Kazuo Nakajima

This professor has taught: ENEE200, ENEE244, ENEE245, ENEE359F, ENEE408C, ENEE644, ENEE750

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Kazuo Nakajima ENEE641 baicaibaicai 01/06/2016	B- Waste money and waste your time. Do no choose any course of this professor.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE200 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/21/2015	Nakajima might be a smart guy, but he does not appear so in class. His English is shaky, he says "right" or "okay" and giggles so often that you often lose track of what he is saying. He is adamant about students attending class. He started off the class by posting homework and lectures online (like any sensible prof would), but when attendance started to fall, he abandoned all use of online resources, opting instead to hand out all homework assignments and some lecture notes. His exams are off topic and do not demonstrate knowledge of the course. The only reason to attend class is for the attendance grade. He grades lecture by participation, which is outlandish given the lecture is 75+ so there is no way to participate every lecture. All knowledge comes for the textbook, the prof adds little extra information. Pray you have a good TA. TL;DR. Do not take Nakajima.
Kazuo Nakajima Anonymous 03/22/2015	This professor has little to no experience on what he teaches. It is very rare the university allows an instructor do something outside one's specialty. Go to Google and you will figure out his field is on chemistry and device physics, relating over 400 published papers in about 40 years. Yet he has been teaching computer science such as digital logic and FPGA courses at this school for, yes, decades. I have taken several courses from him and he showed lack of knowledge on either trends or insights into the field. All he does during class is developing mathematical equations and, ironically, making up with his mistakes in the equations. The materials covered in his lecture and the textbooks he uses can date back to several decades ago. I should accept this if I was in a theory class like physics or maths, where textbooks should be "classic" and good. But in an engineering course, especially a computer engineering course, even a newbie into this field knows things older than 5 years are rubbish. I learned nothing from his courses. He explains his lack of precision as "IM" (Intentional Mistakes) and a following 10-second laugh, after figuring out the error in one single line of simple maths in 5 minutes. That's the usual! If you ever dared to point out his mistake, for most of the time he would persuade everyone that you are wrong. He never talked about programming and software engineering issues in a programming course. The true reason for this is simply he knew nothing about programming language. His lecture notes only has pseudo codes. The references he handed out are also decades-old, weakly related to the course material. That's insane as the whole purpose of that course was to write code in a specific language. Yet he didn't fail to assign teams for weekly projects which pushed everyone writing code and report day and night. He threatens his students that they will fail - if they disobey him. Once he told to the class that a student was in his last semester in senior but "didn't do well" in his course, and he failed him, thus making him unable to graduate - and he was proud of doing so. Just hard to imagine a senior guy will do anything not well enough to pass a course. He will deduct a large amount of points for being absent in class for no matter what reason unless you give him an official letter from your doctor. He treats student visitors who has not been enrolled his course but explained their willing to audit with extreme rudeness and even yelling, stating they are noisy and annoying and must leave - otherwise he will call the police to get them out. Be warned - he only makes (and enjoys making) you suffer and does not bring you any help in your academic career at all and you should avoid this professor. You will learn much more from your TA or if you simply buy a book and teach yourself.
Kazuo Nakajima Anonymous 09/04/2014	It was a sham of a course taught by a charlatan of a professor. Throughout the course, it was pretty clear that the instructor knew that what he was teaching was absolute bullshit, but he never seemed to care. I guess he was there to cheat and not teach. The instructor neither has the technical competence nor the communication skills required to teach this course. If the university is serious about imparting quality education to its students, it should seriously consider assigning an independent auditor to the courses taught by this professor to gauge how atrocious and ridiculous his teaching actually is. Coming to the specifics, 1. The instructor doesn't upload/give the powerpoint presentations which he uses to teach in the class. Imagine this, fellow students were using their mobile phones to take pictures of the slides projected in the classroom. Can anything be worse than this? Are we suppose to take pictures of the electronically prepared powerpoint slides using the camera on our mobile and use these pictures to study? 2. Powerpoint slides full of blatant mistakes. I have lost count of the number of blunders that were taught by the instructor in this course. Some of them were caught by the students but a whole lot of them went unnoticed. Everybody makes mistakes, but what shocks me most is the way the instructor shamelessly justifies making them. He conveniently covers up every blunder made by saying that it was an Intentional Mistake(IM) and continuous on with his sarcastic laugh. 3. Threatening on grades : Threatening the students on grades is the way this instructor functions. That thing that saddens me the most is that he enjoys doing so. He constantly tries to scare students into dropping the course and I believe he has been successful in doing so. It begs the question, are we here to learn or to only get grades? The instructor doesn't teach anything in the first place, has no knowledge of the subject and yet he talks in an extremely demeaning and disrespectful manner when a student scores less marks. In addition he constantly threatens the students into dropping the course with his disrespectful talk. I believe he uses grades as a weapon to control students. Moreover, his grading of examinations is pedagogical, whimsical and ridiculous. Grading is often not objective and arbitrary. He cuts marks for the most ridiculous reasons. 