the content. - 46% of your grade is two midterms and the final. The medians were: Midterm 1: 83, Midterm 2: 87.5, Final (with extra credit): 89.48. Just like the quizzes, you get access to every previous midterm and their answer key, and around ~85% of the content on these exams is the same every semester. They do change things up a bit sometimes (like I think we did more garbage collection than they did in previous semesters), but most of the exams cover very similar content to previous semesters, so it's really helpful to take previous exams for practice. And yes, there's extra credit too. - The discussions were fine. I didn't find them too helpful. There were good review questions, but they were all in a publicly-available GitHub repository that you could look at without going to discussion. Honestly, unless you're really confused about something, you can usually just look up your question online or on Piazza. There are a gazillion resources out there for Ocaml and Rust. For Cliff in particular, I thought his lectures are okay. He goes at a very manageable pace; definitely not fast by any means. He can get pretty theoretical sometimes. He answers questions well. TLDR; This is a fairly easy class as long as you don't procrastinate on your projects and do previous quizzes/exams as practice. I would recommend not starting the projects any later than the weekend before they're due. You could definitely knock them out over the weekend (if you don't mind working on the weekends). I thought the content was fairly interesting, although obviously that's extremely subjective and is up to how interested you are in this type of stuff. I would recommend taking Dr. Mamat but it really doesn't matter that much.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/20/2024	im just gonna say that i don’t think that cliff is a bad professor in terms of exams and quizzes. everything was super fair and as long as you understood what was happening in class, you were fairly fine. that being said, i’m not sure if im fully convinced that he’s a good lecturer. i went to every lecture and tried to pay attention, but a lot of times it seemed like he was just talking to himself. i also didn’t really like the format of his slides since when i was going through them on my own time, if i hit the wrong key i’d end up like four slides ahead. i really liked his notes, though, and they really helped during projects (which are very cool btw!!). overall, i think you’re eventually going to have to end up self-studying most of the content (especially rust), but he’s not a bad professor to take.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/20/2024	To sum things up concisely, the topics covered in this class aren't bad, but Cliff's lecturing style hurts overall engagement. I could not attend an entire lecture without sleeping or doing other work. Most of my productive learning came from reading Anwar's slides and Cliff's notes and starting the projects early. Exams, on the other hand, were pretty chill. They were very similar to past semester exams posted on the website. The quizzes were meh. As many others have mentioned, the first quiz is generally the worst. After we took the first quiz, my TA said, "Congrats, guys. The first quiz historically has a D average." Don't panic about the first one; the others are much better. Overall, three stars for many opportunities to help your grade/do well. Minus two stars for Cliff's lecture engagement.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/19/2024	DO NOT WORRY ABT THIS CLASS Cliff is my goat. Yes, sometimes lectures can be a bit messy, but he's really good at explaining things one-on-one AND his notes are fantastic. If going to lecture isn't doing it for you, I suggest going through his notes instead. Projects are actually great, and complement/reinforce what was covered in lecture. Finally, he provides basically every quiz or exam for the class from the past 5 years, and assessments this semester were always similar to those in the past. So, grind those past quizzes and exams and you'll be chilling. And if that wasn't enough, he gave us 2% extra credit for basically free (filling out the course eval survey and attending discussion). The 75th percentile was a 95. That means more than 25% of people got an A. You do not have to worry about 330 if you're taking it with Cliff. Just sit back and enjoy learning without stressing about your grades!
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/19/2024	Lectures are terrible, but I highly recommend attending Anwar's lectures. The material covered in class is often straightforward, but he tends to overcomplicate it and deliver ineffective lectures. When he taught a concept like "NFA to DFA," I realized I wouldn’t be attending his lectures anymore. The TAs, on the other hand, do a much better job explaining topics. They use a table-based approach for concepts like NFA to DFA, making it simple to understand. Unfortunately, Cliff skips such practical explanations and complicates the material unnecessarily. While it might seem easy to grasp once you already understand the topic, he doesn’t adequately cover the basics, which is crucial for students learning it for the first time. The 330 projects were often quite challenging, but I understood their importance since it’s a project-based class, and I was okay with that. However, if you're trying to learn effectively, I strongly advise avoiding Cliff and opting for Anwar instead. They also offered a 2% grade boost if you completed the course evaluation and attended at least eight discussions, which was a nice. Additionally, my discussion section leader was extremely helpful. They covered critical topics that were essential for quizzes and midterms, so I recommend attending those sessions. Some of the coding questions from previous finals were ridiculously difficult, almost as challenging as the projects. However, in Fall 2024, we got lucky, as the difficulty seemed more reasonable.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/16/2024	This course was co-taught this semester with Anwar Mamat, but Cliff was okay as a teacher. His teaching didn't work for me, perhaps because he often doesn't explain how things connect too well or motivate the topics we're doing in class. Often, I'd feel more confused about a topic after hearing Cliff explain it in a lecture. Thus, after finding lectures futile, I just used the posted slides and notes, which proved to be more helpful. For logistics, he gives weekly take-home quizzes, which are meant to be collaborative—but they can basically just be seen as forced studying material, or like homework. Moreover, he gives four quizzes throughout the semester, which take place in discussion and are good for forcing us to study material, aside from exams. The exams were pretty fair, admittedly they were probably easier than they could've been (which I appreciate). The Final, however, I found pretty challenging overall. Ultimately, this class is quite confusing and Cliff didn't ever really help clear any ambiguity of this sort, but if you can learn the material through the slides or notes then it's rather easy from there.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/11/2024	He's a cool professor. Average at lecturing and boring at times but he'll crack jokes and answer student's questions very well. The course content itself is boring. Probably the most boring CS class I've taken (but not Cliff's fault lol). Medium difficulty and easier than 216 IMO. I'd recommend taking cliff and think his more recent reviews reflect him better than the old ones. Seemed like he wasn't too good at lecturing as a fresh grad I guess, but he worked out the kinks from his previous course mishaps and lecturing style. Also lectures are not recorded but his slides are detailed and he gives a ton of extra practice. There's easy weekly lecture quizzes, and he posts all the previous semester's exams and quizzes so there's a TON of study material.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/09/2024	First, the cons, which is mainly one thing: - His lecturing style did NOT work for me. It's pretty disorganized, and though I pretty much stopped going to class altogether after about a month, I didn't often walk out of class with a good sense of what had just been taught. The lecture slides are kind of all over the place and skim the concepts very quickly, and the he just kind of freehands examples in VIM. You can tell during lecture that the class is pretty disengaged. HOWEVER, there are a lot of things that I appreciated about Cliff's class! He was co-teaching with Anwar, and I heard similar complaints about his lectures from other people. To be honest, I ended up mainly just self-teaching, which I've never done before honestly, and reading Cliff's notes (which are great, READ THEM if you don't want to get tripped up on T/F questions) and Anwar's slides before quizzes/exams. It worked out okay for me, but I don't know if I'd be excited to do it again. The projects are pretty challenging and time consuming, but they leave you with a great understanding of the material. In addition to just studying before tests, I think that the projects did a lot of the teaching for me in this class. There are extensive review materials before the midterms and the midterms enjoyably employed an extremely similar structure to Spring 2024, so they were super doable. Quizzes were hit or miss but oh well.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/08/2024	I'm not sure why Cliff has low-ish reviews. I guess that CS students love complaining that the professors whose lectures they don't attend are bad at teaching. I'll start with the bad, because honestly, there is not that much. Firstly, he doesn't post his notes on time. Most of the time, his notes are posted days after the lecture went over them, which can be quite annoying for those who like to review notes before or after lectures. Secondly, he's somewhat disorganized when teaching, and his in-class reviews and examples are all over the place. Other than that, he's an amazing professor. He has plenty of review material for both quizzes and exams, and has practice utilities. The exams and quizzes are also very fair. Some of the projects can be tedious, but he gives ample time for students to complete the projects, which are integrated very well into the material that is taught. Overall, a pretty good professor.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/06/2024	Pros: - The lectures were informative, substantive with both slideshows and coding demoes. I thought discussions were a great way to practice the material. - The interactive exercises that TAs and the professors coded that were listed on the class website were great (e.g., lambda calculus, nfa to dfa). - The practice exams and quizzes were also very helpful. - The lecture quizzes and discussion quizzes also made sure I was prepared. - The projects also were generally very good, especially making me think with the secret tests - TAs are very very helpful at helping me think about the problem and push me in the right direction without giving me the answer, and just explaining concepts in general. - Office hours are very efficient. He uses Quuly which is an app for managing office hours without needing a whiteboard or just trying to figure out who's a TA and who's a student. It tells you the expected wait time and options for both virtual and in-person office hours. I would highly recommend going to office hours on days other than the 2 days before the project, because then you'll get attention almost immediately. Basically the course is very well-structured, grading is very fair, content is very interesting and valuable, course load is very manageable for a hard-working student, and lectures are self-contained (meaning you don't really need to learn the content outside the class). You won't go wrong with Cliff, he's a great lecturer, runs a great class, and I would highly recommend. That said, this was my hardest class of the semester and the most significant amount of time. But that's just me. Cons: - Personally, I thought Cliff's public speaking needs improvement. He paces and has lots of vocal fillers. Sometimes he talks in a tone that makes him sound bored or frustrated. But none of this actually matters. - Sometimes he runs into errors during his coding demoes in lecture and wastes time debugging which he should have done before lecture. I think it's unprofessional - Most of the time when I failed a test in a project it was because the project instructions didn't specify what I needed to do in that case, so I had to go to office hours to figure it out. But that didn't take much time. - Too many times he finished lecture early. I think if I added all of that time together, we could have fit in at least 1 or 2 more lectures with more content. I am strongly opposed to classes ending earlier than the schedule.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 11/18/2024	He's a great professor. He's really lenient with extensions which is something I myself have appreciated with; he is reasonable with course requirements. Definitely take.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 10/04/2024	5 stars because even though lectures weren't really my style, they were informative and covered the material well, and anything else you need is in his posted notes. The main thing I disliked was his use of typing things into a REPL and explaining using that instead of pre-preparing notes and going over them with us - the same info was gotten, but it was much harder to take live notes effectively, and led to some errors in lecture. I went to his office hours once and he personally and patiently explained a concept to me until I understood, which was nice. He also co-teaches with the other prof each semester, so if you hate his teaching style you can just use the other prof's notes. Exams and quizzes are odd for me to review. In my semester, I found them very easy. I checked out a friend's exam when she got it back and they look a bit harder now, though quizzes look the same. However, the profs generally share exams/quizzes so this isn't really a big thing to choose Cliff/not choose Cliff. I was in the class with the 11.5 average (/20) quiz1, and got almost full points - the main issue was that it focused a lot on a small concept (the one that he explained to me one-on-one, actually), so anyone who wasn't comfortable with that was a bit screwed. However, he gives full copies with answers for all past semester quizzes, so it was clear that this concept was important and you had material to study for it with. The topics are very conceptual. I think this class is like an "intro to compilers" more than anything else. They introduce a lot of concepts that aren't super useful on their own but could turn out useful if you do research or language development, especially. There are also a few small things that are useful (intro to git, use of map/reduce(fold), PBT, regex) in general coding work as well. Overall okay class, enjoyed it with Cliff.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/28/2024	CS 330, a hard class they say, But I never did much work anyways They groan and they sweat and sometimes they cry But to that I say "I didn't even have to try" Speaking seriously, Cliff's 330 is a great class and not very difficult. You'll learn a lot from his projects. Take him!
