Paul Kline

This professor has taught: CMSC250

Sort By:

Information	Review
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 06/25/2023	Overall great teacher. Very nerdy and passionate about the subject and he explains the topics well. Easy to talk to if you have any questions. The homeworks are challenging but you have a week to do them, and afterward the quizzes and test seem relatively easier. Be sure to utilize the TAs for help.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 06/15/2023	Great Professor, enjoyed taking the course.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/29/2023	Took in Spring 2023. Kline is a good lecturer that makes concepts easy to understand. I appreciate how he frequently reviews topics from previous lectures before building on top of it in the current lecture. His head TA Elias was a bit crazy this semester and gave extremely difficult homework at first. After many complaints on piazza, the homework became easier towards the end of the semester. Kline is difficult to reach like many others in the CS department so most of your contact will be with TAs through piazza. There are chances for extra credit on homework if you use latex; you get 8 points extra on 100 point homeworks so these can certainly add up considering we had 10 homeworks throughout the semester. I ended with an A+ even though I did poorly on one of the 3 midterms. To succeed in this class I would recommend finding a good study group and working on problems together and starting homeworks early.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/28/2023	Great and down to earth guy. Class had many logistical issues especially surrounding the quizzes/exams and some of the homework, but Paul was quick enough to rectify those issues. Homeworks were absolutely difficult initially (expect to spend over 10 hrs/week). But the TAs (especially Elias, Lily, Nav, Zoya) were the real MVPs of this semester by hosting 3+ hour study sessions before the midterms, creating hella practice material for the final, and more. Class is not easy at all, so expect to put a lot of work into it.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting a B HashedString 05/26/2023	This is going to be a long and complex-ish review so skip to the bottom for a basic tl;dr THE GOOD: Kline himself I think is a good professor. His lectures are very casual and are usually decent, albeit they do have mistakes in them quite often which he does catch in class. Not a huge detriment but it does make it slightly annoying. He records all his lectures as well which is again, very helpful. Kline also is one of the profs who does not weigh tests heavily as part of your 250 grades. Your quizzes and homework can be a huge grade booster in that regard which can be helpful. His exams are also noticeably on the easier side I feel. The grade averages for my semester were around ~90%+ for Exam 1 (INSANE!) ~80% for Exam 2 and 3, and the final (with the final being slightly lower than 80% in the high 70s) While these are good averages, they aren't crazy, but I'd imagine the majority of the class passes with a higher grade due to the homework and quiz having higher weights. Additionally, all the extra credit in the course probably adds up to 3%+ (There is extra credit on some tests which is hard, and homework extra credit which I will get to later) THE BAD: Oh boy, where to begin? Kline is virtually nonexistent outside of lectures. He outsources everything to the TAs. They make the homework, the quizzes, answer all the Piazza posts, grade everything. This can lead to some issues. The "Style-Guide" is a style reference that we are supposed to use when doing all our homework and quizzes. Unfortunately, because this is a TA resource, at times it is disconnected from what Kline teaches. On more than one occasion (INCLUDING AN EXAM!!!) the style that Kline wished us to use did not match the style guide from the TAs. While this usually ends up not harming your grade directly, it can make the questions much more confusing and unnecessarily hard. Additionally, due to this disconnect, there are SO MANY occasions where quiz or homework questions are flat out DROPPED because they either had style mismatches or other issues that made them not be graded and gave everyone a 100% for them. One quiz we took had 3 questions, and 2/3 were dropped. While this is good for the student as they get free points, it is highly annoying and clearly a sign of a disorganized class. It can also feel discouraging to put in effort on homework only for it to not matter once the question is dropped. Now onto the major point of contention: THE HOMEWORKS The TAs write all the homework and they subscribe to the policy of "Hard Homework" preps you for the exam. And by Hard I mean that the homework are a MAGNITUDE harder and can get downright crazy. The infamous HW4 had an average completion time of over 10 hours for the majority of the course. Some homework got to 14 pages long. It's bad. The TAs eventually chilled near the end of the semester after all the complaints, so perhaps my dear future terp you will have it easier. Just be warned though, it can get bad! OH or internet searching on proofwiki and other things is downright required sometimes for some of the more insane proofs. To compensate there is a flat 8% bonus extra credit if you use LaTex for your homework. This adds up to about 2.5% extra credit for your entire course grade which is very nice and the sole saving grace of turning your homework averages high. Tl;DR THE SUMMARY: Kline is a decent prof who outsources his work to the TAs. It is easy to get a good grade in this class due to easy exams and frequent extra credit, but the workload for this class can be high due to difficult homework. If you are ok with spending a lot of time in this course but an easier course grade-wise, take Kline.