Amol Deshpande | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/10/2024	Midterms and the final are 60% of the final grade in which the scores are historically bad (mean of 50% with the upper quartile being just above that). The slides and lectures are more high-level/conceptual while the assignments and midterms are very technical and detail-oriented. Some exam questions are from 1 slide out of the 800+ posted. ' Most of the materials posted for studying like past midterms and homework were posted just days before the exam. When asking questions about the material, Amol would respond to look at the past exams for more insight. The old exams have also been extremely outdated mostly from 2008-2015 or over COVID in an online setting in which the syllabus has heavily changed. For many of the questions asked about the material or assignments, Amol would explain how the technologies have been updated and that the material in the slides was not widely used or optimal anymore. I think the book and material in this class have become outdated since Amol started teaching it. Amol definitely knows his stuff but delves too much into the details that the bigger picture is not translated. Amol isn't a bad lecturer, just focusing on the wrong things. He'd rather give exposure to every single detail, topic, and language than give a good foundation to build on.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a C- Anonymous 01/28/2023	Content in projects had very little to do with exams and lectures and had little impact on our grade relative to how time consuming they were, there was just too much content in the course to where we were allowed a cheat sheet on the final and it was possible you missed half the content on the exam
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 12/21/2022	Let’s start with the pros. The course teaches you a decent amount of concepts about different database systems, how to design them, and how to work with each. The projects were a lot of fun and taught me most of what I know about databases. I would say you could finish a project in a day or two if you understand the concepts. With all that being said.. the homeworks and exams are MISERABLE. Amol has HUNDREDS of slides on a subject, but they don’t really teach you much. He does go in depth about some subjects in class, but a lot of it is left to self teaching (go figure, it’s a CS course). I wouldn’t take this course again. A lot of what I found to be useful can be learned on your own if you follow some advanced SQL book and lookup Apache spark and mongodb. The last 4 weeks of class are mostly useless, as he goes into how database programs are implemented. It may seem useful at first, but there are just so many concepts to memorize. I’m giving the class 3 stars because I enjoyed the projects. The other material was insane. On the bright side, there is a pretty generous curve.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Anonymous 12/20/2022	Learned a lot of material in this class. We started with SQL, some theory about database design, MongoDB, Spark and ended with some more theory. Definitely a challenging class but there was a lot to learn. Every homework/project had a one week, no questions asked extension. Exams were challenging but also always had questions that were on the homework.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Anonymous 12/15/2022	The only pros to this semester were that the dreaded B+ tree, the E/R Project, and the math-related projects are removed. Spark is a separate project and MongoDB was another separate project, along with a new JDBC/ODBC project. That's the only reason why I'm giving this review two stars, since the projects were actually useful and were a lot easier than they were in the past, and from the generous late policy. But other than that, this was miserable. Each topic no matter how complex it is was gone through in such surface level so then we have to pick up extra time ourselves to thoroughly learn the concepts, especially canonical cover, and concurrency. For canonical cover, we were just supposed to look up an algorithm instead which was ridiculous. Also, the fact that we have to study I don't know a 1000 slides for an exam that can ask about literally anything is ridiculous too. I could be fine with all of this if the homeworks had detailed solutions after them. Some answers are just marked as "Correct" or "Incorrect" without giving us the full answer, and how we get to that answer. Also, as I mentioned earlier in learning the material on our own, examples were not given well at all. Examples should mimic homework difficulty so then we can learn from them and apply to the homework problems, not learning them in surface level and then having to take a lot of extra time just to do the complex ones. And with the late policy, official solutions can't be released, which I understand that. But if that's the case, then we need more complex examples with solutions so we have a point of reference. Overall, this class was just a lot. If you want to learn databases, you're better off learning it on your own.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/13/2022	He is very very smart and this course covers a LOT of material. I was new to everything database/SQL, but had to learn fast. That being said, I thought the professor did a great job at teaching the content and answering questions for those who attended class. Projects were long but manageable, not to mention that he gave week long extensions available for every project/HW as the late policy. Overall, very useful class with lots to learn.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/13/2022	This was the most miserable class I have ever taken. It's hard to know where to start: The review below touches on this, but the class is structured and managed terribly. The slides don't have enough information to rely on, but the lectures often weren't useful enough, so it felt like I was losing by going to class (I went to class every day) or losing if I didn't go. Some of the slides literally say to look stuff up online. There is a topic called Canonical Cover we "learned" where the slides said to look up how to do it, we didn't do any examples in class, and then we had to do Canonical Cover twice on homework and on an exam. Because literally everything in the class is on exams, there was even a case where something we learned in the last 15 minutes of class the day before the exam was on the exam. It makes it extremely difficult to study, especially because slides are grouped by unit, which means you have to sift through a ~250 slide slideshow to find any information. Furthermore, Amol does not provide good examples of stuff. The limited examples he provides are often copied and pasted form the textbook. I had no SQL experience before this class, but when we covered SQL he never really taught us how to write queries, he just sped through the syntax. This meant that I struggled on the SQL programming assignments. Assignments are doable, but often require a ton of time. We had homework and projects due within days of exams. At one point we had three weeks' worth of homework assigned simultaneously. He does schedule assignments they're all done before Thanksgiving, but as a result we'd only have 1-2 days of "rest" between programming assignments. Homework is your only attempt to get practice with the vast majority of the class content. The homework was okay, but he never provides answer keys because of his lax late policy. I'd rather have him be slightly harsher about homework deadlines so I can actually get feedback and learn from the homework, because the Grade Scope rubric often doesn't provide the feedback you need. This class also relies on Docker, so if you have a slow/old computer, like I do, you will be miserable on the programming assignments. Just a heads up. To summarize, this class was terrible. If you are completely new to databases, like I was, just learn how to use SQL or MongoDB on your own. The hell you have to go through in this class is not worth the very little gain you'll get.