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/22/2024	Loved the class, very little busy work, intentful projects, fair exams. There are once a week lecture quizzes where you can collaborate with people so it's not hard to get a good grade on those and they act as a little grade boost. He and anwar gave extra credit that was max 1% that came from discussion attendance/participation. I never went to discussion so I didn't really get those points but it's easy to get those. He also gave 1% if 90% of your section did the course evals at the end of the semester. The projects to take a while but I really liked them. Just make sure to start them early so you're not working for 12 hours straight for 3 days in a row like me. The 4 quizzes throughout the semester were kinda hard but not too bad if you studied. The biggest complaint was about the final this semester. The general consensus was that it was really hard(I studied a while so I did alright) but the average was 68 and he did not curve it. One other issue was the handling of exam 1. I was in a section that had a fire alarm go off right before we took the exam so ours got postponed two days. This was fine but our lecture's exam average/median were about 10% under the other classes. But, at the end of the semester, I only got a 5% boost on that exam, so I think they either curved it on a bell curve or just didn't curve it as much as I think they should have. This probably won't happen again so thats not really an issue in the future but just something to note.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/19/2024	Clippy? More like Cliffy. Cliff is honestly a pretty great lecturer in my opinion, despite what I came in thinking. Although all of his lectures are mostly him typing in VIM, so it's pretty hard to take structured notes, I think he explains topics quite well, and his notes on the 330 website are pretty great and do much more than what's needed. Tests are really fair, though sometimes some questions are a bit tricky (nowhere near as bad as something like a Yoon question though lol). Quizzes are honestly kind of easy to mess up from my experience, but there's only 4 of them and they only make up 10% of the grade. I will say my main strike against this class is the fact that it's pretty disorganized at many points. This comes up in many ways, but just one of them is the fact that projects and their descriptions could be quite unclear. I also wish Piazza was a tiny bit more responsive: sometimes there were questions we really wanted to have answered, but they were sorta delayed. But really, I'll be honest, Cliff was honestly a pretty nice experience. Would give 4.5 stars if I could :)
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2024	Cliff runs the most organized class I’ve taken at UMD. Exams, projects, and quizzes were all fair, and I didn’t have any major complaints. His lectures are a bit boring, and his slides are practically useless, but his notes are really good. You should be aware that projects are modified/made from scratch during the semester, so some projects will have important clarifications after their release and the auto-grader is often released well after the project is. I’d definitely recommend taking him.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/15/2024	It was a good class. It was well taught and organized, and his notes were very good if you missed something in the lecture. The projects were all alright, although there is room for improvement with some (which will happen, as this was just after a major restructuring of the course). His Rust knowledge was a little spotty, though.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/14/2024	interesting class. cliff is cool. lectures could be better, but overall I enjoyed it.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/10/2024	I LOVE THIS MAN. He started off the first lecture saying something like "welcome to the best course in the cs department" and ngl looking back, he was not lying. I consistently sat in the first two rows (as was advised by friends who took 330 w Cliff in past semesters) which helped tremendously. I really like the course material too. There was a lot of interesting content that I feel would always use in my cs endeavors going forward. Quizzes were difficult, I consistently got 10-15/20 until the last quiz; they were difficult because the formatting kinda threw me off. Also, I'm such a fan of Rust that I'm sad we didn't get to use it a lot in this class. Some problems are that there are some lack of materials sometimes because of how much the course curriculum changes on a semesterly basis, but Anwar came in clutch by giving us the format for like exam 3 (?). Cliff sometimes goes a bit fast during his lectures, but sit in the front rows FOR REAL and you'll be an OCaml master in no time. Watch his cool hair flips and laugh at his snarky jokes. Yeah he's my favorite professor thus far.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 03/05/2024	(A)nd shall I compare Cliff to a summer’s day? (M)ethinks Cliff art more lovely and more temperate: (O), do Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, (G)olly, and summer’s lease hath all too short a date; (U)surp Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, (S)o often is his luscious majestic dark hair dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, (S)uch by chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd; (L)ore but thy eternal summer shall not fade, (A)nd nor lose possession of that clear Cliff ow’st; (Y)ap Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, (P)anic! When in eternal lines to time Cliff grow’st: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, (bruh) So long lives this, and this gives life to Cliff. #[derive(Debug)] In all honesty, Cliff tries his best and cares about the academic success and wellbeing of his students. Thanks for a great somewhat chaotic semester!
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/14/2024	exams werent bad at all, quizzes were hit or miss, but just make sure to manage your time with projects. cliff is a pretty decent lecturer as well. overall felt like a breath of fresh air compared to larry herman's 216-- no style points, mostly public/release tests, exams weighted a lot less than projects, extra credit if you participate, late tokens, etc. 330's also much more skill-based than rote memorization. my one complaint was there was a project that was very poorly written in the beginning of the semester. it was a terrible time trying to figure out how to interpret it even with the extension. but, projects after that were much clearer.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 01/03/2024	average lecturer. he's not bad by any means, but not the best either. since lectures are so long, it can get very boring to the point where you don't want to attend. his exams are of medium difficulty. some projects are not that bad, but a few of them are terrible, almost to the point where you cant even do it at all. quizzes are not that bad.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/28/2023	He is a pretty decent lecturer and is pretty kind. However, the course is designed to be a lot of self-teaching. For example, we jump into projects with three different languages that we are unfamiliar with and are expected to teach ourselves the syntax and find different functions to use. The discussion sections are helpful, but the quizzes are hard and we are not given a lot of study material. The past exams and quizzes do not relate to how the class is structured now, so it is hard to prepare for them. They do curve most of the assignments, which is helpful if you bomb one or two assignments in each category.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/26/2023	this class has a lot in terms of work but it’s not really too terrible in terms of difficulty. thought multiple times i was going to get like a 50 on a exam including the final but i was always surprised that i would score high 80s on them and it’s not cus im goated and all that it’s really just cus cliff is a decent teacher. Been a while since i saw B in a computer science class so yeah. Only few things sucked like quiz 1 and like 2 projects but it didn’t really affect me in the overall grand scheme of the class and my grade since if you get 50 percent on those things it was like only 7 percent gone. i imagine he’s going to learn from them as well to fix them and such. that being said, he could have small hiccups like those for future semesters and if youre a tryhard that might be an issue but cliff will sure try his best to accommodate to it if it happens. Overall i enjoyed having cliff as my teacher and i can definitely see him becoming a really good professor, dudes only like 25. his lectures were kind of boring tho but so is every professor i ever had except for justin
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/23/2023	Cliff is an ard professor in my opinion. Pros: good TAs fair exams and quizzes(except quiz 1) He tries his best to help the students Bonus points for participation Cons: boring lecturer does not record Some Difficult projects(Every CS coding class is going to have difficult projects so it is what it is) Overall this class was not that bad
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B+ frankMiller 12/21/2023	Took CMSC330: Organization of Programming Languages with Cliff Bakalian in Fall 2023 (CS major requirement). 1.5 stars for this class, I reserve 1 star for Kruskal. Felt like Cliff really did not care about the well-being and success of his students in their own terms, only did what he wanted. e.g. he feels that uploading answers is beneficial so he will upload but he will not go out of his way on anything else. Maybe he's not expected to, but it makes you miss a teacher for Nelson for example. Everything is available on the class website, fortunately: https://bakalian.cs.umd.edu/330/resources Cliff runs one of the better-administered courses, but he can still mess up: project is released really close to finals with no prior communication, exams taking forever to grade. Entire class was so theoretical I am worried. It's the 300 levels; when do things begin to relate to the real world? Probably not Cliff's fault, but I need to go out there and build things that people will pay me for, not just convert NFAs to DFAs and learn about lambda calculus theory. Exams: I felt these were brutal. Felt like no amount of preparation would prepare me for them. Projects were also brutal, for the first time I found myself liberally using up late tokens. Often unreasonably difficult and only achievable with a lot of stress, time, tears, and assistance. Heavy workload. Cliff has both positive and negative marking, so the grading is all over the place and you are hit with heavy penalties that will obliterate your score. Another recent reviewer from my batch mentioned how the exams are easy but I found them very difficult, maybe it's just me. Absolutely terrible lectures, Cliff is notorious for them. No idea what is going on. I only went for the participation points and to stay abreast somewhat of what was happening but basically you have to learn yourself. Discussions are bad, but not the fault of the TA who was very nice (Amr Tairi). But I felt that what we did discussion was not so helpful. Don't even get me started on the office hours -- both the TA office hours and Cliff office hours. Cliff will actually help you, the problem is that he is spending one hour with the person who came before you even though there is a queue of six people. I got fed up and went just once. TA office hours were objectively THE WORST and a NIGHTMARE, and yes it is Cliff's fault because he is the boss of the TAs. He let them walk all over him and do a bad job. Don't tell me it's not Cliff's fault; Cliff has created a culture. TAs are consistently excellent under Nelson because he actually cares about his students. - Tiny, two desk open area swarming with people, filled with off-duty TAs who just use it as a place to hang out and have a good time amidst all the suffering. - Takes HOURS to get a TA, during non-peak hours (e.g. day after the project is due) who: - Looks down upon you like you are some kind of parasite wasting their time - Doesn't even try to understand what you are saying - Basically just says "I cannot give you the answer" when all you are asking for is some guidance - Not only does not help, but gives you the WRONG answer - Spends five minutes with you and leaves. It was truly terrible. Frankly I've heard Kauffman teaches well, but everything else he does the same with Cliff. So maybe just take Kauffman and benefit from Cliff resources? I don't know, check out his reviews.