Anwar Mamat

This professor has taught: CMSC132, CMSC216, CMSC330, CMSC388A, CMSC388B, CMSC388T, CMSC389E, CMSC389N, CMSC389T, CMSC433

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Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 08/15/2024	Solid professor, really enjoyed CMSC 330 with him. He's also pretty funny lol. He gives you a lot of material to work from and excellent advice. Clicker quizzes are good, it helps with understanding material in real time.
Anwar Mamat CMSC430 Expecting an A Anonymous 07/19/2024	This may be the first semester he teach CMSC430 in 2024 Summer. The grading is good but the lecture have some problem. He spent too many time in the easy stuff and some core contents were omitted.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 06/11/2024	He is a kind person that really cares about how you're doing. You gotta be quick with your fingers if you wanna be able to answer all the clicker questions. The amount of times I missed a clicker was so many :(
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/29/2024	Anwar's lectures can be dry and boring at times, but he is a good teacher. You can not ask for a more qualified professor who is an expert in the field for CMSC330. Extremely intelligent and funny at times, but tries to avoid joking around too much as 330 has a lot of content. 330 is hard and the projects took me a long time personally, but you can not go wrong with Anwar. Between Cliff and Anwar, I would lean Anwar's way since he has much more experience in the field.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/28/2024	He's a great public speaker I think the first half of the semester he was getting back into teacher but after that he was getting better at lecturing. He does clicker quizzes which to be honest only people who don't want to show up to lecture complain about it's a free 4% of your entire grade he essentially gives people answers to it most of the time and there not hard questions. As for projects, exams, and quizzes he co taught with Cliff so most of the projects and exams were made by Cliff and his TAs from my understanding. Between Cliff or him Anwar is the better 330 professor provides great slides to study off and is more entertaining/ easier to follow.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a C- Anonymous 05/22/2024	Great professor, he gives a lot of useful info during lectures and he's the one who will believe in you. He'll give you a chance, like an extension (it never hurts to ask if you really need it)! and he will help you success in his course
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/21/2024	He goes super fast through the content which is very jarring for the first few lectures, so trying to take notes is impossible. But, his slides are very good so there's no need to in my opinion. He has clicker quizzes during lectures to keep people engaged and make attendance mandatory, but they're never too bad and they do help with the content. 330 is the hardest CS class I've taken so far, and it's because all of the content is new. Exams are usually fair but hard, and the project take a very long time to complete. The best thing about Anwar is his passion for teaching. He came back from AWS to teach and I can see why, and I'm glad he did.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/20/2024	Not sure what the person below says hes not a good lecturer for, cause he is really great and makes class interesting, way better than Cliff and more engaging. We had Cliff sub in for Anwar which I am just falling a asleep. The powerpoint slides are great and very informative. A lot of projects with short deadlines, but willing to give extensions which are nice. Lecture quizzes makes you pay attention in class. Regular discussion quizzes were hit or miss. Exams are fair. One bad side is some of his lectures are very boring which are mainly the useless ones.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/20/2024	Dude explained most of the concepts fairly well but for some topics, he kind of just speedran through the slides. Overall, Anwar was co teaching with cliff so we had the same, quizzes, exams, projects but Anwar had in class clicker quizzes while Cliff had separate lecture quizzes for his students of which 20 percent was dropped for both instructors. Overall, Anwar was much more refreshing compared to 216 with herman and his slides were super helpful for the projects and in addition for some projects he also give some tips or boilerplate code to help students get started with some functions whichw as super helpful. Exams were super fair but make sure to prepare for the final since it was definitely harder than the midterms. I kind of went straight into the exam without studying at all which backfired since it was much harder so I got a 70 which dropped my overall grade from a 93 to an 88.