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 11/03/2022	This is THE worst structured course I have ever taken, which has not been helped by Amol's lectures not being useful, mostly just reading off of extremely long slide decks. Despite their size, the slides provide only minimal information to complete weekly homework and projects, so we are expected (explicitly) to read up on the programming language manuals for examples and syntax. The project descriptions are extremely vague and full of typos, with him usually updating them multiple times after releasing it. Sometimes the project descriptions contradict to examples we have gone over in class, making it all very confusing. The class schedule is also a disaster. We will have homework due the day before exams, with a full project due only days after. On the topic of exams, he has put material on an exam that we had not learned until THE LECTURE BEFORE, with no opportunity to practice concepts on homework/projects. There were no explicit topic lists released for exams, usually having to be put together by scouring many piazza posts. The exams he released as practice did not accurately reflect the topics on the exam due to him re-organizing the syllabus, but he couldn't even be bothered to write an accurate practice exam. The class has entirely too much content, trying to jam in at least 2 semesters of content, a lot of which is theory with no practical examples of why it is useful. I would not recommend taking this course under any circumstances. If you want to learn SQL, you are better off teaching yourself than subjecting yourself to this misery.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/31/2022	Amazing course. Learnt a lot about databases and the projects were fun to code. He is a good person and a great lecturer. He and his TAs are very responsive to questions after class on CampusWire which was a godsend because database environments and coding lead to a lot of questions. They also have a strong grip on the material and I got all my queries resolved. Highly recommend the class. One of the best ones that I have taken at UMD.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a B Anonymous 01/28/2022	I took the course during Fall 2021. The biggest issue with the class was his teaching style. He would just plow through his slides which were pretty much just copy and paste from the textbook, but he wouldn't explain the content on the slides well. He would pretty much just end up reading it straight from the slides and then assume that we know exactly what it means, while on most slides there was always something he could explain more. This made the class really difficult when it came to exam time. There could be a question that was somewhat similar to the slides, and many students would still have no clue how to do it, which is a big issue. When you go to office hours, there have been multiple times where I've asked the different TAs the same question and have gotten a different answer, which made things even harder to understand. The assignments were actually not too hard, just takes a lot of time, so you really have to set time to really work on it. Just getting a project set up could take 2-3 hours if your unlucky. Usually though, they are doable and you can get 90+ on all of them. While the teaching style was bad, you could get a 50-70 on every exam and midterm and still end up with a B/B+, so it ends not being the worst class. You do end up learning SQL, Spark, MongoDB, and important relational database concepts in the class.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/25/2021	He gets a lot of hate but I don't fully understand why. His exams are difficult but he clearly cares about the students wellbeing by moving our midterms and finals online due to students fearing about COVID. He also frequently takes questions during lectures, which is not something other CS professors normally do. The projects in this class are quite tedious (especially project 4 and its lack of documentation), but overall he's a really nice guy, explains things well (at least for me), and has a really flexible late day policy.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/24/2021	Amol is a nice guy and generally means well, but this class has a lot of issues. 1. Assignments - In Fall 2021 we had 6 assignments (2 written, 4 programming). While they are somewhat helpful in understanding the material, their length makes them really time consuming (more than expected for a 400 level class). For example, I remember writing 20 or so SQL queries where 10 would have been perfectly sufficient, and in general the written assignments were really long. They aren't necessarily difficult, but you definitely have to start early. One nice thing that I really appreciated was that Amol gives you 10 free late days (up to 5 on a single assignment). 2. Exams - The exams are quite difficult, not in terms of content but more so in terms of time. If you had 24 hours to complete it, you could probably get 80+ assuming you understood the material. But with the time constraint, it was definitely very hard to complete all of the questions fully (the averages on the exam were around 60%). One good thing is that Amol puts a fat curve on the class. He didn't disclose the official cutoffs, but in the beginning of the semester he said that an 80% would be an A (i think it ended up being a few points lower). 3. Content - This is probably my biggest gripe with the class. Amol tries to cover at least 2 semesters worth of content in this class. As a result, he moves extremely fast and tends to not explain things as fully as he can. For in depth explanations, he just tells you to read the textbook (which is decent). The content starts off at a decent pace, but after midterm 1 really picks up. I didn't feel like I was able to absorb anything meaningful because I was so focused on just cramming all of this information into my head to study. I also think that a lot of the content can be changed. We spend a lot of time learning about specific operations on disk, even though Amol prefaces the unit saying "no systems actually do it this way anymore." He justifies it saying that this is still the foundation, but I personally found it very discouraging. 4. Campuswire - This is maybe more of a personal issue, but Amol insists on using campuswire instead of piazza. I really hate campuswire (and I think the majority of the class did too). I find it harder to search posts, and you can't follow questions for when they've been answered. In general, databases is a pretty dry subject so I don't blame Amol for the class being generally boring. One thing I really liked was that he was very responsive so you generally got a fast response to questions on campuswire. He did also listen to students' COVID concerns and had exams online (along with recorded lecture). There's definitely improvements to be made, so unless you are very interested in databases or need the class for a major requirement, I would avoid this class for now.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/23/2021	good guy, but not the best at teaching/running a course. all the projects were rather difficult and required you to do a lot of learning outside of class to figure them out. on the bright side, no secret tests. the midterms and final were extremely long and difficult, but he heavily curves (A- is about an 80) to make up for it. giving him 3 stars because he does seem to care about his students learning, just doesn't seem the best at it
