Rance Cleaveland | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Rance Cleaveland CMSC433 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/22/2023	A solid professor who knows his stuff! His lectures are really easy to understand and the content itself wasn't too bad, and his slides are pretty good on their own. Most of the grade was based on projects which in itself were pretty straightforward. There were two exams (midterm & final exam) and each was open notes/electronics which made it less about memorization and more about conceptual understanding. I was not a fan of the fact that there were no practice exams, however, this isn't really the professor's fault since this is his first semester teaching this version of the course. Would take him again.
Rance Cleaveland CMSC433 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/21/2023	Class itself is straightforward, but exams had tricky questions (even though they were open note and open computer)
Rance Cleaveland CMSC433 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/12/2023	Genuinely one of the worst structured classes I have ever taken. It felt like they threw the course together without any forethought. The course grades consisted entirely of projects and one midterm which occurred during the first quarter of classes. For a course whose material was centered around projects, the projects themselves felt random, and disorganized, and had a zero-tolerance policy for late submissions. Anything submitted after 11:59 on the due date would result in an instant 0% on the assignment. This has been one of the most stressful experiences of my college career.
Rance Cleaveland CMSC433 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/12/2023	Poor structure. Projects seemed random and felt like they had little planning. Late policy was an instant 0 which is unheard of for a project based course.
Rance Cleaveland CMSC433 Expecting a C+ whiskers 12/11/2023	Man. So you thought 433 was always just going to be Java multithreading right? NOPE! Turns out, it's just whatever the professor wants to teach. This guy, Mr. Rance Cleaveland, was all about programming correctly, because in theory, the more correct your code is, the more secure it is. Neat concept. Nice. Cool beans. Quite a shame, because he clearly can't run a class about it. His class is structured around a single paper mathy assignment, several projects in Dafny and Haskell (dafny is extremely cringe and haskell is just ocaml part 2), one midterm, and one final. Oh, you want to study for the midterm or the final? Yeah sure man, all you have to study is a single slide of a presentation showing all the topics you need to know. No example problems. No practice exam. No textbooks. I guess you have the singular homework that wasn't a project. At least the exam is open computer, closed internet, but doesn't really help when you have zilch to study from. For me, his lecture was quite boring and rather un-learn-able for someone who isn't interested in learning what ancient Mesopotamian symbol I need to know this time. The projects were either incredibly easy or extremely annoying and frustrating, either due to the language or the extremely poor project description. There were multiple Piazza questions all asking about what he meant by the projects and he basically answered them full of academic jargon that probably makes sense conceptually. So basically, his class has zero structure and you're supposed to already be a god and know this kinda stuff in order to do well. The class is not easy despite the workload being low. It just felt like he finally found a hundred people or so willing to listen to him talk about whatever he's been studying for the past however many years.

Rance Cleaveland
CMSC433

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/22/2023

A solid professor who knows his stuff! His lectures are really easy to understand and the content itself wasn't too bad, and his slides are pretty good on their own. Most of the grade was based on projects which in itself were pretty straightforward. There were two exams (midterm & final exam) and each was open notes/electronics which made it less about memorization and more about conceptual understanding. I was not a fan of the fact that there were no practice exams, however, this isn't really the professor's fault since this is his first semester teaching this version of the course. Would take him again.

Rance Cleaveland
CMSC433

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/21/2023

Class itself is straightforward, but exams had tricky questions (even though they were open note and open computer)

Rance Cleaveland
CMSC433

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/12/2023

Genuinely one of the worst structured classes I have ever taken. It felt like they threw the course together without any forethought. The course grades consisted entirely of projects and one midterm which occurred during the first quarter of classes. For a course whose material was centered around projects, the projects themselves felt random, and disorganized, and had a zero-tolerance policy for late submissions. Anything submitted after 11:59 on the due date would result in an instant 0% on the assignment. This has been one of the most stressful experiences of my college career.

Rance Cleaveland
CMSC433

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/12/2023

Poor structure. Projects seemed random and felt like they had little planning. Late policy was an instant 0 which is unheard of for a project based course.

Rance Cleaveland
CMSC433

Expecting a C+
whiskers
12/11/2023

Man. So you thought 433 was always just going to be Java multithreading right? NOPE! Turns out, it's just whatever the professor wants to teach. This guy, Mr. Rance Cleaveland, was all about programming correctly, because in theory, the more correct your code is, the more secure it is. Neat concept. Nice. Cool beans. Quite a shame, because he clearly can't run a class about it. His class is structured around a single paper mathy assignment, several projects in Dafny and Haskell (dafny is extremely cringe and haskell is just ocaml part 2), one midterm, and one final. Oh, you want to study for the midterm or the final? Yeah sure man, all you have to study is a single slide of a presentation showing all the topics you need to know. No example problems. No practice exam. No textbooks. I guess you have the singular homework that wasn't a project. At least the exam is open computer, closed internet, but doesn't really help when you have zilch to study from. For me, his lecture was quite boring and rather un-learn-able for someone who isn't interested in learning what ancient Mesopotamian symbol I need to know this time. The projects were either incredibly easy or extremely annoying and frustrating, either due to the language or the extremely poor project description. There were multiple Piazza questions all asking about what he meant by the projects and he basically answered them full of academic jargon that probably makes sense conceptually. So basically, his class has zero structure and you're supposed to already be a god and know this kinda stuff in order to do well. The class is not easy despite the workload being low. It just felt like he finally found a hundred people or so willing to listen to him talk about whatever he's been studying for the past however many years.