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/20/2024	He's really nice and funny, he spent an entire lecture basically giving a standup comedy session which was great. He is also really caring and offers students many ways to succeed. As a lecturer, he is not the best. Hard to follow/understand at times and can rush through slides. Clicker quizzes can also be annoying since lectures are recorded but still cannot be skipped in-person since they are worth 4% of your grade. Projects are interesting but some can be poorly written. Mostly fair exams, though our final had an average of like 68%. Cliff gave a lecture one time while Dr. Mamat was out, and he was definitely a better lecturer. Cannot speak about how he is on the administrative/personal side of things, where Dr. Mamat mostly excels in.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/20/2024	have seen way worse but honestly just not a good lecturer at all either. first time you'll cover a concept sometimes will be on a quiz where its just a guessing game at that point. lectures are super fast paced so you dont learn anything and theyre also hella boring. doesnt explain anything he just glosses over stuff at best.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Anonymous 05/19/2024	Don't get me wrong, Anwar seems like a genuinely nice and intelligent guy. That being said, he is one of the worst computer science professors I've had at UMD. CMSC 330 by itself is notoriously disorganized. They seem to change the syllabus and languages covered every semester, never seeming quite certain about what they are going to do over the 15 weeks and jolting around during lectures. Everything is so haphazard and nothing is properly communicated. There are four quizzes during the lecture and they always cover content that was poorly taught during the lectures that happened that week specifically. There is rarely any time given to actually absorb the content before the quizzes. Projects vary, some being hard and others much easier. Most of the projects will have to be self study because they barely cover what we need to know for them during lecture. Anwar himself is a poor lecturer. He zooms through slides and is always flipping between a powerpoint and a terminal or just freeballing and using his web browser. Because of this it never seems like he has a solid idea of what he's trying to cover during the lecture. The resources given to us are also super messy. I feel like 1/3 of the content we need to know is actually taught and the other 2/3 are scattered across random GIT repositories, massive slide decks that are only half covered in class, or other notes. You will feel lost and alone in the course and there is no one really to help you except your friends who are taking it too. The exams oscillated between very fair and very challenging, with some questions seeming near impossible to finish. Cliff doesn't seem much better and they co-teach the course so good luck to any soldier who has to take it. I very much hope the entire department wakes up and realizes that this is their worst course, but seeing how these problems have persisted for the last 5+ years I highly doubt it.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Anonymous 05/18/2024	Anwar was great! He's a pretty funny guy, so I though his lectures were always fairly entertaining, but he does go kinda fast sometimes. He has in class clicker questions, which are a part of your grade, so going to lecture is kinda required. We had 7 projects throughout the semester, most of which I thought were pretty difficult, but if you started early on them, you'd be fine. 2 midterms and a final, which were all pretty easy and similar to the practice exams. We also had 4 discussion quizzes throughout the semester, which were also not that bad. Overall, I definitely recommend taking this class with Anwar!
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2024	Anwar is a great lecturer and funny guy. However, very similar to Nelson in that he annoys some people because he sometimes takes time out of lecture to tell a funny story(something I personally love). This was not ideal since he was coteaching and would sometimes have to speedrun to catch up to Cliff's class but imo it was worth it. Early on in the semester it was a little rough because it was his first time teaching after a couple years working, but once he got into it I really learned a lot. Projects were long but usually 2-3 weeks were given for them so if you actually started within a few days of them being assigned you could get them done pretty easily. He also gives some sample code that is very similar to the project. We had either a quiz or exam every two weeks which was really nice because it kept me accountable for the material and studying for any exam wasn't that hard because I only had to study like two weeks of content(assuming I remembered everything).