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a C- Anonymous 12/18/2021	Not a good class at all. The lectures were very dry. I get it, databases aren't the most exciting topic in the world. But I just found it hard to retain anything from the lectures in this class. It's a very, very good thing that all the exams ended up being online, because I needed my notes and the slides as a reference. I just finished the final exam and there was so much stuff that I remember him talking about in class, but I couldn't remember any of the details of. Deshpande just doesn't seem to be very good at teaching. I don't think he got the concepts across very well at all. And man, this class is actually really hard! The projects will eat up tons of your time. The exams are really, really hard. Even the weekly quizzes were pretty challenging. The upside is that there's a very, very, very generous curve. No matter what, a 60 is the minimum grade to pass this class. That cutoff can be lowered, but never raised. So there is plenty of leniency. This class actually reminds me of 351 in a few ways. 424 focuses a lot on theory at times, much like 351. 351 is extraordinarily hard, but there's always a very generous curve at the end. This class is the same way. I have no doubt that the SQL skills learned in this class will be helpful. But this class is so much more than SQL, and I kind of mean that in a bad way. There's relational algebra and functional dependencies, E/R modeling, database implementation, then NoSQL stuff, and finally transactions. That's a vast array of topics, and they're done in a strange order, too. This class needs to be whittled down a lot. Focus much more on the SQL and NoSQL stuff. Then at the end, focus on database implementation. Cut out all the theory. Basically, what I'm saying is, this class covers a lot of useful information, but it also covers a lot of useless information. And under Deshpande, I think it's taught poorly. If I even got a 50% on this final, I'll be lucky. I'm just glad the cutoffs are so generous that I could afford to get a 10% on the final and still pass.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/08/2021	He is a very good and fair professor. He genuinely cares. CMSC424 could use some improvements - such as better coverage of the theory assessed on the exams. Most of the topics are covered well but the exams can be quite tricky. Projects are fair and even fun at times. I took the course hoping to be better prepared for industry since I lacked database experience. For me ~60% seems immediately useful and the remaining ~40% was some cool-to-know theory and some challenges/issues in the space. Others may not be happy with this ratio or they may perceive a different ratio. I enjoyed the class. I'd give it a 4, but I am giving it a 5 because it is definitely better than 2.93 it currently stands at.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an F Anonymous 12/06/2021	I would give 0 star if I could. The lecture slides are basically 100+ pages table of content with excessive amount of useless information. The exams are insanely long and difficult given only 60 minutes. His lecture is just hard to understand and he doesn't explain things well. Worst class I've ever taken at UMD.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Anonymous 12/03/2021	Absolute garbage professor. He gives out work without even teaching the material. Additionally, he has no respect for student concerns about taking an exam in person while Omricon is raging through the United States. Gave out assignments where majority of the time to work on it was during the Thanksgiving break. Would not take class with him.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Anonymous 03/10/2021	I took this class when it was online during covid. It was a terrible format for the insane amount of information they expected to teach. The pre-recorded lectures were decent (towards the end it started getting to be too much), but the once a week live classes were just simplified re-iterations of the pre-recorded lectures and did not add much value except for the few classes the professor created polls to practice application of the material. The professor tried to answer questions during class but often ran out of time because he was spending most of the time re-iterating the material. There was no clear guidance to use the textbook, but sometimes he would answer a student question by just saying to read the textbook. Homeworks were way too long and sometimes vague in expectations. Exams were also too long to finish for the average person. There was an overall curve at the end that helped take into account the difficulty and effort required to complete all the assignments. I think a lot of the material in the class is useful to know, but since there is SO much information, it's hard to take all of it in and pick out which specific things you should know for homeworks or exams. A good word to describe this class is "overwhelming," but if you're prepared to consume an insane amount of information (with a decent amount of self study), then you could get a lot out of this class.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A- Anonymous 01/08/2021	I believe this class is necessary for all computer science majors to take because it gives you an in depth overview about databases and the theories/concepts behind them. However, the real world will probably cover 20% of what you actually learn. Since it was the covid online semester, I appreciate Amol for having a synchronous call once a week to cover the panoptos for the week, but if you didn't watch the videos or have any questions the lecture is useless. There was a homework worksheet on gradescope and mini coding project due every week which did seem tough to finish at times (especially at the end of the semester) but he was lenient and gave us 20 late days for the whole semester while dropping some assignments. The midterms were very hard and the averages of them were on the low side, but the curve was extremely generous (80% is an A). He is responsive to concerns and was one of the more understanding CS professors that I have had. The only comment that I have is that there are so many topics that you feel you are zooming without really learning it in depth. But it is kinda impossible to fail this class since the curve is generous and if you show effort within each assignment, you are guaranteed to pass.