4. A CAD course with no coding : There was not even a single software project in this course inspite of the name of the course containing Computer Aided Design. 5. Atrocious teaching : The instructor often resorted to reading the powerpoint slides verbatim. He had no clue about the topics of state encoding or multi-level logic and resorted to reading the powerpoint slides verbatim. That surely cannot be called teaching.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting a C- Anonymous 07/29/2014	I can't necessarily speak for how Nakajima is as a regular semester professor, but if you have the option of taking him during the summer, don't. But if you have to, or want a good start in his class in general, here's what you need to know. To begin, he has a thick Japanese accent, so he speaks fluent "engrish". If you're bad at deciphering broken English, that's going to be a huge hurdle. Also he has like one tooth in the front of his mouth that is rotten and hanging by a thread that is really distracting, try not to look at it. Also, be aware that he plays favorites, and picks them very early on. So sit in the front of the class, laugh at his dumb jokes and whatever you do, DON'T ASK QUESTIONS. I can't stress this enough, if you ask too many questions in that class, your life will become hell. Here's the reality, he likes to pick on the students that he feels are not cut out for his class. So he initially tries to scare off the weak with talk of dropping and failing his course. So ANY sign of weakness or confusion will make you a target for future criticism and condescension. He picks his punching bag fairly early on and will make you feel like the town idiot if given the chance. To avoid this, make friends with the smartest kid in the class at all costs, and know that he teaches straight out of the book, so you pretty much don't need him to teach you squat. He likes to say "right" and "okay" constantly, so rather than asking a question when asked, just nod your head and let him move on in the lecture. His homeworks are the stuff of nightmares. Many a nights I was awake just doing his assignments non-stop till the sun came up. This is where being friends with the smartest kid comes into play, because there is going to be at least one guy who knows what he's doing. Also he lets you work together on homework in a way that other professors would consider cheating. Its pretty strange, but don't complain. He is very picky about partial credit, and most of the time rewards you with a fraction of what a question was weighted with for a slight mistake. This means if you take his quizzes lightly, you'll get under 15% on them easily. His tests are pretty brutal because of this too, and he likes to throw curves balls and test things he knows the students aren't confident about. This isn't much prep for this besides doing his old practice exams and getting a feel for the kinds of questions he asks. He isn't Silio, though, so it is more than possible he'll give you question that will leave you completely dumbfounded. Finally, he will only curve an exam or assignment if no ones get an A, which makes your life difficult to say the least. After all this, I can't say he's a bad professor. He certainly isn't good, but he isn't the worst and is actually a pretty nice guy. The key is getting on his good side, figuring out how to efficiently get decent grades on his homework, not failing his quizzes or midterms and praying to Testudo at McKeldin before the final. If you can do all that, you can pass his class.
Kazuo Nakajima Expecting an A Anonymous 12/25/2013	I took Nakajima for 245 and didn't like him, but this class was entirely different. In 245 I felt like he enjoyed watching his students suffer, but in this class he was very responsive to student concerns, and he actually cared how well we were doing and if we were learning the material. I enjoyed the class as well - we got to do a project on Floating Point Units and on RSA. It was a good learning experience.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/22/2013	This class takes a lot of effort. For one, there is soooo much homework. All quizzes are unannounced and in our semester he gave so many quizzes that we began expecting one every week. The first test is long and it is very easy to make mistakes. The second test is super easy. Our final, however, was not as easy as those of previous semesters, but it was not that bad. I thought I was going to get an A-, but there was a slight curve, so I got an A. As everyone says, getting an A is hard and is no walk in the park.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE245 Expecting an A LadyS 02/02/2013	The labs are difficult but doable (with help from your TA). Dr. Nakajima kept scaring students by telling them that they should drop/withdraw and that they may fail but grading was pretty lenient. I think he did that in order to motivate students to work harder. I believe that the only way to fail his class was to not show up for a lab and not do any work at all (but then you will fail a lab taught by any professor). He curves final grades but to get an A (or above) you need to work hard. I had no problem understanding his accent (which is pretty thick) but I am too not a native speaker of English myself:>
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE245 Anonymous 05/11/2012	Easily the worst professor I've ever had. Organized the class so poorly and gave way too much work for a 2-credit class. He also enforced super-harsh grading and had absolutely zero leniency for minor mistakes. WARNING: Never write on the back of an exam page, he won't count it and won't even entertain the idea of giving a few points back. In general, I never went to lecture and learned the majority of the class material from Google (since almost every assignment is online somewhere). I was lucky enough to have an awesome TA who taught me everything I didn't pick up from Google. If it wasn't for Nakajima's super-harsh grading policies I would have almost 100% in this class, so it isn't hard material, he just makes it nearly impossible to do that well.