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/20/2023	Very nice guy. He has pretty decent notes on his website, and we also have a piazza which is fairly responsive. His lectures aren't the best (half the time he walks in with his xps and starts typing in vim), but they basically cover the same amount of stuff as his notes, which makes it tempting to skip class. The projects are mostly good, as well. Overall, not a bad professor. The course content carried hard, though, since I personally found it interesting and at times fun.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/20/2023	"AFAIK cliff is cringe. cliff, cringe jk idk is cringe" - CMSC330 Final Summer 2023 Cliff is kind of a middle of the road professor at this time. The biggest problems currently are the lack of good project documentation and poor administration. With the project documentation, even outside of the dreaded project 2, the README's consistently left out important information which I needed to scrub through Piazza to get. With administration, projects were pretty much developed on the spot as far as I'm aware, as the autograder was consistently released well after the project start date, and project 8 had a massive delay. Both of these factors make projects much more of a pain than they need to be, as development problems are more often something poorly/not addressed in the README rather than programming logic errors, and "semipublic" testing is delayed until the autograder is up. In addition, while ultimately minor, the lectures were honestly fairly boring and disorganized, as many of them are freeform coding/drawing sessions, but the coding particularly doesn't work because much of the time is spent on coding instead of getting across the main points. Finally, 20 minutes for the quizzes just feels too short, and 25/30 minutes seems far more reasonable for the assessments they are. For the good, besides the project 8 fiasco, the TAs, Cliff, and Kauffman were all fairly active in responding to Piazza inquiries. Most of the projects themselves, except for the infamous project 2, have all boiled down to reasonable implementations. The lecture quizzes were fairly useful, and the amount of forgiveness on them was really nice (I missed one by accident and still got full credit for lecture quizzes). Exam weighting made exams not overly stressful, and the exams themselves were incredibly fair, which was nice after taking some past exams with fairly memorization-heavy questions (like coding an OCaml parser from memory). Finally, Cliff and the TA's seem to know when things were screwed up, such as with quiz 1 and project 2, which is reassuring. Overall, you will likely do well with Cliff. Exam averages were around 85 across the board, and nothing seemed too unreasonable at the end of the day (well, almost). I think he's middle of the road right now, but chances are with a bit of fine tuning, he'll turn out to be a great professor. Hopefully things get sorted out, as I understand the course is going through some growing pains right now. At the end of the day, I would still recommend Cliff. That is, if you had the choice, as CS class registration is in a terrible place right now. One more thing, I didn't really like Rust as the final language of 330. It kind of just boiled down into a mess of language rules, and the rust projects were not as effective as the OCaml projects in getting us acquainted to the language imo. The original plan was to tack on Racket, and honestly, I would have much rather had that instead of Rust, as I feel it ties into the themes of the course much better. It also has the side effect (get it) of preparing us better for 430.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/19/2023	Overall, I thought Cliff was decent. 40% of your grade comes from projects. The only projects that were annoying were project 2 and project 6. Project 2 in my opinion was too much. Period. Project 6 was okay, but the evaluator part was somewhat annoying. You have 2 mid terms both 12% and one final worth 22%. All exams are very fair, except the year I took it Kauffman and Cliff were coteaching. I think some exams were written by Kauffman. Then you have quizzes and lecture quizzes. Lecture quizzes are fine and the quizzes are okay. When I took it, people performed poorly on quiz 1. Cliff as a lecturer is okay. He definitely can get boring at times, but goes over all the content you need to know. He is also extremely helpful in OH. The class also has a large amount of TA's. That's a plus as well.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/17/2023	As a student, it feels to me that he designs the projects simply to trick students and not help them learn anything- showcases how smart he is! Looking back, I don't really understand why he taught the way he did as I don't know what I learned. On the other hand, watching the other instructor's (Kauffman) lectures really helped me learn and also appreciate the course a lot more. Avoid Cliff as much as possible if you want to maximize a stress free schedule while also getting value out of the class instead.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/16/2023	Very good choice for 330. Pros: - Has notes for each topic that gives more information than the lectures - Office hours are very helpful (both Cliff's and the TA's) - Lecture Quizzes that are easy and give a small grade boost - Content on exam is spread out so there aren't too many points on one topic - Also exams aren't hard - Listens to feedback about class assignments Cons: - Projects can be hard at times - A few of the projects were also confusing but TA's were responsive on piazza - Quizzes were hard (There are 4 in total each weighed 2.5%) Overall: If you start projects early (Basically the day they come out) and you use office hours, they're doable. Study for quizzes and exams. If you study throughout the semester, studying for exams won't be as bad. Also make sure you understand the topics well since you will (most likely) have a project on it.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/16/2023	Chill and class covers some interesting content. Some projects (especially project 2) were hard because of a lack of organization and foresight in project descriptions; if you had Larry and complained about his long project descriptions, these projects will make you appreciate them. Overall I think he was alright, I think a lot of salty people leave bad reviews because they are being confronted with the fact that a CS degree requires learning about how computers and programming actually works and not just making JS web-apps or something. So many people don't go to lecture but I highly recommend it, if you don't he has very good notes as supplement though.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/16/2023	Cliff is really smart but his teaching style really did not work for me. He did a decent job of giving us the content, but does a bad job of explaining how the topics that we learn intertwine together, so it feels like we are learning random arbitrary topics for a while until the pieces finally go together in your own head. The projects in this class were a mess. I believe a TA wrote project 2, and the description was really vague and no one really had any clue how to do it. Project 6 was also a really poorly written project – both needed added resources halfway through the project to help students understand what they had to do.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/15/2023	Cliff is a good lecturer, I think most of these reviews are overly harsh. Cliff's lectures are boring, but he makes great lecture notes so going to class is practically optional. Exams are incredibly fair. My only complaint with Cliff is that some of the projects were too difficult and took too much time, and I wasn't a fan of having quizzes (only four though), but other than that he is a great lecturer.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/15/2023	Cliff is the definition of mid, the definition of a 3 star professor. Basically every aspect about his class structure and personality is mid. Not bad, not good. - Lectures: Sometimes very informative, sometimes big wastes of time. Sometimes I'm engaged; most of the time I am not. The semester started with him using slides (which were really just visual aids for him and didn't serve as useful notes), but devolved into him just typing notes into Vim later into the semester as he talked. Lots of time wasted trying to spell correctly. Publishes decently useful notes. - Exams: Two midterms. Usually pretty fair if not easy. Usually hits you with a couple really ambiguous multiple choice or true/false but he double majored in philosophy so he likes things abstract and theoretical. Cumulative final. - Projects: Some were really, really hard. Others were fine. Lets you submit as many times as possible. No grading on style-- just tests, and usually these are all public or a mix of public and semipublic. Secret tests were on a couple projects but not most. As a result, they took a long time, but as long as you were able to get through it, they were easy guaranteed As. Project descriptions were kind of terse and didn't really describe what to do in edge cases, and I often had to rely on Piazza posts to get a full understanding of the project. But to be fair, going from Larry to Cliff was a big jump and usually he just doesn't test weird edge cases like Larry would. - Discussions: Completely optional unless there is a quiz. Dates for discussion quizzes given at the start of the semester. Quizzes are sometimes a time crunch. 4 quizzes throughout the semester. - Reachability: I went to Cliff's office hours once and he was kind of standoffish. I've heard TAs are helpful and they are very responsive and helpful on Piazza. - Personality: I think Cliff is a chill guy but often times he just kind of came off as boring. He's weirdly interested in unconventional programming languages like Shakespeare and INTERCAL, but luckily this class's content allows him to talk about that a little and relate it to the lecture content and it was decently interesting. I'm basically entirely indifferent to Cliff. The class was fine. The semester was fine. I performed fine and am expecting an A. Wouldn't mind taking him again.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/28/2023	very mid ngl -good notes -horribly boring lectures -some well-written projects -some very disorganized projects -exams are like practices -quizzes are pretty chill other than the first one -not insanely challenging exam wise -projects are more tedious and leave more to interpretation -tas are good, but they are always in the room and like never helping -quick piazza posts long story short, idt i learned shit, but this class isn't the worst
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/26/2023	very chill and fun guy (nice hair), nice tas too extremely helpful detailed note pages and fairly decent, understandable lectures quiz 1 and project 2 were absurdly difficult but he seems receptive to feedback - gave extra late tokens after the horrors of project 2 and pretty much every project and quiz after has been easier and more reasonable not a perfect class but it feels like he's down to earth and working to improve which is always good
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 11/16/2023	Nothing against Cliff but I am at a loss for words regarding the new projects introduced this semester (Project 2 and Project 6). If you can't provide a solid description for each project, how do you expect students to understand what they are being tested on for secret tests? it is a guessing game at this point and a good chunk of your grade is at stake.