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/21/2020	It's a good course but I don't know if its transition to online has been best. As many other reviewers have noted, there's a definite disconnect between the lecture/slides/textbook and the homework at times. Most coding assignments are fairly easy, but worksheets can be very vague and often require office hours for clarification. Projects/worksheets take up about 75% of your overall grade and there is probably a minimum of a solid 8 hours of homework each week. It seems like the curve will be fairly generous and I believe this class is pretty hard to fail, but it's also far from a piece of cake. Also, there's simply way too much material involved in this course. You jump from topic to topic week after week while it feels like you're really just skimming the surface.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/18/2020	good class pogchamp very hard - but lots of interesting material online environment is, if anything, just as good or better than in person lecture, as is the case with most computer science courses The coding homeworks are often straightforward, but the gradescope questions are usually relatively long. Overall not too bad of a class. The exams are hard, but everyone does terribly, and the grading is extremely flexible.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a W Anonymous 12/14/2020	First course I've ever had to withdraw from (3.9 GPA double major). Semester started off fine (SQL section was handled fairly) and veered completely off the rails into incomprehensible algorithms which were not well taught. Professor started off giving polls on certain concepts, but then didn't bother when it was really needed. Homeworks regularly required us to sift through documentation, including learning procedural SQL (not covered in class), to low-level implementations of data structures and joining algorithms in Python. If I wanted to write shitty low-level code for 10+ hrs/wk I would have just taken Operating Systems. In addition, even though the professor gives 20 late days, the standard due date for homeworks is within 3-4 days, so it's not that big of a helping hand. I thought the HW in the later half of the course would be similar to the difficulty in the first half, and got screwed having to write those algorithms with limited time. Midterm was filled with questions on highly specific concepts that were covered once in class. Average on Part 2 of the midterm was <50%. This midterm was also supposed to be taken closed note, but on the honor system. Any student who cheated probably gained a major advantage due to the specific nature of the questions. Avoid CMSC424 online with Deshpande at all costs. This class singlehandedly made me switch out of Data Science into the Machine Learning track, and probably killed any interest I would have in Data Science at all, which was a shame since I really enjoyed CMSC320 and CMSC422.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Anonymous 11/16/2020	The lectures are worthless, the homeworks take 10+ hours to complete and even then getting good scores on them is extremely difficult, the exam was terrible and poorly managed, and I don't think I learned a single thing this semester other than some useful surface level fragments of information
Amol Deshpande Anonymous 11/16/2020	Legit an extemely horrible class that has been poorly run during this fully online COVID semester. The homeworks are actually impossible to do good on since he barely even covers the concepts during lecture, and then on homeworks gives insanely detailed questions that not even the holy scriptures of the textbook cannot answer. The midterm was extremely difficult and the class average was well below failing. The homeworks take an insane amount of time and scrutiny to complete, and I feel like I am walking out of this class as if I have learned nothing essentially.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting a C Anonymous 11/03/2020	CMSC424 during the full covid semester is actually kind of absurd. The concepts build up extremely rapidly, but the extraordinarily difficult homeworks don't even cover material relevant to future jobs. If I ever have to calculate precisely how many hard disk seeks and block reads occur when running a SQL Hybrid Hash merge join operation in the worst case at a future job, I will actually eat my hat. The fact that homeworks ask us to effectively re-derive and analyze internal sql algorithms is a bit ridiculous for this semester. I made the mistake of not doing a couple early homeworks to make room for other classes, thinking the difficulty would be consistent throughout the semester. Turns out I need every point I can get in this class, and that's not really possible with how inscrutable and impossible the homeworks have become.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Anonymous 11/01/2020	This class as an online course has been horrible. The homeworks are absolutely killer and take 10+ hours a week to get done, if you can even figure them out at all. They’re usually 20+ questions and some programming assignment that the instructions are often unclear for. Multiple times during the homework it feels like during lecture we were taught how to do a doggy paddle and the assignment is like figure out how to swim across the Atlantic, good luck. The midterm was poorly done too, with 2 parts on elms being multiple choice and a writing section, timed. I truly feel like I haven’t learned that much and the homeworks are incredibly frustrating. Lectures are not great either and we have a synchronous time every week where we meet and he just repeats what’s on the slides from the videos we already watched. This class is very poorly organized and I would not recommend it to anyone due to the frustration and headache.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/02/2020	Nice professor. Didn't do the best job handling covid, but was clearly trying and cares.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Anonymous 01/24/2018	Very nice professor, willing to work with his students. His projects earlier on in the semester aren't a joke (unless you've already studied python and django). So much stress in finishing each project, but it really hammered in the concepts for databases. I would recommend this course, but probably not to final semester seniors.
Amol Deshpande CMSC424 Expecting an A rockinbassman 06/22/2012	Prof. Deshpande was a great professor (especially for computer science courses). He did not just stand in front of the class and read off a power point. He actually taught the concepts, sometimes with no presentation at all. When he did use a power point, it was as a visual aid and not as a crutch. For this semester, he did only quizzes (no midterm) and a final, plus homeworks. I liked the quizzes because it removed the stress of having a big midterm, however, it required you to always be caught up in the material.
Amol Deshpande CMSC724 Anonymous 08/05/2011	A very good course and very good Prof. The course is quite extensive and well prepared covering the entire database concepts from basic to advance. The course is little bit heavy so be prepared to read lots of papers. Also a suggestion if you are taking this course then try to make the semester otherwise lighter. Else you may not get the time to read the papers thoughtfully. Grading is quite good.
Amol Deshpande CMSC724 sthakor 12/02/2007	A very good course! Midterm and final will be difficult. He explains the concepts very well.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a B-
Anonymous
05/10/2024

