| Information | Review |
|---|---|
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John Dickerson
DATA320 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/15/2023 |
This class seems very interesting on paper, but most lectures were very boring in my opinion. He is not the best lecturer but he gives over everything you need to know. Projects were very time consuming for me. There was a final project where you can work in groups. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/27/2023 |
EXCELLENT PROFESSOR!! Weekly quizzes are pass/fail (free points) and THERES NO FINAL!! You are graded pretty much based on projects which are usually extremely fun to do! John is a very nice guy, even though i'm not the kind of guy who goes to office hours much, I could tell that he has a very nice and fun personality and he's very approachable. I can confidently say that he is one of the best professors I've had. Overall, I would highly recommend Professor John and CMSC320 to anyone interested in data science or computer science. It was a challenging course, but with Professor John's guidance and support, I was able to learn a lot and feel confident in my abilities. Thank you, Professor John, for being an amazing teacher! |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A- Anonymous 04/27/2023 |
I had the pleasure of taking CMSC320 with Professor John at UMD, and I can confidently say that he is one of the best professors I've ever had. I've sat in Maksym's lectures and honestly John is much much better! His knowledge of data science and computer science is unparalleled, and he has a real passion for teaching and helping students understand complex concepts. His lectures are engaging, and he always takes the time to answer questions and provide extra help to students who need it. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM! THE WEEKLY QUIZZES ARE PASS/FAIL (FREE POINTS!!) I will probably be one of the TA's for this class next semester and we have taken into account all the reviews that are on planet terp and rate my professor. We will have a whole new set of practice material for the exams which are similar to the exams themselves. We have also listened to the issues about grading time and we will CONSIDERABLY REDUCE them next semester so that students can track their progress and take action if necessary to improve their grade. One of the things I appreciated most about Professor John was his approachability. He was always available to talk to outside of class, whether it was to answer a question about an assignment or just to chat about the course material. He truly cares about his students and wants to see them succeed. Overall, I would highly recommend Professor John and CMSC320 to anyone interested in data science or computer science. It was a challenging course, but with Professor John's guidance and support, I was able to learn a lot and feel confident in my abilities. Thank you, Professor John, for being an amazing teacher! |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/11/2022 |
Honestly, I was pretty excited for this class, but I was disappointed this semester. As others said, Dickerson is a nice guy and he's a decent lecturer. I found the lecture content, however, to be boring. Perhaps this was just me excepting data science to be less math oriented and theoretical. The lectures would sometimes seem to be overly complicated. The content that you learned in lectures barely helped for the projects. I remember being quite frustrated by the first project because I was going through slides and I didn't know how to do it. Once you realize that the projects are a lot of Googling how to use the tools they give you (such as Pandas and numpy), they become pretty easy. Even though they were easy, the projects were tedious and uninteresting, and they do take quite a bit of time. I expected more of a coding class, but you have to explain and analyze a lot of things in your project (which is I guess how data science is, but I found it uninteresting). There's only four projects, however, and the fourth one (the map one) was pretty short and interesting. The projects were graded leniently, with averages in the high 90s, but they took way too long to grade them. The midterms didn't end up being too difficult, but he had basically no practice material. It'll probably get better as time goes on since he'll just re-use old exams as practice, but I had no idea how to prepare for his midterms. Since the projects have basically nothing to do with lecture, I stopped going after the second midterm (there's no final exam, just a final project). He has you do weekly reading quizzes and they were pass/fail, so they were pretty much free points. The final project is basically what you make out of it. It's a great opportunity to put something meaningful on your resume as someone down below said, but I ended up doing something much easier for a good grade. Still, it's very open-ended and a great idea. Even with all my complaints, the class itself wasn't very difficult to be honest. Dickerson is a nice guy and a decent lecturer, and you will be be fine if you take a class with him. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/27/2021 |
