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John Baras
ENEE660 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/14/2025 |
Summary: Save yourself the misery! Avoid this professor at all costs! Dr. Baras is not a terrible person. He is, however, a terrible professor. I have never had a professor who was such a terrible communicator, by a wide margin. Dr. Baras's idea of a lecture is to mumble through 100+ slide-long presentations, where every slide is full of many paragraphs of text and equations with no background. He started off the course by going straight to random advanced material that was unrelated to anything to do with control theory, and then continued for several weeks with advanced material while giving zero background. He never really zoomed out, he just kept going over advanced methods with zero context and none of the necessary background information. On top of that, the presentations themselves and the notes are extremely disorganized. Yes, they are typed up, but the theorems and proofs are presented without context, or delineation, or any logical ordering. His notes are a "nightmare to navigate" (that is a direct quote from the TA), to the point of being completely useless. The only way I learned anything for this course was by studying on my own from other textbooks and ignoring Baras's lectures, which only ever made me more confused. Dr. Baras is not only a hopelessly incompetent lecturer, but does not seem to care about the class at all. His homeworks are always very difficult, and seem like they are pulled out of thin air since they often contained problems that required us to learn major concepts which were not at all gone over in class or even in the notes! This was very frustrating. Dr. Baras has also belittled students in front of the class, by interrupting and dismissing them when they try to answer his own questions. He doesn't always do that, but I have observed it a number of times. On top of that, Dr. Baras usually comes in to lecture about 10-15 minutes late (sometimes up to 20+), and often finishes late, sometimes by 15 minutes or more. He also asked the class what day we want our midterm, then ignored the results of the poll and gave it on a different day. Then, he returned our midterm about a month after he said he would. And, the one time I asked him for help on a homework question, he gave an answer that was completely conceptually wrong. If I could describe Dr Baras in two words, they would be: "atrocious communicator." I will absolutely never take a course with him again. |
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John Baras
ENES489P Anonymous 05/10/2023 |
This is the worst structured class I have ever taken at UMD. Not only is Baras practically unreachable, the TA's clearly are so disconnected from what he expects. The class is nothing like it is described on Testudo and you will basically be learning SysML the entire class. The TA's and Baras told us to study the 700 lecture slides and that SysML would not be on the midterm, spoiler alert: that was the only thing on the midterm. Baras does seem like he wants his students to make it as a systems engineer but everyone I talked to in the class had no interest in systems at all after this class. Expect to go into your final and midterm presentations just to be told you did the entire thing incorrectly and be rudely interrupted throughout it. Grade data is fine and TA's said everyone would pass but imo the tedious busy work is not worth it. |
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John Baras
ENEE660 Anonymous 10/09/2013 |
No doubt Prof. Baras is a great researcher. Unfortunately he's not interested in teaching the students. He has his own lecture notes for ENEE660. However the notes are not user friendly. There are a lot of typos, unconventional notations, and almost zero accompanying diagrams to help better understand the concepts. There is no logical flow and it lacks actual applications or examples. In terms of teaching, he is always late for class and finishes way over time. He didn't show up for a class without prior notice and didn't apologize. He basically reads the lecture notes in verbatim and criticizes students for not reading it. It's been six weeks and we are yet to receive an assignment. I really hope I will learn something useful from him or else I'll be wasting my time and money. In short, he's terrible. |
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John Baras
Anonymous 05/14/2012 |
Only teacher I have ever given a one star too. There was no syllabi, outline for any assignments and I have yet its finally and i have yet to get one grade back. He assigned up a pop 5 page pager during finals week too. He only showed up to maybe 5 of the classes all semester and make the TA teach the class but did not give the TA any control over the class. How does that work? It doesn't. He is also very disrespectful to students. During our midterm presentation he showed up late to one of the groups presentation, criticized them for not having something which they did say before he came (TA started class) and then for the rest of the presentations was playing with his smart phones then asking questions that were clearly answered in peoples presentations. |