Midterms and the final are 60% of the final grade in which the scores are historically bad (mean of 50% with the upper quartile being just above that). The slides and lectures are more high-level/conceptual while the assignments and midterms are very technical and detail-oriented. Some exam questions are from 1 slide out of the 800+ posted. ' Most of the materials posted for studying like past midterms and homework were posted just days before the exam. When asking questions about the material, Amol would respond to look at the past exams for more insight. The old exams have also been extremely outdated mostly from 2008-2015 or over COVID in an online setting in which the syllabus has heavily changed. For many of the questions asked about the material or assignments, Amol would explain how the technologies have been updated and that the material in the slides was not widely used or optimal anymore. I think the book and material in this class have become outdated since Amol started teaching it. Amol definitely knows his stuff but delves too much into the details that the bigger picture is not translated. Amol isn't a bad lecturer, just focusing on the wrong things. He'd rather give exposure to every single detail, topic, and language than give a good foundation to build on.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a C-
Anonymous
01/28/2023

Content in projects had very little to do with exams and lectures and had little impact on our grade relative to how time consuming they were, there was just too much content in the course to where we were allowed a cheat sheet on the final and it was possible you missed half the content on the exam

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a C+
Anonymous
12/21/2022

Let’s start with the pros. The course teaches you a decent amount of concepts about different database systems, how to design them, and how to work with each. The projects were a lot of fun and taught me most of what I know about databases. I would say you could finish a project in a day or two if you understand the concepts. With all that being said.. the homeworks and exams are MISERABLE. Amol has HUNDREDS of slides on a subject, but they don’t really teach you much. He does go in depth about some subjects in class, but a lot of it is left to self teaching (go figure, it’s a CS course). I wouldn’t take this course again. A lot of what I found to be useful can be learned on your own if you follow some advanced SQL book and lookup Apache spark and mongodb. The last 4 weeks of class are mostly useless, as he goes into how database programs are implemented. It may seem useful at first, but there are just so many concepts to memorize. I’m giving the class 3 stars because I enjoyed the projects. The other material was insane. On the bright side, there is a pretty generous curve.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Anonymous
12/20/2022

Learned a lot of material in this class. We started with SQL, some theory about database design, MongoDB, Spark and ended with some more theory. Definitely a challenging class but there was a lot to learn. Every homework/project had a one week, no questions asked extension. Exams were challenging but also always had questions that were on the homework.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Anonymous
12/15/2022

The only pros to this semester were that the dreaded B+ tree, the E/R Project, and the math-related projects are removed. Spark is a separate project and MongoDB was another separate project, along with a new JDBC/ODBC project. That's the only reason why I'm giving this review two stars, since the projects were actually useful and were a lot easier than they were in the past, and from the generous late policy. But other than that, this was miserable. Each topic no matter how complex it is was gone through in such surface level so then we have to pick up extra time ourselves to thoroughly learn the concepts, especially canonical cover, and concurrency. For canonical cover, we were just supposed to look up an algorithm instead which was ridiculous. Also, the fact that we have to study I don't know a 1000 slides for an exam that can ask about literally anything is ridiculous too. I could be fine with all of this if the homeworks had detailed solutions after them. Some answers are just marked as "Correct" or "Incorrect" without giving us the full answer, and how we get to that answer. Also, as I mentioned earlier in learning the material on our own, examples were not given well at all. Examples should mimic homework difficulty so then we can learn from them and apply to the homework problems, not learning them in surface level and then having to take a lot of extra time just to do the complex ones. And with the late policy, official solutions can't be released, which I understand that. But if that's the case, then we need more complex examples with solutions so we have a point of reference. Overall, this class was just a lot. If you want to learn databases, you're better off learning it on your own.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a B
Anonymous
12/13/2022

He is very very smart and this course covers a LOT of material. I was new to everything database/SQL, but had to learn fast. That being said, I thought the professor did a great job at teaching the content and answering questions for those who attended class. Projects were long but manageable, not to mention that he gave week long extensions available for every project/HW as the late policy. Overall, very useful class with lots to learn.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a B-
Anonymous
12/13/2022