Cliff Bakalian Expecting an A Anonymous 11/14/2023	This guy needs to chill. He has no teaching experience, is a mediocre programmer and his projects are outrageous (not only are the descriptions useless, but test cases are convoluted and meaningless). He is a terrible lecturer. Take Kauffman if you can.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 11/12/2023	organized class and some extra credit(<2%). but the lectures arent the best. OH should help though
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 11/12/2023	Don't take this class lightly. I got an A+ in CMSC216, but it seems like every project in this class is worse than the next. Despite never procrastinating on them and starting the day they're assigned, sometimes it's just not feasible to finish the projects without spending over 20 hours on them. The project descriptions are vague, and whenever I went to office hours, the TA's agreed that compared to the semesters they took this course, the projects seemed more harsh and convoluted. I will say, Cliff is good at explaining the topics, the TA's are wonderful at explaining things and even if you're stuck with a crappy one for your discussion section, there's enough that if you go to office hours you WILL get any question you have about material answered. The material itself isn't overly challenging, and the tests are fair with a lot of practice material provided. But for a class so heavily dependent on the projects, I wish they'd put more thought into the workload they're assigning.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/10/2023	Cliff is an incredibly boring lecturer but he provides you with every resource you need to succeed. Practice quizzes and exams are super helpful. This semester, one quiz and one project were extremely difficult but the difficulty has since gone down.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/09/2023	I think these reviews are generally too tough. The only thing holding my review back from 5 stars is the quizzes, which feel unnecessarily stressful, despite only being 2.5% of your grade each. Other than that, I think the class is taught well, and I really like Cliff's lecture notes, which cover basically everything that happens in lecture, and are very well-written. He also gives you access to previous exams and quizzes to study. The projects are probably more difficult then they should be, but if you start early you will be fine.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 11/05/2023	Absolutely horrendous projects, they basically boil down to whether you can guess what he wants you to do.
Cliff Bakalian Anonymous 10/18/2023	Dont neglect this class
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 09/30/2023	Cliff needs to chill with these quizzes
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 09/22/2023	The two reviews below were unnecessarily mean and did not explain in enough detail. Look, Cliff's a good guy. And he's smart. But there have already been so many unclear things this semester, leaving a lot of the class frustrated. The first quiz was rough. The median score was 11.5/20. The reason for this is largely the fact that we had only 20 minutes for two write-in coding portions, plus other fill-in-the-bubble questions, a few of which were annoying trick questions. Project 2 was worse. The description was imprecise, and I had to turn to Piazza to understand what exactly he wanted, which nobody should have to do. Not to mention the fact that it was far too difficult for a project that was primarily intended to test your knowledge of regular expressions. I had to give up after spending my entire Friday night & whole day Saturday on it, while still failing two semi-publics. I've never had to do that in the past (granted, I had Larry Herman for my past two project based classes, who is probably way TOO descriptive). The most difficult part of the project also had nothing to do with any new content, and everything to do with (a) understanding what the heck we're even supposed to be writing, and (b) basically recursion stuff, which we all know how to do, but which was further complicated by various things Cliff had done to intentionally make the project more difficult. There have been several other things. One is that, up until maybe the day before the first quiz, the syllabus had said that quizzes were open-note. And they weren't. Next, navigating his slides are like navigating fields of landmines. The slides have like three layers to them, and you can go up, down, left, or right. Which is further complicated by the fact that the slides appear to have a mind of their own, and they'll shift to random places when hitting the left or right arrows, when all you want to do is go back or forward one slide. Perhaps Cliff's saving grace is the fact that he, and his large army of TAs, respond fairly quickly to Piazza posts. And he has notes online that have basically all the content, which is a plus. He is not a terrible lecturer at all, and he knows his stuff, which can't be said of everyone. And I genuinely feel bad that he's getting so much heat right now. But he does have some things to work on. I hope he realizes that, and the rest of the semester can be smoother.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 09/21/2023	Just countering the most recent 2 ratings after this (as a different/current) student There was a recent project that was convoluted and made by some TA(s). There were a lot of typos and it was confusing and vague. Cliff tried his best being super responsive on Piazza and clearing up any questions so I really wouldn't blame him. It was just not a good time overall for students and I understand ppl are stressed hence the bad reviews below. But overall Cliff so far has been really great
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 09/20/2023	Horrible project descriptions making your life hell
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 09/20/2023	kid thinks hes philosophical with it but hes just booooooooooring and the projects are dog water
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 09/19/2023	Terrible assignment descriptions, unfair quizzes, unhelpful explanations.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 09/19/2023	Boring lecturer but cannot write a coherent project description to save his life. Cliff needs to take ENGL393 or something before attempting to write a project.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 09/12/2023	Nice guy. Had him for 330 after 250 in the fall of 2022 and he taught the class pretty well. Quizzes and exams were pretty fair game and you'll be fine if you practice his old papers and go to office hours for help. Cliff is approachable in his office hours and explains stuff pretty well. Will miss him. Cliff, if you see this, thanks for being a good prof for a year. Have a good rest of your life
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 05/29/2023	Lectures are very dull and monotone. But as long as you start on the projects they seemed alright (this class is horrible for procrastinators). I would recommend using class slides from other classes as well because Cliff's slides are really hard to navigate. Overall, decent class and he is understanding but doesn't really check his emails.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- atp236 05/28/2023	330 with Cliff was a solid choice. 330 as a class: this class was run much better than 216, so that was a breath of fresh air. There were a lot of TAs to handle OH, and the TAs I got help from knew what they were doing. There was a lot of practice material online from previous semesters, but I feel like the style of questions changed this spring 2023 semester because assessments were all in-person instead of online. However, I will say the exams and quizzes were fair game (if you really understand the material, I think it’s possible to do well, though I flopped them myself Projects were within reason if you vaguely understand the topics, start early, visit OH, and get the help that you need. Cliff as a lecturer: he got the job done (I mean he really is the only option so you can’t escape unless you drop out…?). He covered everything that was tested on (whether it be verbally or through writing), though I will say there were a few times I probably fell asleep in that lecture hall. Going to discussion to learn how to do NFA to DFA and OpSem were helpful. Overall, I wouldn’t be too worried about this class with Cliff. I felt much less stressed in 330 with Cliff compared to 216.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/26/2023	- Good professor who is engaging and is very communicative with his students - Very easy to email or to reach out to - exam accurately reflects content in the course - Large amount of TA’s in Office Hours (sometimes takes a while to get help if u go at a bad time, but overall good amount of TA’s)
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B- akl2025 05/26/2023	Amazing professor. Helpful TAs. Definitely recommend him. Pros: - Resources: you have all you need to review for quizzes and exams. Go to the class website and practice! - Office hours: a lot of smart TAs are there to help. Cons: - Quizzes/Exams: I don't think I'm great at functional programming because I usually struggle with the topics. Even when I understand the contents, I make lots of dumb mistakes and I lose a lot of points on exams. But if you thrive, then congrats! - Lectures: sometimes boring and dry, but you have the notes and TAs. A few words of advice: start the projects early! Don't procrastinate. Have a good time management because you definitely will need it while doing the project and reviewing for the quiz or exam. Have a study group, too!
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/21/2023	Cliff is nice and his exams are fair. He has a lot of great TA's and the projects are also not bad at all. The only con I'd say is that Cliff's lecture style is a bit dull and boring to endure for 75 minutes, which I think could be fixed by recording his lectures, but Cliff does not seem to be interested in recording his lectures. But other than that, he's great!