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 03/12/2024	Anwar is not a good lecturer, the lectures are incredibly disengaging, and trying to take notes is hard as he flies through his slides. He yaps away while doing a poor job explaining new concepts, and if it were not for his in-lecture "clicker" quizzes, I would self-study because at least his online lecture slides at least contain everything he says, not to mention that he records. Cliff's notes are arguably more detailed and understandable though. I do give him credit for his extremely fair exams and grading, he seems to be generous with partial credit.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/11/2022	I guess Anwar's gone now, but in case he comes back... I would say he's a good lecturer. My main complaint would be that he never really slows down. We would go through a huge amount of slides everyday and sometimes it seemed like he was racing. 330 has a lot of content, so that's probably why. I don't personally take notes, but I don't think anyone could with how fast he goes. He still did a good job at explaining concepts and the slides were well made, so you could basically just study off of those. He was clearly frustrated this semester by the turnout in lecture. Clicker quizzes used to be 4% of the grade, basically making lecture attendance mandatory. They changed the policy in the first week of the semester I believe, since people could be in and out with COVID. He would make lots of comments to himself during lecture about how it's so hard to teach this semester with not that many people in lecture and with everyone wearing masks. I also guess that computers used to not be allowed in 330 lecture, but now they are? He would complain about people having computers out too sometimes, and how he couldn't do anything. The projects in this class weren't very difficult, except for the NFA to DFA project and maybe the first OCaml project. If you start early, you should be fine. There were two online midterms which were pretty fair. We had four 20 minute online quizzes in the semester that I found to be very difficult. 20 minutes was not enough time and they seemed a bit unnecessary (the last quiz was on a topic on the last midterm, which was a week before). The final was also in-person for some reason. People would complain on Piazza and the TAs said that the decision was made by the instructors. People tried to ask Mamat/Eastman to change it to in-person and they said they would think about, but they did nothing. Not a good look on their part, considering the online midterms were open book and this wasn't. Plus, many people expressed COVID concerns due to a in-person final, which was also ignored. All in all, if Anwar comes back, I would recommend him. I was planning on taking 433 with him, but they changed teachers. He seems to have been a bit disillusioned by teaching this semester by all his comments on lecture, but I do hope he comes back.
Anwar Mamat CMSC433 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/23/2021	Second class with Anwar and he's a great professor. His exams are pretty easy for the most part since he emphasizes more on projects (which I 100% agree with). The projects in the class range from extremely easy (Hadoop and MPI) to challenging (Akka), but they're all good skills to know. I didn't attend lecture live as he uploaded the recording, and he does fly through the material, but the slides and GitHub repository provide enough examples to help you understand the material.
Anwar Mamat CMSC433 Expecting a C Anonymous 10/10/2021	Not great lecturing style IMO. Lots of "you know?" "this stuff" "this thing" "this stuff is tricky" "just read the JavaDoc". Little motivational content to introduce concepts, which I've always found very useful in CMSC. Absolutely flies through examples without prefacing them well. Much prefer Dr. Hicks or even Prof. Herman hyper-explicit lecturing style and projects. Projects are open-ended and almost guaranteed to be 75% or more secret tests. TAs are exceptional but projects will still take 15-30 hours for average student, which was hell for someone balancing career responsibilities and other CMSC4xx classes as well. Midterms were fair and lecture slides were good. Main complaints are lecturing style and project difficulty/disconnect from lecture material/lack of direction given in description. Do not let this review discourage you from taking 433 with Anwar if you enjoy his style or are simply... well... smarter than me. Anwar is cool but the class just did not resonate with me. I've heard he's pretty good for 330 though.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 09/30/2021	This professor was very good. He made sure that everything you needed to know was in the lecture slides. Make sure to follow what he is teaching and do the practice that he puts up and you will be fine. The assignments are tough if you do not both to learn/practice the material that he is teaching. As a teacher he seems to genuily enjoy teaching the students and it was a breath of fresh air compared to other professors here.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Anonymous 07/22/2021	He's great! Goes very fast but at least for 330, everything you need to know is on the slides anyway.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/27/2021	Had him for CMSC132 and had to take him again because he's great. Would take another class with him if I could.
Anwar Mamat CMSC433 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/18/2021	Pretty good 400 class overall. I don't think Anwar is a good lecturer, but he's pretty accommodating by making clicker questions fairly easy and worth 5% of the final grade to redistribute from exams. Some projects were tough (akka), especially due a high amount of the grade being secret tests, but others were fine. Make sure you put time into them, since they're worth a lot, and if you do you should be able to get a good grade. I thought the midterm and the final were fine, since I found them to be somewhat modeled after old exams. Also, TAs were great; they were really responsive on Piazza (much more than other 400s) and helpful for office hours. Great slides, and the material itself is also quite useful. Thus, if Anwar is teaching this class, I'd recommend taking it with him.