This was the most miserable class I have ever taken. It's hard to know where to start: The review below touches on this, but the class is structured and managed terribly. The slides don't have enough information to rely on, but the lectures often weren't useful enough, so it felt like I was losing by going to class (I went to class every day) or losing if I didn't go. Some of the slides literally say to look stuff up online. There is a topic called Canonical Cover we "learned" where the slides said to look up how to do it, we didn't do any examples in class, and then we had to do Canonical Cover twice on homework and on an exam. Because literally everything in the class is on exams, there was even a case where something we learned in the last 15 minutes of class the day before the exam was on the exam. It makes it extremely difficult to study, especially because slides are grouped by unit, which means you have to sift through a ~250 slide slideshow to find any information. Furthermore, Amol does not provide good examples of stuff. The limited examples he provides are often copied and pasted form the textbook. I had no SQL experience before this class, but when we covered SQL he never really taught us how to write queries, he just sped through the syntax. This meant that I struggled on the SQL programming assignments. Assignments are doable, but often require a ton of time. We had homework and projects due within days of exams. At one point we had three weeks' worth of homework assigned simultaneously. He does schedule assignments they're all done before Thanksgiving, but as a result we'd only have 1-2 days of "rest" between programming assignments. Homework is your only attempt to get practice with the vast majority of the class content. The homework was okay, but he never provides answer keys because of his lax late policy. I'd rather have him be slightly harsher about homework deadlines so I can actually get feedback and learn from the homework, because the Grade Scope rubric often doesn't provide the feedback you need. This class also relies on Docker, so if you have a slow/old computer, like I do, you will be miserable on the programming assignments. Just a heads up. To summarize, this class was terrible. If you are completely new to databases, like I was, just learn how to use SQL or MongoDB on your own. The hell you have to go through in this class is not worth the very little gain you'll get.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
11/03/2022

This is THE worst structured course I have ever taken, which has not been helped by Amol's lectures not being useful, mostly just reading off of extremely long slide decks. Despite their size, the slides provide only minimal information to complete weekly homework and projects, so we are expected (explicitly) to read up on the programming language manuals for examples and syntax. The project descriptions are extremely vague and full of typos, with him usually updating them multiple times after releasing it. Sometimes the project descriptions contradict to examples we have gone over in class, making it all very confusing. The class schedule is also a disaster. We will have homework due the day before exams, with a full project due only days after. On the topic of exams, he has put material on an exam that we had not learned until THE LECTURE BEFORE, with no opportunity to practice concepts on homework/projects. There were no explicit topic lists released for exams, usually having to be put together by scouring many piazza posts. The exams he released as practice did not accurately reflect the topics on the exam due to him re-organizing the syllabus, but he couldn't even be bothered to write an accurate practice exam. The class has entirely too much content, trying to jam in at least 2 semesters of content, a lot of which is theory with no practical examples of why it is useful. I would not recommend taking this course under any circumstances. If you want to learn SQL, you are better off teaching yourself than subjecting yourself to this misery.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
01/31/2022

Amazing course. Learnt a lot about databases and the projects were fun to code. He is a good person and a great lecturer. He and his TAs are very responsive to questions after class on CampusWire which was a godsend because database environments and coding lead to a lot of questions. They also have a strong grip on the material and I got all my queries resolved. Highly recommend the class. One of the best ones that I have taken at UMD.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a B
Anonymous
01/28/2022

I took the course during Fall 2021. The biggest issue with the class was his teaching style. He would just plow through his slides which were pretty much just copy and paste from the textbook, but he wouldn't explain the content on the slides well. He would pretty much just end up reading it straight from the slides and then assume that we know exactly what it means, while on most slides there was always something he could explain more. This made the class really difficult when it came to exam time. There could be a question that was somewhat similar to the slides, and many students would still have no clue how to do it, which is a big issue. When you go to office hours, there have been multiple times where I've asked the different TAs the same question and have gotten a different answer, which made things even harder to understand. The assignments were actually not too hard, just takes a lot of time, so you really have to set time to really work on it. Just getting a project set up could take 2-3 hours if your unlucky. Usually though, they are doable and you can get 90+ on all of them. While the teaching style was bad, you could get a 50-70 on every exam and midterm and still end up with a B/B+, so it ends not being the worst class. You do end up learning SQL, Spark, MongoDB, and important relational database concepts in the class.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/25/2021

He gets a lot of hate but I don't fully understand why. His exams are difficult but he clearly cares about the students wellbeing by moving our midterms and finals online due to students fearing about COVID. He also frequently takes questions during lectures, which is not something other CS professors normally do. The projects in this class are quite tedious (especially project 4 and its lack of documentation), but overall he's a really nice guy, explains things well (at least for me), and has a really flexible late day policy.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A+
Anonymous
12/24/2021

Amol is a nice guy and generally means well, but this class has a lot of issues. 1. Assignments - In Fall 2021 we had 6 assignments (2 written, 4 programming). While they are somewhat helpful in understanding the material, their length makes them really time consuming (more than expected for a 400 level class). For example, I remember writing 20 or so SQL queries where 10 would have been perfectly sufficient, and in general the written assignments were really long. They aren't necessarily difficult, but you definitely have to start early. One nice thing that I really appreciated was that Amol gives you 10 free late days (up to 5 on a single assignment). 2. Exams - The exams are quite difficult, not in terms of content but more so in terms of time. If you had 24 hours to complete it, you could probably get 80+ assuming you understood the material. But with the time constraint, it was definitely very hard to complete all of the questions fully (the averages on the exam were around 60%). One good thing is that Amol puts a fat curve on the class. He didn't disclose the official cutoffs, but in the beginning of the semester he said that an 80% would be an A (i think it ended up being a few points lower). 3. Content - This is probably my biggest gripe with the class. Amol tries to cover at least 2 semesters worth of content in this class. As a result, he moves extremely fast and tends to not explain things as fully as he can. For in depth explanations, he just tells you to read the textbook (which is decent). The content starts off at a decent pace, but after midterm 1 really picks up. I didn't feel like I was able to absorb anything meaningful because I was so focused on just cramming all of this information into my head to study. I also think that a lot of the content can be changed. We spend a lot of time learning about specific operations on disk, even though Amol prefaces the unit saying "no systems actually do it this way anymore." He justifies it saying that this is still the foundation, but I personally found it very discouraging. 4. Campuswire - This is maybe more of a personal issue, but Amol insists on using campuswire instead of piazza. I really hate campuswire (and I think the majority of the class did too). I find it harder to search posts, and you can't follow questions for when they've been answered. In general, databases is a pretty dry subject so I don't blame Amol for the class being generally boring. One thing I really liked was that he was very responsive so you generally got a fast response to questions on campuswire. He did also listen to students' COVID concerns and had exams online (along with recorded lecture). There's definitely improvements to be made, so unless you are very interested in databases or need the class for a major requirement, I would avoid this class for now.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A
Anonymous
12/23/2021