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/20/2023	Probably my favorite CS class I've taken. Cliff's lectures are good if you can stay awake (I usually did not). Exams are straightforward and fair. Project were reasonable difficulty and really helped reinforce concepts learned in class. He does not record his lectures, but do have pretty good lecture notes, some topics do not have notes but I had no problem using online resources to get through. There was a slight curve at the end for my semester. Overall, a solid professor.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/19/2023	Pretty good teacher. Actually cares about how the students are doing and has extended deadlines for projects when everyone was struggling. Only things that were annoying were there always being several errors on the exams that are found while we are taking the exam. Also he didn't lectures for some reason. In substitute for not recording the lectures, he would put out his own notes that he produced. These notes were usually pretty good imo but he just stopped making them towards the last month. For the Rust and garbage collection, he just linked us to previous year's slides which annoyed me.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 05/18/2023	He has good notes on the topics and gives a lot of practice exams to use for studying
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/17/2023	Cliff for 330 is by far the best choice. Some words of advice would be to start the projects early as the majority of them will be difficult and time consuming, but they are all doable. He give a lot of great resources and his TAs are all really good and knowledgeable, plus he has a lot of them, more than I've seen in any other class I've taken.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 05/15/2023	You're in good hands. Good lecturer, very helpful on piazza. Absolute memelord as well and has lego kits on display in his office. About the review that complained about Exam 1, all you had to do was explain what you roughly did. You could even bullshit and come up with a solution on the spot as long as you knew what the project was (you should). The other part of that question was literally just a critical thinking exercise (as long as you did the project). Also, if a project is due before the exam, it's fair game and you know that.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/15/2023	Kind of nerdy, cool guy. Decent lecturer, but he doesn't record. Just show up and that doesn't matter. Rough but doable projects, one in particular was extremely difficult but as usual, start early and you'll be fine. Pretty reasonable exams and quizzes. Just show up to class, pay attention and take good notes, and you'll do well.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a C- Anonymous 05/14/2023	Cliff's overall a great professor and class is not too hard. My grade likely doesn't reflect that statement, but that's entirely my fault.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/09/2023	the structuring of this class was actually perfect. only issue was that he was very mistake prone and he didn't record lectures while kline did, which lowkey saved everyone
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/08/2023	Cliff is a good professor. His lectures may seem monotonous but if your listen and take notes you will understand the topic. Projects are perfect, not too easy neither too hard. The Worst part is Slides. OMG Cliff has a map like slides which are so vague and annoying. This was so difficult cuz even if you listen in lecture towards the end of the semester you might need review concepts and his slides are just a big disappointment.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/08/2023	Cliff is a great professor for this class. He is always well prepared for lectures, he has a dry humor that is engaging and he explains concepts clearly with good examples. The projects are challenging but we are given plenty of time and they are really interesting. He is understanding and gives discussion notes on the class github that are great for helping us with where to start on projects. I had a lot of fun in this class. He slays.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/06/2023	Cliff managed to take an incredibly well-designed course put together by professors like Jose and David Van Horn and turn it into a disorganized mess. It seemed like he almost never actually prepared for lecture or planned content out ahead of time. Rather than providing slides, Cliff would often just whip out a sheet of paper and decide what we would cover that day on a whim. I felt like he did a disservice to the content of this course and am disappointed that he will be the only instructor for it again next semester. The only reason I am not giving him one star is that he is very understanding of students' concerns. However, it seemed to me throughout the semester that Cliff was more interested in playing the part of a "cool professor" than competently doing his job as a lecturer. He has a lot of room to improve.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/06/2023	I like Cliff. He's a pretty chill dude and has blimps of humor here and there. I would heavily recommend going to lecture even if he has online slides because he covers material that may be difficult to understand strictly from reading. The projects are hard but reasonable if you stay on track and don't procrastinate. Expect to spend a decent amount of time on them, but once you complete them, you'll feel like a god.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 05/01/2023	Taking 330 with Cliff is the right choice. Projects are challenging but not overly so, and his lectures are good, albeit a bit boring. But, he is funny and accessible and gets a lot of points for that.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/30/2023	Cliff is a really cool guy; I found his lecture’s interesting and he explains the concepts really well. The projects are fun and he always went over helpful examples in class to help us get started. He is very detail oriented and explains thoroughly which I appreciated. I think he made this class very enjoyable!
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A mbatukam 04/29/2023	HIs lectures are boring and he puts a lot of time into explaining irrelevant things rather than the main points. The projects are pretty well written though, they have steps/helper functions that you put together to make the final thing
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 04/05/2023	Overcomplicates lectures. Easy topics are discussed in such convoluted ways. Throws out terms and uses then without properly defining them. Dry lectures, doesn't record. lecture slides are subpar, however he does give decent notes that accompany the slides. Some trivial exam questions. However Exam 1 for this year was terrible, he expected us to remember how we implemented projects from a month or two ago. The data structure was super complex and he just expected us to remember how we did it.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 04/01/2023	CMSC330 is a tough class. Go to office hours and start the projects early. Set aside a lot of time to prepare for the exams/quizzes/bi-weekly lecture quizzes.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 03/12/2023	Cliff was super nice and chill. I honestly didn't learn a whole lot but I think that may be the way Discrete Structures is as a class. His hair is mad luscious too. The exams were online when I took it in spring 2022, and they were very fair. His class did kinda reward cheating behavior, but I didn't mind it personally.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 03/10/2023	Really nice instructor. He's quite approachable during his office hours and answers questions or explains concepts really well. He has started from the basics many times even though it's repetitive/obvious. His lectures were quite good and I enjoyed his classes.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B+ theGreat 01/20/2023	Pros: - lots of good TAs - nice guy that will try to answer your questions Cons: - difficult to contact - provided lecture notes are horrible - often in lecture he gets lost and doesn't know what hes talking about which is kinda annoying - overall just felt like he didn't know the content very well and wasn't great at teaching it either. It was his first time teaching the course though so ill give him the benefit of the doubt.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 01/03/2023	Decent instructor, but lectures can sometimes be boring. Exams (in-person) and quizzes (online) are fair but require studying. Weekly-ish homeworks were tricky at times but a few got dropped. Some TAs were very helpful and took time outside of discussion (which doesn't consist of graded assignments) for exam review sessions. The content itself isn't too difficult but can require some practice to understand. Would recommend taking it with him.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/03/2023	I wanted to like Cliff, I really did. He was a bad lecturer. He often got confused during lecture and his style was extremely different from what we were expected to replicate, making it impossible to do well in the class without studying the style guide. I stopped going to his lectures completely and instead watched Paul Kline's recorded lectures that we had access to while they co-taught. When I talked to him in person about issues with his TAs and their grading though, he was very understanding and willing to help with regrade requests.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 12/29/2022	I was really disappointed by Cliff's teaching. He seems like a really chill guy and was very helpful during office hours. However, his teaching was pretty uneventful. To begin, his slides were impossible to use. He decided to use reveal.js which, while being very sleek and clean, forced you to look through a 2D maze to try and find what you were looking for. Add to that transitions which prevented all necessary info from showing on the overview made it a mission to try and find a formula or method to do a problem. His lecturing wasn't fantastic either. He would mumble through his slides and not do a lot of in-class practice problems. A more class-wide issue was style. Having a style guide was very helpful in showing what would be accepted as homework/test answers. However, it would be more helpful to designate a specific way of doing a problem/signs to use to prevent confusion when one professor uses one symbol/method, the other uses different ones, and the TAs use whichever their profs used when they took the class. Although the previous gripes made the class frustrating, Cliff was very fair about how he ran the class. Each homework could get a 10% boost if you used Latex (which is not hard to learn/use) and almost every test/quiz had an extra credit question that was very possible to get right. He gave opportunities to submit homework late for full credit and even gave a supplement to a question on the first midterm that did not go well initially to boost test grades. He also gave a survey to gauge class satisfaction after the first midterm. All in all, a fair class but with sub-par teaching. 10/10 hair and fit though (worth an extra star).
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/24/2022	Great professor who understands what the students are dealing with and changes/adapts to accordingly. This is only this second year teaching so there are a few rough edges but if you get in touch with him, he is more than happy to help. His slides could use a little more work especially towards the later chapters but at the same time, TAs release detailed notes on the topics discussed. There is also Justins Notes and the entire Fall 2020 250 class webpage to consult.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/22/2022	His TAs are inconsistent with grading. There have been multiple instances where my answer is basically the same as my friends but I get less points. I emailed Cliff for a regrade because it was impossible to get one done over gradescope (the TA wasn't taking my argument) and he never got back to me. The only reason I might get an A is because you get 10 extra points for using Latex on your homeworks, and two of them get dropped. I like his late tokens policy, even though I've never used them. I know it would have been nice to have that for some of my other classes. Cliff sometimes gets confused during his lectures, but it's understandable since he's not as experienced as other lecturers. Other than that, he did a pretty decent job of explaining the concepts. His TA took over one of his lectures, though, and I think she was a lot better.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/20/2022	I reviewed Cliff for 250 during Fall 2021 but I feel compelled to submit another review as I strongly disagree with his current rating and my opinion only strengthened when I took him for 330 during Spring 2022. He was an effective professor - sure he sometimes speaks monotonically, but he teaches the concepts very well. The pacing of his classes were perfect, and the projects and exams were extremely fair. He's also just a straight up nice guy; he's been through the UMD CS program himself and he knows how it is to be a student going through the very classes he's teaching. I strongly recommend Cliff, really can't go wrong by picking him.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A ceremonialgradematcha 12/17/2022	jose and cliff cotaught this semester and i had jose, but this class was run more like a cliff class (everything on gradescope, quizzes, an online exam1, etc.) so it seemed like cliff was in charge of (and i'll blame him more for) course administration. in other words, this review is solely for course organization and not for his actual teaching. - lecture quizzes did not match what i learned in lecture. just cause i don't have cliff doesn't mean my section matters any less, and it's up to the instructors to make sure they material and the quizzes sync up between them. - the 5 large quizzes were all 20 minutes each, when they needed more time. i don't know why 250 got 2-hour quizzes but 330 20-minute ones. - office hours were a crapshoot; half the tas couldn't do project 4. obviously this isn't directly reflective of the instructor but he should at least put some effort into making sure all his tas are at least capable of the basic things students are expected to do. - exam 1 was poorly organized. the exam was way too long, and it seemed like although the tas each submitted a question they thought was ok, the fact that almost no one managed to finish that exam in time showed that no one testsolved it and that the tas' questions weren't organized and selected well. again, my review is only relevant to courses he administrates, not his lecturing style or competency. so, if you actually have him for a class, ymmv.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/17/2022	Decent choice overall. Lectures can be a bit dry but the TA's are very helpful. Exams were pretty easy and fair
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/16/2022	Pros: - Slides are very detailed and easy to read - Goes through many examples when explaining concepts - Exams reflect content covered in lectures - Offers extra credit Cons: - Doesn't post lecture recordings
