Sujeong Kim

This professor has taught: CMSC421

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Sujeong Kim CMSC421 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/15/2024	She is a new teacher and I don't think it is necessarily her fault, but attendance is weighted way to high for a class copied from Berkeley. and copied poorly. There is less frequent homework than the Berkeley course and this causes it to be a much larger problem set so everything is covered. There were only 3 homework assignments the entire semester and 1 group project. the workload is not bad but this means the class is not really the most engaging and you end up having to relearn lots of topics to do the homework because you haven't thought about it for 4 weeks ago since you initially learned it and the professor moved on. The attendance is worth way too much and I would have an A- in the course if they removed it completely. The one time the professor had to miss class for a family emergency we had to come to class for participation points and watch a zoom lecture of the other classroom projected on the screen and I honestly felt insulted reading that canvas announcement. It was a waste of the Ta's time that day to have to sit there in person, operate the zoom meeting and, ask questions for students when we just as easily could have watched from home and gotten the same experience if not better.
Sujeong Kim CMSC421 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/11/2024	Course was fine. Professor mostly read off slides, but I thought the material was neat. It was mostly material taken from Berkeley's course, so the slides are solid. The course has a few homeworks, an exam, and a semester-long project, all of which I thought were reasonable. Solid, relatively easy CS elective, but professor was nothing special.
Sujeong Kim CMSC421 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/10/2024	I'll preface my review by stating that I had Dr. Sujeong Kim, but she co-taught this course with Dr. Max Ehrlich, so much of this feedback applies to them both. Starting with the curriculum, I feel that this course was very poorly designed. The professors put in the bare minimum effort, more or less entirely ripping off Berkeley's CS188 course (https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/fa23/), including all of the topics and slides. In fact, the slides they provided us with were identical to the Berkeley ones, just with the Berkeley branding replaced by UMD branding. They didn't even bother recording lectures, telling us to use the Berkeley recordings instead. Also, the Berkeley course had regular discussions, homeworks, and projects—which would have helped us learn to apply the material we were learning, something the professors didn’t really seem to care about. Moving on to the quality of the lectures, Dr. Kim seems very knowledgeable, but she simply cannot teach effectively and seems best suited for research. Her lectures pretty much consisted of reading off the Berkeley slides and giving inadequate answers when anyone would ask a question. It seems that there was very minimal preparation done before the lectures. The only reason anyone even bothered attending lectures was the clicker quizzes, which effectively made attendance mandatory. I personally learned more putting in headphones and reading the Berkeley notes instead of listening to her. The assignments didn't make the course any better either… There was one midterm exam, which was a disaster. The professors made us take the exam on Gradescope on our laptops in class, because their goal was not to measure students' comprehension of the material but instead to minimize the time and effort needed to grade the exam while maintaining the façade of a well-run class. They provided hardly any review materials themselves and only posted full solutions after complaints on Piazza. And even the solutions provided turned out to have errors. Besides that, they pointed us to Berkeley's past exams, which ended up being nothing like our exam. The exam was such a time crunch that hardly anyone could even finish, and they had to curve the exam to be out of 78 points even though there were well over 100 points originally. The first 2 homework assignments were quite boring, but Homework 3 (a PyTorch lab which involved building an image classifier from scratch) turned out to be quite interesting. However, the professors did not teach us anything to equip us with the knowledge necessary to do the homework. They did not go over how to use PyTorch, how to design a neural network, how convolutional neural networks work, how to improve models, or anything else that would be remotely useful. While this was one of the only thought-provoking assignments, the professors did not prepare us for it at all. Finally, we had a group project due at the end of the semester that was pretty interesting, but the professors did not communicate the requirements clearly at all. They waited until a week before the end of the semester to tell us the details of the final poster presentation and announce that we had to complete a 3-5 page report in addition to the deliverables that we proposed in our project proposals. And that's also when they finally communicated the grading criteria, which was laughable. Somehow, the poster presentation was worth 70%, while the rest of the deliverables combined (including the 3-5 page report and all of the code) were worth just 30%. Overall, it seems like not much thought was put in this course. Why am I paying for a cheap rip-off of a Berkeley course that is freely available to all?