Firstly, hes a pretty young and chill guy. His lecture topics are relevant and he makes the course in Python so that you can actually benefit from the material in the class. The course itself is actually kind of interesting. Now here is the kicker, it takes a CENTURY for him to grade stuff. The projects themselves are quite time consuming, and I had to google how to do half the shit on the projects because he makes them so you learn as you go. There are about 4 TA's in the class and they tend to be not helpful themselves. He gave us 2 mid term exams, one which was kinda hard, while the other which was kinda easy. Though he gives no practice, so you do not know how to study for any of his exams. He is also an awful communicator to the point where he avoids questions on piazza because he simply doesnt feel like answering them. Ive seen him answer like 2 questions and then ignore all the others. For our Final Project (no final exam), he is independently grading all of them so obviously it may take a bit, but he essentially just assigned us grades on testudo and didnt even tell us what we got on our final projects. When asked on piazza about it, he has been stone cold silent. We did not get our project 3/4 grades until the day before our Final Project was due. We got our project 2 grades the week before that. Keep in mind these projects were due like months before. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/23/2021 |
Dickerson is a nice and approachable professor. However, I found that the projects were unecessarily difficult and took a long time to complete. The TAs weren't very helpful, so this class ended up taking a lot more time than expected. The grading is also pretty slow. However, Dickerson did a good job teaching and was generally quite engaging. The final project, which requires making a tutorial, was a great resume builder and was fun to work on. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Anonymous 12/20/2021 |
Absolutely ridiculous how long it takes a project to get graded. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/06/2021 |
Very fair teacher, but lectures are pretty boring. Projects take a long time but are not very complicated. Class is very slow at grading so you will not know how you did on a project for at least a month. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Anonymous 10/10/2021 |
This class is much harder than it needs to be because of how disorganized it is. The lectures cover maybe 10% of what you need to know for projects. John and the TAs rarely answer questions on Piazza, and when they do they're usually not helpful. There are basically no practice materials for exams, or even general information on what topics are covered. Project descriptions are extremely vague and ambiguous. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A- Anonymous 10/26/2020 |
He's a good lecturer and a nice guy, but it's almost impossible to reach him by Piazza or email because he barely ever responds to anything. TAs similarly were very unresponsive on Piazza, and he and the TAs were super late/negligent on giving help and practice material. For our midterm, we barely got any test practice and what we did get was only a few days before the exam. This may probably be benefited by having more TAs in this class. Also, project descriptions were vague and full of errors. Despite this though, the grading is very lenient on the projects and final once you put in the work, so I'd probably still recommend him over the other guy (Hector). |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/06/2020 |
Really liked the structure of the class. 4 projects, a midterm and a final project, along with weekly quizzes online. The material is interesting, however does not go super in depth. Slides are posted on the class page and contain all the information you need to know very thoroughly |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/22/2019 |
Course size is way too large. Dickerson is a good lecturer, but I think the the course covers too much material overall. Learned a bit of python and pandas, and projects were okay. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/21/2019 |
honestly i did not learn much from his lectures. i mean i looked at his slides and learned but i don't really like his lecture style. i stopped going after the midterm since there's no final exam. the TAs were sometimes very unresponsive on piazza and the projects are veryyyy vague and can be unclear what they want. then when you do what they want, they take more points off because of "requirements" that weren't even mentioned in the description(this didn't happen to me but some other people). overall if you have to take 320 it honestly doesn't matter, i wouldnt go out of my way to avoid dickerson and he's a pretty nice person and has done a lot of great work/projects(check his kidney transplant scheduling..thing) but i didnt really like the experience of 320. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC389K Expecting an A Anonymous 12/12/2019 |
Class is well organized and projects are easy to get good grades on. You get out what you put in and have the opportunity to create solid resume projects. Student instructors do not answer on piazza in a timely manner, but otherwise average. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/25/2018 |
10/10 would recommend this Prof. CMSC320 with him is very interesting. Projects actually helped me learn a lot of Python and ML stuff. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/11/2018 |
Great Professor Overall - went over content in depth but well. Was a bit hard to ask questions in a big lecture hall, but I don't think that's on him. Projects were interesting and overall a good class. |
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John Dickerson
CMSC320 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/08/2018 |
Projects are not too bad. One midterm, really hard because he doesn't provide study materials for it. great class |