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 12/15/2022	Cliff is better professor for 330 than 250 IMO. He was definitely more interested in the material. Can be monotone at times, but covers the material well and gives a ton of practice resources for quizzes and exams.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/10/2022	I would stay away if possible. His class management is very poor and his teaching is horrible. He over complicates everything and makes stuff harder to understand than it needs to be. However, his exams are very fair.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/01/2022	Cliff is an alright choice for 250. He's not amazing at explaining new concepts but not terrible either. Tests were pretty easy, though, especially when compared to the homeworks. Not a bad choice by any means.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- log_n 08/04/2022	Just took CMSC330 with Cliff over the summer. The main issue with Cliff has been with his structure and administration of the course. Unclear deadlines and typos in assignments, quizzes, and slides were extremely commonplace when taking this course. Even what material we were going to cover over the condensed course was questioned a lot by the instructors and TAs. At one point, they even outright lied (probably not intentionally) about what was going to be covered/not covered on the final exam. All of this had a direct impact on the class, and this run of CMSC330 had some of the lowest exam averages on record (the class was curved substantially to make up for this). Apparently, this was due to Cliff somehow not being told that the course was going to only be 6 weeks long instead of 12 weeks long, but I digress. As a lecturer, Cliff was not the worst. He typed things out in Vim to demonstrate concepts, but he went fast and it was largely hit or miss if this approach beat out just sticking to dense slides. For instance, typing out code in Vim made sense, but once we got to NFAs/DFAs and grammars... Why not use whiteboarding software instead? One plus is that he'd post "Lecture Recap" videos for each lecture for those who couldn't make it to class. Although, these videos would often be posted 3-5 days after the lecture they covered, so relying on them to keep up is ill advised. While I didn't personally go to in person office hours (both in person and online OH were offered), those who did described the TAs as "rude" and "bothered by questions." This doesn't affect my evaluation of Cliff himself, but I felt that it was worth mentioning and pointing out that this is unacceptable behavior for TAs. Overall, I would still recommend taking courses with Cliff over many alternatives simply due to his approachable nature as well as his modern online approach to teaching. He is still young and can only improve with experience and I believe Cliff has the potential to be a good professor. He cares and is accommodating to students, but as of now, he still has a way to go (and needs new TAs) before being truly exceptional. Oh, and his hair was stunning.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a C- Justacoder 07/08/2022	I understand this is an accelerated summer class, that said some of the expectations made in this course were simply unacceptable. I found it quite obnoxious when Cliff would say we have 10 days for a project then proceed to wait a week before teaching us all the content needed for said project. The projects were honestly a pain. Some of the requirements felt more like tick questions designed to frustrate us rather than to actually display what we learned. That said lectures don’t get uploaded during the weekend; perhaps Cliff also needs a break over the weekend; however it would be nice to have something to reference when we have projects to work on over the weekends. In any case, Cliffs lecturer's examples were usually inadequate and not clear; they were not a good foundation for these projects. The difficulty between what we learn in class and the projects is too large of a jump, perhaps it’s not that surprising considering they are just reused projects from other professors, who gave weeks to work on the same projects we are given 6 days for. The lecture quizzes were quite a headache. The slides don’t get uploaded the same day and so we are basically expected to just retain everything we had learned that day. The exams weren’t great and averages weren’t very good. We were provided older exams to reference; however working on projects consumed way too much time away from studying. A Lot of us had to make a choice between getting the project done or studying. Even now at this moment we have a 4 part project due Friday the same day as our final worth 27% of our grade. I must seriously question if anyone would find this reasonable. The class honesty left me feeling helpless at times, there needs to be more reasonable standards for projects and adequate time allocated on par with what we learn. I believe Cliff does care about these students but he needs to sort of look at things on our level and set reasonable expectations.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 06/02/2022	Chill guy, nothing wrong with his teaching per say. He mainly seemed uninterested in teaching, and had zero enthusiasm when lecturing. Didn't really go into a lot of detail when doing example problems in lecture, and I had a hard time not falling asleep. Exams and projects were manageable. For projects just start early and got to OH asap if you are stuck.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/28/2022	To do well in this course, study Justin's notes. For quizzes and exams, showing how you got the answer is important and you will lose points. However, Cliff doesn't teach how to do it, he just scribbles all over the board leaving the class confused. His class is manageable, but I would rather take it with someone who grades harder and teaches better.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/25/2022	Class lectures were a bit dry, though I would also blame the extremely dense powerpoints given for 330. While Cliff did at times do a good job explaining concepts to students and making sure to answer any questions, I ended up learning more by going to outside sources, and by doing the lecture quizzes and projects required for the course. Cliff definitely does care about his students though, and I don't think you'd do poorly if you had him as a professor.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/25/2022	The class pacing was fast but at the same time, I didn't want to learn the content because it was so uninteresting. In class, I did barely anything and I just looked at the slides during the lecture quizzes to learn the material for the day. He just seemed so tired after teaching CMSC250 that he didn't feel like teaching 330 at all. Seems like people were not fans of cmsc250 either. My TA was great though.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/21/2022	Very nice guy, I think that's evident based on all the reviews, and if you take any course he teaches you will feel the same. I feel like the reviews given for him for CMSC250 don't represent him as well. I had him last semester and got an A-, but he was pretty amazing for me. He did speak in a monotone manner though, which can be easily to cause you to daze a bit. People were saying he only has good reviews because he was co-teaching with Justin, but Cliff made his own slides for CMSC250 last semester and taught his own way, so I do feel he's being slandered a bit. Maybe it was because he was the main one to manage CMSC250 and Justin was the main one to manage it last semester, and if that's what people meant, then I suppose so. I felt he did great overall, but maybe this semester is different. I can't speak on that because I didn't take CMSC250 with him this semester, so my opinion may not be as valid as the others, although I feel the other reviews may be a bit over-exaggerated. In terms of CMSC330 though, he was pretty solid too. Not as much as 250 for me last semester, but he was still pretty good. He's very understanding as well. He doesn't question anything, as once I showed him what a TA said on a regrade request on my exam and fixed it on the spot, and he has a lot of sympathy for students. Sometimes he does get thrown off on a slide and gets confused or something, and sometimes he does blatantly read off the slides so going to lecture may not be optimal (he had lecture quizzes online so some people didn't really go to lecture, including me to be honest). The slides posted online helped me navigate through CMSC330 and helped build an understanding for each unit/topic we covered, along with understanding the whole purpose of the course. Sure, it may not be hard to post slides or he might have recycled them, but at the end of the day all the professor has to do is deliver information and make sure you understand it, and I felt like he accomplished that. The exams, quizzes, lecture quizzes, and projects of course were all online and open-note/internet as well, making it less stressful for students too. Overall, it was hard for me to pay attention in lecture at times, but that's just me. I sometimes even daze off even in Justin's lecture. Sometimes Cliff's lectures felt like "I can just look at the slides when he posts them", but then that turns into "I have to look at 15 slides the day before an exam" which i found myself doing a decent bit lol. I didn't give him a 5 star because his lectures are somewhat dull because he's monotone, and that makes it harder to pay attention, especially when you're already lost on some topic. He's very sympathetic, and has great potential to be a great professor though. Currently, I'd give him 4 stars, and for the future when he adjusts to lecturing, managing and leading courses, and overall improve over time, I'd say he's easily at-least a 4.5 star.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/20/2022	really bad organization of the class
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/20/2022	Just gonna say, this class was so rigged and I'm so glad I'm out of the woods. Most people cheat and screw others over by making the exams have an unusually high average. Cliff is nice but also delusional when it comes to this issue. It was survival of the fittest/"get a high grade by any means possible" all semester long. The exam reviews were not that helpful and were recycled from last semester. Additionally, we were given wrong answers for them. I felt like two of the TA's at office hours took more of the role of professor than Cliff did in lecture. Can't even read his hand writing because he uses a super pixelated drawing program. He also took out learning about logic circuits from the class which really sucks considering this is a computer science course it'd be nice to know about those. Just be prepped to be at office hours regularly and maybe you'll do okay.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/18/2022	I stopped going to his lectures and went to DVH's instead. In hindsight it was the right move as I went from having a 100% success rate of falling asleep in class to actually paying attention. I will say Cliff seems like a really chill guy and is approachable, however, I felt like he wasn't that interested with the content of 330, hence really dry lectures. Most of the material can be found on the slides or recordings so there's no need to show up. Exams were very fair. Projects weren't terrible(don't go to office hours last second). Quizzes were tough in terms of limited time, but doable.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/18/2022	People are correct about his disorganized class, but I think he still is a great prof to take. All exams and quizzes were online which was nice, and the overall was just a great and accommodating person. His lectures were tough to understand at times as his handwriting is pretty horrible. If he continues to keep the content online take him, if not then run.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/17/2022	I think some of the bad reviews that he is getting on here are a bit unfair (especially the comment about his speech impediment) considering how accommodating he was to students this semester. He made all quizzes and exams online, moved multiple quizzes because of upcoming exams in other courses, and was generous in providing make-ups. Also after students complained about it taking too much time to take the first exam, he made the second exam and final shorter and easier. Grade averages this semester were pretty high for this semester, so not much of a curve will be needed. For the most part his lectures went at a decent, if not a tad slow, pace. However, there were certainly some issues in the structure of this course. Grades took a very long time to come out for many assignments, and many times the TA's made mistakes in grading. But they were all rectified with regrade requests. Overall, I do think that taking this course with Cliff is a good experience, and I thought that all-around he was a very solid professor. There is no doubt that he truly cares about his students and wants them to succeed in his class. His luscious locks make attending lecture worth your while.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/17/2022	Cliff is a great person and a decent teacher. He is definitely understanding of students' concerns and I feel that he teaches the material in the course properly (wish Cliff was more engaging though and enthusiastic). However, I think his management of the class was rather poor. Assignments were never graded correctly and very few TAs seemed to care about teaching the course material properly. There would be several times when a student had the correct answer and approach to solving a problem but would get graded incorrectly. I think that through better management and more enthusiasm for the content, Cliff could easily become a great professor. He is young and has a lot of time to improve. Hopefully, the class will go much better next sem.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/16/2022	Pros: The class was entirely online and open note this semester so was not particularly difficult (stress load/work wise). His exams are more or less fair although a bit of a time crunch. Cons: This man is a genius in everything EXCEPT teaching. His lectures are straight from Justin’s Notes (which carried me through the course), but the way he explains everything so disinterestedly makes them so hard to watch. Plus, the examples he provides in lecture are not well explained and incomplete. Honestly I ended up just using Justin’s notes for most of the class and the only reason I watched his lectures were to make sure I was using the style he wanted for proofs. However, there was no point as he is EXTREMELY inconsistent in grading. I don’t know if it’s him or his TAs. He goes back in what he says about style numerous times and the only reason I’m even finishing with a B is the amount of regrade requests I submitted. Overall, the only positive about taking Cliff this semester compared to the other professor is that his class was online. I feel bad for whoever has him in coming semesters in person. I honestly don’t know how I would pass the class with his terrible teaching and inconsistent grading .