Anwar Mamat CMSC433 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/12/2021	Anwar is fine. He explains the material decent enough in lecture, but he moves so fast! It's really hard to keep up with him during lectures. Also, the exams for CMSC433 are kind of really hard. I aced every single project but I couldn't for the life of me manage better than a 71 on the midterm. I don't expect to do much better on the final. All in all, Anwar is just okay. Not the worst CMSC professor I've ever had but certainly far from the best.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/11/2021	Anwar manages to keep the lecture engaging and entertaining the whole class, he's a great professor and I have no dought I would have received a higher grade had I taken this class in-person. Genuine guy who really cares about his students and offers them a lot of resources and opportunities to ask for help in office hours.
Anwar Mamat CMSC433 Expecting a B Anonymous 01/12/2021	Good professor that knows the material well. Mostly reads off slides but gives alot of examples which helped alot. TAs are very good and office hours provided alot of help on projects. Projects are standard and should be started when they are assigned.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Anonymous 12/20/2020	He is boring but the content is fine. He doesn't really care much about his students but the TAs are awesome. Start projects the day they are posted and you will be in good shape.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/15/2020	Not a good lecturer, because he goes super fast over complicated material, and could be a bit more civil, but that's really the only main complaint. Clicker questions are not the worst and his slides are very comprehensive, the projects are fairly reasonable to do (better than 216's for sure) and the exams were fair too. Nothing completely out of the blue. Some TAs were really really helpful too and were responsive on Piazza. Overall, since 330 is usually co-taught, you should be fine taking either Anwar or the other professor.
Anwar Mamat CMSC132 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/18/2020	Took this course in the summer and Anwar was a great professor for it. Made class very fun, and made it easy to understand. Plan on taking his 330 class
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 05/21/2020	Anwar flies through the material very quickly, but that's just because there's a lot of stuff to cover. This semester he managed the online transition due to the pandemic quite well, and he toned down the amount of work we had to do. The slides really are the primary resource in the class, so study those, look at them when doing projects, and you'll do great!
Anwar Mamat CMSC433 Expecting a B josfeldmann 12/18/2019	I had Anwar for 433 and 330. He knows how to run a course well, curves fairly, and is generally pretty responsive to student concerns. I think he is a good standard that other UMD CS professors should hold themselves to. His slides are pretty good and his tests are fair.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a C+ Anonymous 12/18/2019	Solid guy but not a good lecturer. Reads off slides. Lectures are so useless but attendance is mandatory via clickers. Slides are good.
Anwar Mamat CMSC132 Expecting an A Anonymous 08/20/2019	Anwar is a great lecturer for 132. He also explains concepts very well. His lectures slides are great too. He doesn't put anything on the exams that he doesn't cover in lecture. Exams are also pretty easy. I usually finish with 20 minutes left and use the rest of the time to check my answers. I also dislike the MC section, which make up a fair portion of the exams, because they're just memorization and can be kind of tricky. Projects are hard to implement, but the project tests aren't hard to pass. I think I got a 100 on most of my projects. When I took it, projects were 40% of the grade, which should make the class an easy A.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/06/2019	Decent lecturer, although he goes a bit fast at times. He is a nice guy and has some funny stories.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/24/2018	Anwar is not a terrible instructor, but not great either. He mostly reads off the slides and often rushes through topics. He tells a lot of stories and goes on a lot of tangents, which would be fine if it didn't mean rushing through challenging topics. I often felt like I didn't learn much by going to lecture and wished I didn't need to go, but there are clicker questions in order to enforce attendance. The material itself is very cool and the TAs for 330 are phenomenal. Also, Hicks is supposedly incredible, so if he's an option, take him. Otherwise, you'll be OK with Anwar, you just might need to put in a little extra time and effort.