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/24/2023	Amazing professor. Super helpful and approachable. I wish I could take more courses with him in the future, but I think he only teaches 250 since he teaches part-time. HW is a little tough in the middle of the course but if you go to TA office hours you will be fine. Great guy.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A cdavis73 05/22/2023	250 is a hard class and it's hard to comprehend the topics and ways of thinking regardless of how good the professor is. However, I have to say that Paul was an excellent instructor. His lectures were very engaging and he explained the difficult concepts in ways where it was really easy to understand, focusing on developing the ways of thinking rather than just memorizing methods and formulas. Although he himself was not very reachable outside of class besides office hours, he had a team of TAs that were very reachable for help. With that being said, the TAs were RUTHLESS sometimes with their homework and quiz assignments, expecting high understandings of number theory, proofs, and combinatorics that I didn't possess nor did the majority of students. We would learn the basics and be slapped with a problem that called for hugely advanced applications of the concepts that we shouldn't have been expected to do. Exams were pretty free, but the final was a little much, and almost everyone took the full 2 hours. But all of the problems associated with this class are at the fault of the TAs, and Paul himself was a fantastic lecturer and clearly knew what he was talking about.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/21/2023	Solid guy I'd say, some of his TAs go a little crazy on the homework but it got better by the end of the year. He teaches concepts really well, posts his slides and records lectures. Has a piazza which is helpful and all homeworks/exams are uploaded to gradescope to you can easily get regrade requests. He has style differences from his TAs which came to bite us on our third exam but its nothing to terrible. His exams are super fair/easy and his TAs often release hella practice material. Teaching is his side gig, he works at a software company but is a really good teacher. Also he is the biggest nerd known to man, 4.0s straight throughout high school and colleges, but in a cool way. I'd
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/20/2023	Note that I took 250 with Kline in Fall 2022 when he co taught with Cliff. Great professor overall, really nice, and good lecturer that tries to engage with students. The weekly hw's were alright (although this seems to be different in the more recent semester), we had extra credit for each hw for doing it in Latex. There were some issues with the TAs teaching a different notation than Kline, but it was not a big issue as both notations are accepted on hw and exams. Exams were also fair and straightforward.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/16/2023	Kline is a super solid prof for lecturing. He is enthusiastic, his lectures are easy to follow, and he makes the material reasonably easy to grasp; HOWEVER, the TAs are immensely frustrating. The grading on the homeworks is wildly inconsistent. You could follow the style Kline uses in lecture pretty much directly and still manage to get points off for style. There are also hundreds of regrades for each homework because the TAs just grade things incorrectly, and to top it all off it takes forever to get grades back. It is not fun to deal with at all. Also Elias, the head TA, has a stick so far up there it might as well be a second spine. The good news is though the latex extra credit can offset this. Overall it's not hard to get an A but it is tedious to fight for your grade.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/16/2023	The class is very frustrating. Paul Kline is a good lecturer and a nice guy, but the TA's are incompetent. They seriously cannot do their job. They don't even know half the course. When we got to the section on Combinatorics, half the TA's said "go to a different section, because I have no idea how to do this stuff". It baffles me how they even got to be TA's. One of the TA's slept through his discussion time and sent out an announcement saying "oops sry guys i forgot to set an alarm". I get that we're all college students, but that's your job. Worst of it all, is that all the quizzes, and homeworks, and style guide isn't written by Kline himself. It's written by the pompous ***wipe Elias, the head TA who actually runs the whole show. You will lose so many points on homeworks because of "style issues". If you follow the style Kline uses in class, the TA's will take off points due to bad style, if the homeworks ever get graded (it took till the end of the semester to get the last half of the homeworks graded). It's honestly not that hard to get an A in the class, the TA's just don't know how to do their job.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 04/25/2023	great professor but the TAs gotta chill on the hw
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 04/18/2023	Great lecturer and did a good job making the content of 250 seem really simple. There were times where what he was saying contradicted how the TAs were grading, but he was new and it never was that big of a problem. Great professor and cares