good guy, but not the best at teaching/running a course. all the projects were rather difficult and required you to do a lot of learning outside of class to figure them out. on the bright side, no secret tests. the midterms and final were extremely long and difficult, but he heavily curves (A- is about an 80) to make up for it. giving him 3 stars because he does seem to care about his students learning, just doesn't seem the best at it

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a C-
Anonymous
12/18/2021

Not a good class at all. The lectures were very dry. I get it, databases aren't the most exciting topic in the world. But I just found it hard to retain anything from the lectures in this class. It's a very, very good thing that all the exams ended up being online, because I needed my notes and the slides as a reference. I just finished the final exam and there was so much stuff that I remember him talking about in class, but I couldn't remember any of the details of. Deshpande just doesn't seem to be very good at teaching. I don't think he got the concepts across very well at all. And man, this class is actually really hard! The projects will eat up tons of your time. The exams are really, really hard. Even the weekly quizzes were pretty challenging. The upside is that there's a very, very, very generous curve. No matter what, a 60 is the minimum grade to pass this class. That cutoff can be lowered, but never raised. So there is plenty of leniency. This class actually reminds me of 351 in a few ways. 424 focuses a lot on theory at times, much like 351. 351 is extraordinarily hard, but there's always a very generous curve at the end. This class is the same way. I have no doubt that the SQL skills learned in this class will be helpful. But this class is so much more than SQL, and I kind of mean that in a bad way. There's relational algebra and functional dependencies, E/R modeling, database implementation, then NoSQL stuff, and finally transactions. That's a vast array of topics, and they're done in a strange order, too. This class needs to be whittled down a lot. Focus much more on the SQL and NoSQL stuff. Then at the end, focus on database implementation. Cut out all the theory. Basically, what I'm saying is, this class covers a lot of useful information, but it also covers a lot of useless information. And under Deshpande, I think it's taught poorly. If I even got a 50% on this final, I'll be lucky. I'm just glad the cutoffs are so generous that I could afford to get a 10% on the final and still pass.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
12/08/2021

He is a very good and fair professor. He genuinely cares. CMSC424 could use some improvements - such as better coverage of the theory assessed on the exams. Most of the topics are covered well but the exams can be quite tricky. Projects are fair and even fun at times. I took the course hoping to be better prepared for industry since I lacked database experience. For me ~60% seems immediately useful and the remaining ~40% was some cool-to-know theory and some challenges/issues in the space. Others may not be happy with this ratio or they may perceive a different ratio. I enjoyed the class. I'd give it a 4, but I am giving it a 5 because it is definitely better than 2.93 it currently stands at.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an F
Anonymous
12/06/2021

I would give 0 star if I could. The lecture slides are basically 100+ pages table of content with excessive amount of useless information. The exams are insanely long and difficult given only 60 minutes. His lecture is just hard to understand and he doesn't explain things well. Worst class I've ever taken at UMD.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Anonymous
12/03/2021

Absolute garbage professor. He gives out work without even teaching the material. Additionally, he has no respect for student concerns about taking an exam in person while Omricon is raging through the United States. Gave out assignments where majority of the time to work on it was during the Thanksgiving break. Would not take class with him.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Anonymous
03/10/2021

I took this class when it was online during covid. It was a terrible format for the insane amount of information they expected to teach. The pre-recorded lectures were decent (towards the end it started getting to be too much), but the once a week live classes were just simplified re-iterations of the pre-recorded lectures and did not add much value except for the few classes the professor created polls to practice application of the material. The professor tried to answer questions during class but often ran out of time because he was spending most of the time re-iterating the material. There was no clear guidance to use the textbook, but sometimes he would answer a student question by just saying to read the textbook. Homeworks were way too long and sometimes vague in expectations. Exams were also too long to finish for the average person. There was an overall curve at the end that helped take into account the difficulty and effort required to complete all the assignments. I think a lot of the material in the class is useful to know, but since there is SO much information, it's hard to take all of it in and pick out which specific things you should know for homeworks or exams. A good word to describe this class is "overwhelming," but if you're prepared to consume an insane amount of information (with a decent amount of self study), then you could get a lot out of this class.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
01/08/2021