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/16/2022	I took Cliff in the Spring of 2022, and I probably have a totally different experience than everyone else. Cliff was a super flexible guy who cared a lot about his students, and he did try to set us up for success. I believe the downfall of the course was the disorganization and laziness of most TAs throughout the semester as the grading had a lot of errors for people with it being inconsistent as well (since everything was online). There were a lot of errors on assignments as well, which I hope Cliff is more cautious of next semester. However, i never really got affected by any of this and I really did enjoy and felt like I learned a lot in this class. Cliff offered tons of OH, and I know some cannot make it to OH, but i found it to be super helpful I could come anytime to OH whenever I had a question, and I would say all the in person TAs were super helpful this semester over the ones online. I will stand by my 5 star rating because I thoroughly enjoyed the class, I never had anything wrong happen for me, and Cliff (and all In person TAs) were super helpful to me this semester to learn discrete math. If you are willing to just get out of your bubble and try to use the resources Cliff gives you to the best of your ability, the class isnt too bad. Some materials that really helped me in the class was: The lecture slides, IN PERSON OH, Justins Notes, the recommended textbook, discussion slides and recordings from some TAs, and answer keys for every single assignment despite the errors. I think Cliff will do a better job next semester and will eventually shape how he wants to structure his class in an organized manner soon.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/16/2022	Solid guy, seems pretty chill. However, his teaching and course organization abilities are frankly dismal. Most assignments have errors in them, adding to that there would be grading mistakes for almost everything. Lectures are boring and hard to follow. The pacing of the material is extremely poor, with some lectures covering seemingly nothing important and others leaving many students confused. The worst part of the class, however, are the TAs. It is obvious that the TAs don't care about the class whatsoever, the discussions are poorly led and the TAs often give contradictory information. To do well in the class, students are forced to constantly haggle for points on blatantly ignorant grading. The material should be easy to understand but being in Cliff's section made this class far more stressful and difficult than it had any right to be. The silver lining is that Cliff is a new teacher and should learn from his mistakes as he gets more experienced, oh, and he has cool hair... I guess.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/16/2022	Immaculate hair, but his TAs are quite disorganized and grade inconsistently from each other. His handwriting Isnt stellar so you have to pay extra attention to what he is saying and his lecturea overall arent too good for note taking since its almost all just examples, each being implement in a different manner. Regrades take ages and the autograder has had mistakes in almost every homework, 8/11 if im counting correctly.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/16/2022	CMSC250 with Cliff started off very well, but it ended with some noticeable flaws. This may be due to lack of teaching experience, miscommunication with the TAs, or some TAs slacking on their share of grading work. But PLEASE NOTE, I'm not considering class management in this review. Homework grading took a considerable amount of time, and there were often incorrect problems/solutions in exam practice problems. Whether this was Cliff's fault or the TA's, this was a major issue that stressed out many students and must be taken care of for future classes. Considering lectures, I thought Cliff was a solid instructor. Sure, some content could have been explained better, but Cliff made an effort and answered every question during or after lecture. I think the best way to prepare is to read Justin's 250 notes alongside regularly attending lecture. Other than doing the homework (yourself!), you should understand the general content. To me, lectures felt well paced and taught. Some content was boring, but well, it's 250. Just attend lectures and take notes and do your share of studying and you'll be fine. Exams were fair. Quizzes were fair. Got extra credit opportunities sometimes. Like others have said, Cliff is one of the most understanding instructors. If you approach him and explain your situation, he will accommodate. Super nice and chill guy. I genuinely think that in a few years Cliff will be a top-tier instructor. Hopefully 250 will not have these issues with grading/TAs moving forward. Side note: Cliff might keep exams/quizzes online moving forward. Don't cheat with others. Not worth the risk and 250 content is important in later courses. You'll get imposter syndrome if you do.
Cliff Bakalian Anonymous 05/16/2022	not super organized, TAs grade suppppeerrr randomly, but cliff is rlly considerate online/take home exams were nice, all you need are justin's notes and you'll get an A in this class.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A fiftyseven 05/16/2022	Cliff is generally a great guy and a pretty solid professor. He's very approachable and definitely tries his best to make the class interactive though it can be difficult given the lack of participation sometimes. He showed examples in REPls like irb and utop and I came out of lecturers feeling like I knew the content well. His style of drawing things out when they're complicated and showing examples in that manner gave some depth to his teaching that I really appreciated, especially in the finite automata units. Though I sometimes felt like the content was a bit dry, I found him to be a more than good professor. The exams and quizzes being online were also very nice.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/15/2022	Cliff's 250 this semester was quite an experience that could (and should) have been much smoother. As already mentioned, his biggest flaws are much mismanagement (having no work graded until 1 week before the final, including the second exam, very little explanation as to why points are taken off and what is expected, hardly responding to emails). A decent portion of my grade lost would be from assignments that I was not able to send or resend in time from not having a printer which stifled numerous questions on quizzes and exams. Additionally, there were some times when he muddled up material, or said things incorrectly and didn't follow a set standard that TAs may have graded. However, given that Cliff is a relatively new professor, and was handling 2 huge CS courses this semester, it seemed he did try to put a good deal of effort in both courses. In addition, the hybrid structure of in person lectures and exams/quizzes being online was weird to adapt to and caused numerous issues, which is not Cliff's fault particularly. He definitely has a chance to grow and despite the problems, he did an alright job handling the teaching/lecturing he needed to do this semester.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/15/2022	This class had the potential to be good. Cliff structured the course in a "hybrid" kind of way that was very understanding towards students—lectures were-in person but basically everything else was online and/or asynchronous. Homeworks were encouraged to be done collaboratively; quizzes and tests were open-note. Lectures are dull but not notably duller than any other 3-star CS professor I've had so far. Incredibly poor organization, however. Slow and inconsistent grading. Takes off points for style yet the lecture examples—Cliff handwrites proofs and screen shares—are a mess. I stopped showing up to discussion because my TA didn't seem to care about the content, and because what we were told in discussion didn't always line up with what we were told in lecture and/or what was expected on graded assignments. The proof style guide was helpful but only for the first few units, and then it was no longer maintained. Most of my learning in this course came from provided practice material, which was okay in the beginning but once we started getting to more word problems—proofs, statistics, combinatorics, etc.—hilariously poor quality. Hilarious because if someone just proofread the material once, 90% of the problems could be fixed. They're obviously copied and pasted from other sources—they'll be talking about pizzas one sentence and party hats the next, which isn't so bad until you try to check your work and they didn't even bother to change the answer key to match the new question at all. Answer keys are wrong or just plain irrelevant on a good chunk of the questions. Unclear phrasing and the questions can be interpreted many ways, which isn't great when they're expecting one solution. Ask three different people these questions and they're bound to interpret the question three different ways. I only grasped the combinatorics and statistics unit because of Justin's notes and through group studying in order to figure out what the question is really asking.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 05/15/2022	extremely cool and also based professor. do not listen to the other girls. he slays too hard.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/14/2022	Lectures might be a bit boring but all of the content you need to know for the exams is explained pretty well. Quizzes and tests were online and open-note for us which made them very stress-free.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 05/13/2022	Cliff skips over important material in lectures, paces poorly, and does not truly attempt to check for understanding among the class. When nobody raises their hand to answer his lecture quiz questions, it would suggest that few are following the material. The class was still not particularly difficult, considering that exams were online and very fair. Watching David Van Horn's lecture videos were also great for getting up to speed. Cliff's lectures, however, are inadequate for engaging with the important material in this class. TLDR; the TAs and Van Horn's videos carried me through this class; would not currently recommend Cliff
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/12/2022	Took him for CMSC250 his first semester teaching, and had a pretty decent experience. The class was mostly organized and he knew the content pretty well. Unfortunately 330 this semester wasn't the same. While the class was organized well, cliffs lectures were very difficult to follow along with. He seemed to not be interested in the material, and would speed through content and wouldn't/struggled to break down complex topics. This was especially a problem when it came to Rust, which is pretty complex and we covered in the last 3 weeks of the semester. I went to almost all lectures this year, and for each I found myself feeling disengaged with the content. I found myself learning most of the content by carefully reading the lecture slides after the lecture was over, and looking at outside resources. All in all cliff is a great guy and clearly cares about his students, but his lectures weren't up to what I was expecting for a CS course.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/12/2022	Very disorganized class, grading was extremely poor, examples were convoluted, and it seemed that there was no consistent standard for how proofs should be written, as Cliff seemed to change his style at random between lectures. Would definitely recommend avoiding Cliff.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/11/2022	While there were a few snags this semester, Cliff clearly cares about the class and is doing his best for his first-time teaching independently. At most, the late turnaround on assignments and errors in grading were inconveniences, and did not impact my understanding of the class at all. His lecturing style worked for me, and I always felt set up to complete all the assignments just from just the lectures. Most of all, Cliff is simply the most compassionate and understanding professor I've ever had. People here put that in as an aside, but if some roadblock suddenly emerges mid-semester, you will be very glad to have Cliff instead of a more apathetic professor. Overall, I think it is only fair that we give Cliff the same level of compassion that he extends to us. Given that it's his first time alone and he's clearly trying his best, I'm willing to let a few things slide.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a C- Justacoder 05/09/2022	TLDR: Nice dude, poor teacher Look I want to be fair. Cliff is a nice person and I feel like he understands what we go through. With that said I really felt hopeless at time during his class. I didn't really understand these concepts until I started reading Justin's notes. (I guess that's sort of my fault, if I had looked at the notes earlier maybe I would have done better) His lectures honestly jumped around a lot. When showing us steps he would sort of pull out solution from thin air. He didn't show us the intuition and the though process behind what he was doing. This lack of clear steps really frustrated me. Grading wasn't great. His examples in lecture don't go into enough details and so on exams and quiz's I would miss several points because of formatting or slightly different methods. The grading was also inconsistent at times. Several regrade request were sent.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/08/2022	Cliff is nice and understanding but his teaching style is very subpar. He's constantly unorganized and doesn't respond to emails. Although he records lectures to post online, he is constantly late and posts the material needed for homework on the day it's due. It seems he doesn't understand how to take responsibility and maybe that's because this is his first class he is teaching without help, but over the course of the semester, I started to realize that he continues to fall below normal standards.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/07/2022	Great person, horrible teacher. Every single paper or lecture has has a mistake, even answer keys and en exam. Don’t expect to get scores back for anything until 2 months after you submitted it. Cliff doesn’t look at Piazza doesn’t post lecture videos until weeks after you need it. Terribly run class but I believe he has potential ti be great, just not anytime soon.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/07/2022	immaculate hair but terrible class management
