Yizheng Chen | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Yizheng Chen CMSC414 Expecting a B Anonymous 06/19/2024	Seems like she cares more about research than teaching the class. Project were WAY to long and very unclear. By the beginning of may only midterm 1 and project 1 had been graded. Averages on exams were C-/D+. Lectures were fairly boring and she doesn’t really answer questions in a clear way. She has no practice material of her own, so studying for exams was difficult. And ZERO communication on piazza. All in all avoid!!
Yizheng Chen CMSC414 Expecting an A- Anonymous 06/13/2024	She is super kind and tries to be understanding but she is not great at teaching. There are four projects that are time-consuming and confusing because the project descriptions are very contradicting and do not give enough information. The content of the projects are not covered in class very well, so you are expected to do a lot of learning on your own. Practice exams are very old and do not reflect how the actual exam will look. Her exams were written so poorly that everyone was confused about different assumptions and means were consistently Cs/Ds. Overall, the class is interesting but very difficult. It was heavily curved.
Yizheng Chen CMSC414 Expecting a C honestcskid 05/14/2024	Don't take this class. I came in with significant cybersecurity experience and the class is extremely poorly directed. Exams have little relevance to what we do in class, and the projects weren't graded until finals week, when it was too late to realize how poorly I was doing in the class-- projects had no test cases and no submit server, so I was blindsided by the grades I received on them. TAs and professor are absent on piazza and the lectures were boring. I dont think I learned anything. Our last project was a machine learning project for some reason. This class destroyed my GPA. Do not recommend
Yizheng Chen CMSC414 Expecting an F Anonymous 05/14/2024	Yo please do not take this prof, she is so unorganized and she is so bad at teaching. During lectures she contradicts herself each time when a student asks a question. She also makes the exams look nothing like the practice that she gives. To add on, when she answers questions, she is always not sure about her answer. The grading in this class is so bad that they release grades two months after the deadline. PLEASE AVOID THIS PROF
Yizheng Chen CMSC414 Anonymous 05/10/2024	this is her first semester teaching at umd and she really needs to improve. this has to be the worst, most disorganized class i've ever taken here. she goes very fast during lectures and expects us to know much more than we should. the piazza was very inactive and we had questions about projects that were only answered after the projects were due. the TAs were also clueless about the projects and we ended up going to other sections' TAs' office hours which were much more helpful. our midterm averages were very low (about 72 and 70) and there was no clear curve. when students asked questions about projects or grading in class she said "I don't know". our project grades from months ago were only posted recently. instead of network security our 4th project was on ml security which was almost completely irrelevant to our lectures and was apparently given only because she does ml security research. there was also no clear way to check if our results were correct. the only positive thing about this class was that the projects were worth half our grade. i would never want to take this class again. please avoid.
Yizheng Chen CMSC414 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/10/2024	While this is her first semester teaching an undergrad class at UMD, she isn't the best. Far from it. I think she could learn from Cliff and his TAs and actually answer any Piazza posts. I'm not confident in her knowledge on the subject given how much she says "I think" and "I don't know". I think the only lecture she knew her stuff about was the one about her research: ML security. Furthermore, how she structures her exams are completely different than previous ones. The first exam barely corresponding to the format of any previous practice exams. Its Reading Day and we have 3 and a half grades. The autograder script for our second project is broken and we all have bad grades. I swear half the TAs are comatose and if they wake up, they spout incorrect information and mislead us. The last project was changed from the typical networking one (allegedly because they couldn't get it working) to a ML project that had nothing to do with anything in the latter half of the class, and I swear the only reason why we had the ML project is because of her research being in the same field. What pisses me off the most is that the next and previous semesters have had and will have a much easier time than us.
Yizheng Chen CMSC414 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/09/2024	This professor is so bad like omg. She cannot teach for life and her lectures is basically reading the slides. Both her exams averages are bad and idk if im going to pass because only 2 grades are in canvas and I am writing this in finals wee.