I believe this class is necessary for all computer science majors to take because it gives you an in depth overview about databases and the theories/concepts behind them. However, the real world will probably cover 20% of what you actually learn. Since it was the covid online semester, I appreciate Amol for having a synchronous call once a week to cover the panoptos for the week, but if you didn't watch the videos or have any questions the lecture is useless. There was a homework worksheet on gradescope and mini coding project due every week which did seem tough to finish at times (especially at the end of the semester) but he was lenient and gave us 20 late days for the whole semester while dropping some assignments. The midterms were very hard and the averages of them were on the low side, but the curve was extremely generous (80% is an A). He is responsive to concerns and was one of the more understanding CS professors that I have had. The only comment that I have is that there are so many topics that you feel you are zooming without really learning it in depth. But it is kinda impossible to fail this class since the curve is generous and if you show effort within each assignment, you are guaranteed to pass.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/21/2020

It's a good course but I don't know if its transition to online has been best. As many other reviewers have noted, there's a definite disconnect between the lecture/slides/textbook and the homework at times. Most coding assignments are fairly easy, but worksheets can be very vague and often require office hours for clarification. Projects/worksheets take up about 75% of your overall grade and there is probably a minimum of a solid 8 hours of homework each week. It seems like the curve will be fairly generous and I believe this class is pretty hard to fail, but it's also far from a piece of cake. Also, there's simply way too much material involved in this course. You jump from topic to topic week after week while it feels like you're really just skimming the surface.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
12/18/2020

good class pogchamp very hard - but lots of interesting material online environment is, if anything, just as good or better than in person lecture, as is the case with most computer science courses The coding homeworks are often straightforward, but the gradescope questions are usually relatively long. Overall not too bad of a class. The exams are hard, but everyone does terribly, and the grading is extremely flexible.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a W
Anonymous
12/14/2020

First course I've ever had to withdraw from (3.9 GPA double major). Semester started off fine (SQL section was handled fairly) and veered completely off the rails into incomprehensible algorithms which were not well taught. Professor started off giving polls on certain concepts, but then didn't bother when it was really needed. Homeworks regularly required us to sift through documentation, including learning procedural SQL (not covered in class), to low-level implementations of data structures and joining algorithms in Python. If I wanted to write shitty low-level code for 10+ hrs/wk I would have just taken Operating Systems. In addition, even though the professor gives 20 late days, the standard due date for homeworks is within 3-4 days, so it's not that big of a helping hand. I thought the HW in the later half of the course would be similar to the difficulty in the first half, and got screwed having to write those algorithms with limited time. Midterm was filled with questions on highly specific concepts that were covered once in class. Average on Part 2 of the midterm was <50%. This midterm was also supposed to be taken closed note, but on the honor system. Any student who cheated probably gained a major advantage due to the specific nature of the questions. Avoid CMSC424 online with Deshpande at all costs. This class singlehandedly made me switch out of Data Science into the Machine Learning track, and probably killed any interest I would have in Data Science at all, which was a shame since I really enjoyed CMSC320 and CMSC422.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Anonymous
11/16/2020

The lectures are worthless, the homeworks take 10+ hours to complete and even then getting good scores on them is extremely difficult, the exam was terrible and poorly managed, and I don't think I learned a single thing this semester other than some useful surface level fragments of information

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting a C
Anonymous
11/03/2020

CMSC424 during the full covid semester is actually kind of absurd. The concepts build up extremely rapidly, but the extraordinarily difficult homeworks don't even cover material relevant to future jobs. If I ever have to calculate precisely how many hard disk seeks and block reads occur when running a SQL Hybrid Hash merge join operation in the worst case at a future job, I will actually eat my hat. The fact that homeworks ask us to effectively re-derive and analyze internal sql algorithms is a bit ridiculous for this semester. I made the mistake of not doing a couple early homeworks to make room for other classes, thinking the difficulty would be consistent throughout the semester. Turns out I need every point I can get in this class, and that's not really possible with how inscrutable and impossible the homeworks have become.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Anonymous
11/01/2020

This class as an online course has been horrible. The homeworks are absolutely killer and take 10+ hours a week to get done, if you can even figure them out at all. They’re usually 20+ questions and some programming assignment that the instructions are often unclear for. Multiple times during the homework it feels like during lecture we were taught how to do a doggy paddle and the assignment is like figure out how to swim across the Atlantic, good luck. The midterm was poorly done too, with 2 parts on elms being multiple choice and a writing section, timed. I truly feel like I haven’t learned that much and the homeworks are incredibly frustrating. Lectures are not great either and we have a synchronous time every week where we meet and he just repeats what’s on the slides from the videos we already watched. This class is very poorly organized and I would not recommend it to anyone due to the frustration and headache.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A
Anonymous
05/02/2020

Nice professor. Didn't do the best job handling covid, but was clearly trying and cares.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Anonymous
01/24/2018

Very nice professor, willing to work with his students. His projects earlier on in the semester aren't a joke (unless you've already studied python and django). So much stress in finishing each project, but it really hammered in the concepts for databases. I would recommend this course, but probably not to final semester seniors.

Amol Deshpande
CMSC424

Expecting an A
rockinbassman
06/22/2012

Prof. Deshpande was a great professor (especially for computer science courses). He did not just stand in front of the class and read off a power point. He actually taught the concepts, sometimes with no presentation at all. When he did use a power point, it was as a visual aid and not as a crutch. For this semester, he did only quizzes (no midterm) and a final, plus homeworks. I liked the quizzes because it removed the stress of having a big midterm, however, it required you to always be caught up in the material.