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/07/2022	Cliff's class is the most awfully organized class I have every taken. Nothing is posted on time: lectures, grades, etc. Good person, but highly overrated as an instructor because he co-taught with Justin. All of his content is recycled from Justin's material, and it doesn't even feel worth going to lecture. His practice exam for the final consists of a copy paste of the Exam 1 and Exam 2 practice exams, with like two additional questions, even when he stated that over half the final would be on stuff after Exam 1 and Exam 2. Probably because this was all the content available from Justin. It's overall a horrible experience to constantly be frustrated with nothing being graded properly, posted on time, having no idea what your grade is, and feeling like you aren't set up to succeed in the class. I would not recommend taking Cliff if there is a better alternative.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/06/2022	Honestly has the potential to be a great teacher but is completely unorganized and seems like he doesn't care. Grades for assignments are not released until 2 months later which does not help you for exams or homework at all.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/06/2022	Maybe the material just came quickly to me, but the organization of this class was a mess. I understand Cliff is young and stressed and new to teaching, but oh my Took about 2 months to get an exam graded, multiple questions were messed up. I am not joking when every single assignment/homework/quiz/exam he gave us had some sort of mistake on it. I have never seen a group of TA's who have cared less about what they're doing, and honestly, it was extremely insulting. Every single homework had an issue with grading, as well as quizzes and exams. I understand that this isn't Cliff's fault, but it felt like my future in CS was being determined by his TA's who must've had their eyes closed while grading any assignment. It honestly felt like the entire team gave up halfway through. With all that being said - He understands what he's doing. My guess is that he just needs time - AND NEW TA'S.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a C- Anonymous 05/06/2022	Don't take him. Period.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/06/2022	DO NOT TAKE CLIFF!!!! Confuses himself in lectures, illegible handwriting, speedruns lecture slides in monotone, doesnt post lecture slides for weeks, takes 3 MONTHS to grade EACH homework, and once it is graded there are mistakes everywhere with autograding and TAs. The previous ratings were when he co-taught with Justin so he had high ratings, but now that he is on his own, he is beyond awful. Perhaps the worst class and lecturer I ever had. If you are fine with not having half your homework, quizzes, and exams graded when you take your final exam and are fine with a disorganized monotone speedrunning professor with illegible handwriting then take this course.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 05/06/2022	Cliff has good intentions but is far from being a good, or even an average instructor. This was his first semester teaching and the class has been a disaster. Mistakes on every assignment, weeks to grade, slow responses - overall a really frustrating experience. His class was the worst organized class I have ever taken.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/05/2022	Cliff doesn't know the material he is teaching and recommends us to use Justin's notes because he even confuses himself during lecture. He didn't post lectures until weeks after the material was covered in class and in those videos, usually posted after the homeworks were due for that material, he would correct himself about something he said during the in person lecture. He didn't hold his TAs to any standard and he was very behind in grading and we had to go into every quiz and exam without knowing the grades of the relevant work we turned in weeks prior. He told us at the start that he came from a philosophical background and not CS and it showed. He would trip up on his wording and sometimes would scrap half of the work he was writing because he was lost himself. I would try to avoid him in future years if he ends up teaching anything more than 250 because I can't deal with being taught by someone who acts like a student themselves and can't stay on top of their own responsibilities. I know this was his first semester teaching on his own but it was even worse than I thought it could have went.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/04/2022	Great guy, terrible teacher. Cliff cares about his students, but the structure of the class and lectures was god-awful. There was seemingly little communication between him and the TAs, leading to a lot of misunderstandings and extremely delayed grading. Lectures were either incredibly trivial and boring or very confusing. Lectures also often didn't prepare us fully for the homework or exams. The grading was super questionable for everything, and almost everyone I talked to in the class submitted multiple regrade requests throughout the semester. Mistakes on seemingly every homework assignment were only fixed several days after being released. I actually learned most of the content in Discussion thanks to my GOAT TA. Cliff bases his lectures and content off of Justin's notes, but often presents them in a more confusing manner. The previous positive reviews were from when he co-taught the course with Justin, so I guess it was drastically different than this semester, because the general consensus is that this class was a mess.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Anonymous 05/03/2022	While I don't vibe with his lecturing style, Cliff is a very knowledgeable and nice professor! I had external issues this semester and was really scared to talk to him about it, but he didn't ask any questions and was extremely understanding-- more so than I thought any professor here would be. He obviously cares about the class content and students. He's new to teaching and has said he's constantly thinking of how to change the class for the better, so I think he'll only improve from here. If he's an option, definitely take him :)
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/29/2022	Cliff is a very understanding person, but he has very boring lectures, keeping me and others very disengaged. Handwriting is not good so it’s hard to follow, and when it comes to grading, there will either be a lot of mistakes or grades just won’t come out until a month after the assignment.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 04/28/2022	In the Fall 2021 semester, Cliff Bakalian was the new instructor for CMSC250, and many of my friends who took him left with very positive impressions. Because of this, when I saw his name listed on Testudo for CMSC330 the following semester, I was very excited to sign up for his lecture section and learn more about the organization of programming languages. Unfortunately, I was left rather disappointed. CMSC330 is a very content-heavy class - the sheer amount of information being packed into a single week is astounding. However, students have already taken or gotten credit for CMSC131, CMSC132, and CMSC216 by this point, so learning new material should not be a foreign experience. Sadly, Cliff's lecture style left something to be desired. He usually seemed to prioritize covering as many slides as possible as opposed to focusing on the fundamentals. For example, one week we had a PowerPoint nearly 70 slides long - Cliff blasted through as fast as he could, and many of the pertinent examples provided he would go "I don't care about this," and skip straight past them. Consequently, by the time we got to more complicated topics, I was lost and confused as we didn't spend enough time on the fundamentals. I stopped going to his lectures about a month into the semester and decided to watch Professor Van Horn's recordings instead - while he could be monotonous at times, he took much more care with the material, and besides, there are a great number of very helpful TAs both in in-person and online office hours, so I got by that way. Overall, I wouldn't recommend taking CMSC330 with Cliff unless you can absorb lots of material very quickly. At least he responds to questions effectively.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 04/28/2022	Very boring and unorganized teacher. Don't expect anything graded for weeks.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/25/2022	Not very engaging as a teacher but gets the job done. Handwriting isn't the best so sometimes it's hard to follow, and examples in class aren't nearly as hard as the homework/exam questions. Class is unorganized as a whole, as documents and solutions always seem to have some typo or mistake. TA's are not that helpful and sometimes can't answer certain questions. Grading is very poor, as graders often make mistakes when grading and it takes very long for assignments to be graded. Regrade requests aren't looked at for a long time as well. Cliff is an understanding and nice guy, who keeps the students' best interests in mind, but there are definitely many things that can be improved.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 04/25/2022	Hard HWS but can do with friends. Generous to students about quizzes and exams. Lectures start off slow, but speed up. Never got too fast tho.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 04/14/2022	He does not respond to emails. TAs are as unresponsive as him. They mess up grading and answer keys.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 04/10/2022	He does not read his emails, TAs are unresponsive. Assignments take forever to get graded and graded incorrectly a decent amount of times. Not great.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 02/13/2022	Great hair and a good lecturer who likes legos.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 01/22/2022	Lectures get a bit confusing at times, but he answers questions clearly. He’s also very understanding and really wants everyone to succeed. Would take this class again if he were teaching it, if the material itself wasn’t so confusing at the end o_o
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 01/21/2022	Cliff is amazing. 250 itself is hard but he made it as easy as possible to understand the material. 10/10 hair and 10/10 teaching.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 12/22/2021	First of all, his hair is amazing. Second, he is a really nice guy and he wants you to succeed. The co-taught with Justin WG this semester, and the exams were reasonable. Some of the homeworks were pretty difficult, but they are not impossible if you utilize office hours. I would recommend him!
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 12/09/2021	Cliff teaches really well. He's young and relatable, his lectures are organized, and he does a great job of answering questions and clarifying on points of confusion. He seems like a nice person too. My only qualm would be with the class itself, which was that the homeworks often covered really complicated or difficult applications of what was covered during the lectures, especially towards the end of the semester.
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Expecting a C Anonymous 12/06/2021	Solid professor, super nice. Couple times had some confusing examples and lectures but super understanding with student concerns
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 11/30/2021	impeccable hair, 10/10 teacher
Cliff Bakalian CMSC250 Anonymous 11/08/2021	Great guy