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 03/29/2023	Had him for the first semester he taught. Did a really great job. His lectures were always clear, I would actually be enjoying the content because I was able to understand it instead spending the whole lecture confused and trying to figure things out. He had some really good TAs too that made it even better. I thought I would struggle going into the class based on the reviews for 250 I've seen before but It surprisingly went better than I thought. He was really down to earth and understood everything from the perspective of the students. 10/10 would do it again.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/25/2023	Great lecturer, teaches well and is enthusiastic about the material. My only complaint with the class is that some of the exams, particularly questions on probability, were worded poorly. Still not going to dock a star because I think Paul is aware of this and working on it.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting a C- Anonymous 01/23/2023	For Professor Kline's first semester here teaching, he did an outstanding job. He is extremely helpful in office hours and so are his TA's but I was rarely able to attend since my focus was on linear algebra(MATH240) and CMSC132. On of my biggest issues with the course was that there was a lack of practice material that was available online to prepare for much of the harder concepts in the course like induction or combinatorics. Start the homework early as you have a week to complete it. Youtube and Justin's Notes for CMSC 250 are your best friends to do well in the course. There are only two midterms so not performing well will drop you significantly. That first exam is not a joke as I did not prepare with enough time in hand and did very poorly. He is a very nice guy that wants his students to succeed and have no doubt he will be a top professor at UMD.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/21/2022	As a side note, Kline first co-taught this course with Cliff Bakalian, who has his own set of issues, so I'll cut him some slack. As a lecturer, Kline is great. It's clear that he's very enthusiastic about teaching the course material. HIs style is teaching by example, which is really beneficial for a class that is oriented around proofs and intuition. In terms of the structure of the course, there are some issues. The homework was pretty awful and—for students who tend to have a slow start adjusting to course material—overwhelming. It didn't help that the grading of homework was incredibly delayed either. Additionally, out of the three exams that we had (including the final), only ONE practice exam was posted (and based on the grade distributions for each exam, the one with the practice exam is the one people did the best on). Regardless, several of these issues can be attributed to being a new lecturer at UMD and not having complete authority of his course, so I think he'll be a better option for incoming CS students in the future.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/19/2022	Paul is a solid lecturer and was very fair throughout the entire course. I'm not going to dock him stars here for the organizational problems that cliff's class has because I mainly attribute those problems to Cliff.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/17/2022	Kind of a nerdy, chill guy. Good lecturer, moves his class at a reasonable pace. Homework is challenging, but they're designed to be that way because they have significantly harder questions than you will ever see on an exam or quiz. There are 4 online quizzes during the semester designed to take 2 hours each, which is a bit excessive but they're typically doable. Exams are very fair, there was one section on exam 1 that most people did horrendously on and he offered a makeup assignment to get points back. Final exam was also very fair. He currently co-teaches with Cliff so the class is definitely a bit disorganized, but show up to lectures and discussions and this is a very doable class.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Anonymous 12/14/2022	Great professor, not a very good course. Discrete Structures is a challenging course. In my honest opinion, Paul does a decent job at teaching the material. He is a nice guy who is interested in the things that he's teaching. He also knew that a part of an exam was hard, so he did a supplement assignment to the exam on the part that was hard. One of my concerns is that (like others have said) he co-teaches and is not in full control of his content. He is also a first-time 250 teacher (which is why I'm more lenient on his rating). Also, his slides are not as interesting as what I've seen with Cliff. Sometimes I get lost and I don't know where we left off. Overall, I hope that this semester will help him see the waters of teaching so that in the future, he will be one of the best lecturers.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/10/2022	It's obvious that Paul enjoys the material he teaches in a nerdy way. He made great efforts throughout the semester to engage us with discrete math and generally explained concepts very well. The exams and quizzes in this class were also generally very fair, closely matching the course content and what we had seen before in homework questions. However, mostly due to the fact that this course was co-taught with Cliff Bakalian, there were still some structural issues. My main problem was that the instructors didn't reference any textbook throughout the course - this probably fine for any other 100- or 200-level CMSC class, but in a largely proof-based math course it meant that the sole authorities for clarifying concepts were the slides (often with typos or with information omitted because they were good slides for presentation but not for reference) and the provided style guide (updated throughout the semester but not consistently). It would have been nice to have more consistent resources to refer to throughout the course instead of having to reference Stack Exchange or Proof Wiki for some homework questions that were not adequately given context in lecture.
Paul Kline CMSC250 Expecting a B Agt 11/30/2022	It's important to keep in mind that Paul's first semester teaching CMSC250 was for a class shared with Cliff Bakalian, so his class inherited much of the same, notorious issues that Cliff is known for (frequent grading discrepancies, disorganized structure, delayed feedback on submitted work, inconsistent expectations, etc.). However, Paul lectures are solid and always conveniently recorded online. He will provide generous accommodations to students who need them, and engages with the class on a frequent basis. I can see him becoming a solid lecturer for CMSC250 once he has full charge of his own class.