Anwar Mamat CMSC433 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/20/2018	Funny stories, nice guy. Class grades are pretty fair. Projects are kinda butt, and clicker questions suck, lectures are mediocre. I also hate slide trivia exams (which is what he gives)
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/19/2018	Anwar is a pretty good lecturer and incredibly funny. His exams are fair, the average my semester was an 80% on the nose. The only valid gripe people have with him is the pacing of his lectures. He does tend to fly through some of the material on the slides, but if you try to pay attention, you'll be fine. Even moreso, all of his lectures are online, and his lectures are recorded and put online in case you missed them, so you should be fine. The projects will be more challenging than the ones you have had so far in 132 and 216 because you will be forced to navigate through different languages and different concepts, but for the most part, you will survive. People have gripes with him for having clicker questions that force you to come to lecture, but that really isn't criticism, because you should come to lecture anyway and he's giving you easy points that'll bump your grade at the end of the semester. All around a nice professor and person, and I definitely recommend you take 330 with Anwar. I've never had Eastman, but I hear he's ok too.
Anwar Mamat CMSC132 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/13/2018	Anwar is a good choice. You will have to learn some things on your own as he doesn't go through everything fully. The amount of notes he provides for students is AWESOME. His tangents are funny but were less appreciated when we had to speed through topics at the end of the semester.
Anwar Mamat CMSC132 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 06/27/2018	He is a horrible lecturer. Do not take him unless you are willing to basically learn all the material on your own outside of class. To make matters worse, he has tons of clicker questions to penalize you for not going to his pointless lectures. And he doesn't allow laptops in class for students who actually want to learn while he's "teaching." The one good thing about his classes is that the grading structure is fair, and the class is organized, but he just has no idea how to communicate the material. He doesn't seem to understand that coding in front of the class in a ridiculously small font while providing little explanation as to what he's doing is not the best way to teach computer science. Going from him one semester to an actually competent lecturer like Eastman the next was a night and day difference.
Anwar Mamat CMSC433 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/14/2018	I like anwar and he keeps class fun but the material is just kinda boring so it is hard to pay attention sometimes. The class feels like just memorizing a bunch of java libraries used for multi threading. Easy Class though and projects are not too bad.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/13/2018	He is extremely engaging and I honestly understood the material so well after. He goes fast but the slides are online so you can just note what he says. I'm a visual learner and he's the best at explaining through code examples that he writes on the spot. I would say he is definitely a better professor to have for 330.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Anonymous 04/21/2018	Goes over slides pretty quickly, but he is pretty engaging in my opinion. Just sit in the front.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Anonymous 04/17/2018	what the heck is wrong with this dude. He goes over his lectures really fast. Cannot take notes and cannot understand anything.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting an A me 12/16/2017	The lectures were way too fast and not engaging. By the end of the semester, I was skipping class and watching Foster’s lectures online. The tests and projects were fair, although we were left to just figure out basic SQL on the last one, which was annoying. The class itself is an interesting one, and old tests are provided for study. It’s certainly not the end of the world or anything if you have Mamat, you’ll still learn things, just probably not as much as if you had Foster.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/16/2017	Mamat is a very accommodating professor, but his lectures are completely worthless. On more than one occasion, he would explain the material in the first 45 minutes while barely moving through the slides, and then rapidly go through them, only doing quizzes AND SOMETIMES SKIPPING IMPORTANT THINGS ALTOGETHER! Fortunately, if Foster/another professor posts their lectures online, the class will be a breeze. Also, the project descriptions are very easy to understand, and the public tests are usually pretty robust, which is great especially if you're used to Nelson's "figure it out if you can" approach. I like the guy, but I didn't attend lecture after the first month and still got an A on the final just by reading slides and doing projects. That pretty much sums up how important his lectures are right there.
Anwar Mamat CMSC330 Expecting a C Anonymous 12/14/2017	I had cmsc330 with Anwar and between him and Hicks/Foster, he's probably the worst professor to take for this class. Anwar is a cool dude, but his lectures were terrible and he moves at a pace that was too fast for most students to catch everything. His explanations are less than clear, and I soon ended up watching Hick's online lectures to try and get the rest of the material. There were two midterms, fairly tricky but not too bad. Both of them were pretty long, and took the full 75 mins right up to the line - they really pack the exams. Definitely study the exams from previous semesters and drill ocaml/prolog programming if you want to do well on these. Otherwise, it's actually an awesome class and the material is really interesting despite the workload. I felt pretty solid in my standing as a software eng. after this class, because a lot of concepts across different languages kinda clicked for me. Get Cameron Moy as your TA if you can :) Good luck!