Liyi Li

This professor has taught: CMSC433

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Liyi Li CMSC433 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/23/2022	I took this couse in Fall 2022, and having now graduated, I can now safely say that Li is the worst professor that I have had the displeasure of having, CS or otherwise. Pros: + Sometimes when responding on Piazza, Li gets to fed up, that he will just post answers to graded assignments + Exams are online + Late policy: 20% docked off, but you get an additional four days to complete the project. Since the 20% penalty is flat, regardless if you take 1 or 4 days, it is pretty generous as far as late policies go Cons: - Li is a horrible lecturer. Some reviewers below mention his accent, and while that is an issue, I feel like the bigger issue here is that Li can't properly explain any concept for the life of him. He essentially just reads off the slides without elaborating further on any concept. Whenever he does attempt to try to explain something, it just ends up muddying things up. - Many crucial processes (ex. combining bucchi automata) are not explained - There are too many assignments. The class has major programming assignments, prelecture assignments, and HW assignments. Weeks can have as many as four assignments due, but since each type of assignment is due at a different frequency, it's hard to determine what's due when. In general, it is simply a lot of work - There are too many websites with assignments/announcements with no centralization in where everything can be found. The class had as many as four sites active at once, each with different stuff and no reminders about due assignments. It is extremely easy to miss assignments. - He claims you get 2 weeks to do every major programming project, but since multiple programming projects are active at a time, you really only are spending one week on each, since the previous week is spent on the previous project. One week is not sufficient. - Announcements on finals were confusing. Additional clarification was required on exam timings, and he kept saying that there would be zoom proctoring, only for him to randomly not do it at the last second.
Liyi Li CMSC433 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/14/2022	Have you ever wanted to waste a semester learning nothing, but still be so stressed about a class you nearly get an ulcer? Do you want a teacher who will be rude and condescending to you and ignore all your concerns? Is your life missing a teacher who is utterly incapable of explaining the material and steadfastly refuses to answer your questions in any comprehensible way? Look no further than Liyi Li, the worst teacher bar none at the University of Maryland, perhaps in the world! His existence is proof positive that God is real and He Hates CS Students. Dr. Li demonstrated every single day in class that he did not understand the material any better than the students did, or that if he did, he was so utterly incapable of communicating the material that we just assumed that lecture was the first time he was seeing it. Asking him questions didn't help as, assuming he didn't just ignore your question, he regularly failed to answer it in any meaningful way or even rephrase the confusing material in a way that could be better understood. Lecture slides are utterly useless for learning due to being incomprehensible. Going to TAs to learn the material doesn't help either as they don't understand it either - though that's not their fault; he so completely fails to impart even the smallest nugget of information on whoever he is talking to that even they don't understand what was going on in the class Often the TAs were forced to just give out the answers left and right to students or almost the entire class would fail. We regularly had 3-4 projects assigned to us at a time on top of regular homeworks. Projects might be due mere days apart from one another without any office hours between them to discuss the project with the TAs. When students complain, his go-to responses are "well a few people finished the project on the first day, so why can't you?" and "you students are lazy and just want the TAs to do all the work for you." He insisted on using software that by his own admission was broken and regularly discarded your work before you could save it. To "make up" for the technology issues he simply allows you ~2x the normal time to take exams. If you have another class or exam right after and can't use that extra time, tough luck, you're screwed. Who cares? Not Dr. Li. You doing poorly on an exam is just another example that proves his belief that students at UMD are idiots (literally something he has said to his TAs). If I could give this man fewer than 1/5 stars I would - he's one of the few professors on PlanetTerp with 1-star reviews across the board. Do yourself a favor and avoid him at all costs.
Liyi Li CMSC433 Expecting a C Anonymous 11/23/2022	Please Please Please stay away from this professor. He makes the courses harder than it should be. TA's are not helpful because they don't even know it themselves. The professor doesn't help you either. You literally are left alone to die. Only take this course if you want to test hell.