Yizheng Chen
CMSC414

Expecting a B
Anonymous
06/19/2024

Seems like she cares more about research than teaching the class. Project were WAY to long and very unclear. By the beginning of may only midterm 1 and project 1 had been graded. Averages on exams were C-/D+. Lectures were fairly boring and she doesn’t really answer questions in a clear way. She has no practice material of her own, so studying for exams was difficult. And ZERO communication on piazza. All in all avoid!!

Yizheng Chen
CMSC414

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
06/13/2024

She is super kind and tries to be understanding but she is not great at teaching. There are four projects that are time-consuming and confusing because the project descriptions are very contradicting and do not give enough information. The content of the projects are not covered in class very well, so you are expected to do a lot of learning on your own. Practice exams are very old and do not reflect how the actual exam will look. Her exams were written so poorly that everyone was confused about different assumptions and means were consistently Cs/Ds. Overall, the class is interesting but very difficult. It was heavily curved.

Yizheng Chen
CMSC414

Expecting a C
honestcskid
05/14/2024

Don't take this class. I came in with significant cybersecurity experience and the class is extremely poorly directed. Exams have little relevance to what we do in class, and the projects weren't graded until finals week, when it was too late to realize how poorly I was doing in the class-- projects had no test cases and no submit server, so I was blindsided by the grades I received on them. TAs and professor are absent on piazza and the lectures were boring. I dont think I learned anything. Our last project was a machine learning project for some reason. This class destroyed my GPA. Do not recommend

Yizheng Chen
CMSC414

Expecting an F
Anonymous
05/14/2024

Yo please do not take this prof, she is so unorganized and she is so bad at teaching. During lectures she contradicts herself each time when a student asks a question. She also makes the exams look nothing like the practice that she gives. To add on, when she answers questions, she is always not sure about her answer. The grading in this class is so bad that they release grades two months after the deadline. PLEASE AVOID THIS PROF

Yizheng Chen
CMSC414

Anonymous
05/10/2024

this is her first semester teaching at umd and she really needs to improve. this has to be the worst, most disorganized class i've ever taken here. she goes very fast during lectures and expects us to know much more than we should. the piazza was very inactive and we had questions about projects that were only answered after the projects were due. the TAs were also clueless about the projects and we ended up going to other sections' TAs' office hours which were much more helpful. our midterm averages were very low (about 72 and 70) and there was no clear curve. when students asked questions about projects or grading in class she said "I don't know". our project grades from months ago were only posted recently. instead of network security our 4th project was on ml security which was almost completely irrelevant to our lectures and was apparently given only because she does ml security research. there was also no clear way to check if our results were correct. the only positive thing about this class was that the projects were worth half our grade. i would never want to take this class again. please avoid.

Yizheng Chen
CMSC414

Expecting a B
Anonymous
05/10/2024

While this is her first semester teaching an undergrad class at UMD, she isn't the best. Far from it. I think she could learn from Cliff and his TAs and actually answer any Piazza posts. I'm not confident in her knowledge on the subject given how much she says "I think" and "I don't know". I think the only lecture she knew her stuff about was the one about her research: ML security. Furthermore, how she structures her exams are completely different than previous ones. The first exam barely corresponding to the format of any previous practice exams. Its Reading Day and we have 3 and a half grades. The autograder script for our second project is broken and we all have bad grades. I swear half the TAs are comatose and if they wake up, they spout incorrect information and mislead us. The last project was changed from the typical networking one (allegedly because they couldn't get it working) to a ML project that had nothing to do with anything in the latter half of the class, and I swear the only reason why we had the ML project is because of her research being in the same field. What pisses me off the most is that the next and previous semesters have had and will have a much easier time than us.

Yizheng Chen
CMSC414

Expecting a B-
Anonymous
05/09/2024

This professor is so bad like omg. She cannot teach for life and her lectures is basically reading the slides. Both her exams averages are bad and idk if im going to pass because only 2 grades are in canvas and I am writing this in finals wee.