Liyi Li CMSC433 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 11/09/2022	PROS: - course content is not difficult; the sheer amount of assignments is what makes the class difficult - Professor Li is VERY responsive on Piazza. Between the professor and the TAs, posts usually don't sit unanswered for more than a few hours. Same goes on weekends too, though maybe a longer response time - Lectures are recorded and are posted to elms with the slides - online + open notes exams CONS: - Each week you'll either have 2 or 3 things due or nothing due. If there's nothing due one week there's a big project due the following week. - Your learning will come from the TAs office hours and learning on your own because the lectures provide little to no educational value. - His accent makes things impossible to understand. Doesn't apply to project descriptions though because he took them from Dr. Mamat. - Concurrency is only a small fraction of the course, but there are some other interesting concepts - Course is pretty unorganized - Straight up doesn't understand some of the concepts himself. There have been a few times where he answer questions in lecture/on piazza with "I don't know".
Liyi Li Expecting an A Anonymous 05/21/2022	I had Li for CMSC433 in the spring of 2022. Originally, this class was supposed to be taught by Dr. Mamat, but he ended up leaving the university. After his departure, the department didn't have anyone to take over the class, but Li (who is a postdoc, not technically a professor) was listed as the new instructor a few weeks before the start of the semester. The first half of the class was pretty easy. Li himself was not a great lecturer, but the projects and homework were easy enough, and there was a decent amount of extra credit offered as well. Halfway through the semester, Li significantly changed the material from previous iterations of 433 and began teaching extensively about program verification, type inferencing, and other topics that had little to do with the typical content of 433 (which is supposed to be a class about concurrency/parallelism). The course content itself was still about the same difficulty (IMO), but his lectures were so awful that it was difficult to understand even the simplest concepts presented, and the topics discussed were so niche that it was difficult to find other resources to learn the material. The TAs were also of little help, since most of them were also trying to learn the new concepts as well. The projects and homework for the latter half of the semester were also boring and difficult (again, not because the concepts themselves were necessarily difficult, but because Li's lectures were so bad that it was difficult to know where to even start), and Li was frequently condescending in his responses to student requests for project extensions. According to him, since he was able to complete the project quickly, that must mean that students in the class should also be able to complete the project quickly - never mind the fact that Li has completed a PhD on this material and that getting help from TAs would sometimes take hours because of backlogs in office hours. I ended up with an A in this class thanks to the extra credit offered, but in my view, that doesn't make up for a semester's worth of extremely poor teaching, boring projects, and unhelpful, condescending responses to student concerns.
Liyi Li CMSC433 Expecting a C Anonymous 05/18/2022	Very difficult professor to understand in class. Condescending when students reach out for help. to quote liyi "Just finish it today. It is very easy. Even easier than I thought."
Liyi Li Anonymous 05/18/2022	Really really bad. Unintelligible. Hard projects. Not lenient. No one understands what is going on.
Liyi Li CMSC433 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2022	If you think Kruskal was bad, this man is worse. There is no help in this class, and on top of that there are no online resources. The only way to pass is to bug the TAs for answers
Liyi Li Expecting an A- Anonymous 04/18/2022	Complete failure of a class. Completed redid the entire class after anwar left. TA's do not know the material well due to the sudden change. Unreasonable with expectations constantly citing that people have finished the assignments within an hour even though the majority of the class is completely lost. Lecture is just reading off slides and slides are not great. Only saving grace is the one or two ta's that actually somewhat understand the material.
Liyi Li Anonymous 04/17/2022	Really hard projects and exams. Condescending towards students and not helpful. TAs for the class don't know the material.
Liyi Li Anonymous 04/04/2022	This man is literally the bane of my existence. Cannot teach for shit and then expects everyone to get an A+. And I'm not kidding. A majority of the class will be screaming at this man that "we can't do this project, we need an extension, we need clarification" and this man will respond with "It's easy, I did it in 2 hours." He refused to grant me a medically documented excused absence as well and just told me to work harder.
Liyi Li Anonymous 03/29/2022	Worst professor I’ve had at UMD across all classes. He is ignorant and doesn’t care about students. Exams are unfair and resulted in questions being dropped and then assigned as more homework. Very theoretical with little to no job application. Projects are boring. Homework’s are useless content.