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE245 Expecting an A+ 245Student 04/06/2012	When taking Nakajima's class, just keep this in mind, "Nakajima is a robot programmed to be your teacher". If you do not give him a valid input, he will not give you your desired output, no matter what you do. He has no feelings. If you are ever in his class, make sure you are very very very careful. He will not tolerate anything; like I said he has no feelings. He is like a "Segfault". Please do not be deceived; he laughs and smiles all the time in class, but deep down inside he is as cold as zero degrees Kelvin. All that smiling and laughing that he puts up is just a camouflage. About Lectures and Lab: His lectures are hard to understand due to the way he speaks, but if you can understand what he is saying, you will get so much out of it. For the lab, please make sure you start your prelab early as possible, so you can utilize your lab assistant's office hours. Make sure to ask Nakajima to post how to write lab reports before the first lab report. He waits after three lab reports to post that, and by that time most people have lost so many points because they did not know what he wants. For the first exam, make sure you know everything about the labs and memorize the "Testbench" format even though it is generated by the computer. Overall, Nakajima wants you to learn and make your parents proud from what I see. However his approach to doing this is hellish.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE245 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/27/2011	Dr. Nakajima actually impressed me as a professor. You won't find many professors around here as dedicated and organized as he is. The lab assignments can be tough, but he didn't make them and they should be the same regardless of the professor. He was pretty good about extending the due date for assignments that a lot of students didn't finish. The way it worked out is that for any given week, the lab assignment is usually about 90% of your grade, and the prelab was the other 10%. We had two quizzes throughout the course, which were 50-100 points each, but they weren't too bad. The course was worth ~1500 points total, so the impact of the quizzes was minimal. Prelabs generally entail a Verilog coding assignment where you design something that may be helpful for that weeks lab. They are usually not too bad, but there were a few towards the end of the course which were difficult. The lab each week was a 3 hour block which was usually just Verilog coding, simulation, and testing the design on an FPGA. If you know what you're doing, you might get out of lab early pretty often. The grading for this class was very lenient, and if you got your lab working, you usually received pretty close to 100% on your report. Lab reports are long and take a while, but they shouldn't be difficult if you got your design working. Lectures are once a week for 50 minutes, and he tries to cover the upcoming prelab or introduce a few ideas that you need to know for the lab. There was no final exam for our class, but he did mention the possibility of adding one for future semesters. Overall, I would take another class with this professor.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2011	Everyone else has pretty much hit the nail on the head. He says "uhh" and "right" every other word. He laughs at his own jokes. His lectures slides are LITERALLY pages from the book scanned onto a powerpoint. Literally. He scares you by saying he doesn't curve if even one person gets an A on the exam, BUT HE DOES. Do not believe his lies. One time he even said he would curve downwards. I swear he just loves to troll students. He heavily favors those who sit in the front, so do that if you want to get on his good side. By the end of the class, I'm pretty sure he hated me, but I got an A so who cares. His exams aren't too bad. His homework is RIDICULOUS. He gives a homework which is graded for correctness, and then an "optional" SPS (Selected Problem Set), which is in fact not optional at all, but mostly graded for completion. Don't stress those too much on the SPSs. In fact, I think homework only counts for at most 10% of your grade, so don't stress it at all too much. Overall, this guys a joke. He'll come in rockin athletic shorts and a Hawaiian button down shirt like its nothing, proceed to mumble incoherently in engrish and laugh at his own jokes for 15 minutes, and then proceed to read lecture slides that are scanned imaged of the book. The only reason you'll go to class is because he threatens with pop quizzes, of which there might have been 2-3 the whole semester.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Anonymous 04/06/2011	Professor Nakajima is a nice guy if you go talk to him. He will never turn away your questions or interest to learn. However, his exams are very unforgiving. His HW are very long. He is incompetent in explaining material. I don't like his class or his grading policy, but he is a nice guy who if you build a good relationship with, could be depended upon to help you with research opportunities, etc.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 UMDstudent2011 04/04/2011	Difficult exams, 10+ hours of HW, and my favorite: He says "right" & "ok" & "uhhhhh" at least a 100 times each class period. My advice: Take the other guy; silo gives same exams every semester (easy), and Barua exams are straight forward and he does teach the material fairly well. The choice is yours.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Anonymous 12/16/2010	Run for your life! This guy is the worst professor at UMD. EE professors are horrible. And this guy would be horrible even by EE standards. Has no teaching abilities whatsoever. Teaches from slides, which he doesn't post online. Uses different means to force students to attend is torture of lectures, by taking attendance, unannounced quizzes etc. Exams are extremely hard. Another thing is that this guy is very hard to understand. He has a thick Asian accent (which I personally don't mind, lot of professors here are from foreign countries). But the bigger problem is that his English grammar is horrible. And even if this guy had Morgan Freeman's voice with perfect grammar, his lectures would still be horrible since he just does not know how to teach. Also, this guy is very biased. He is nice with students he likes, and really mean to students he doesn't. I'll say the same thing as another reviewer below me did. Taking this guy's class was the biggest mistake in my life. Avoid this guy at any cost. Trust me, any professor is better than Nakajima. If two professors are taking this class, pick the other guy. If Nakajima's the only choice, wait a semester.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting a C+ frapis 11/16/2010	This guy will try to scare you into dropping his class, because if you don't, you FAIL. ALOT of work, and homework is barely part of your overall grade. The differences between him and Silio are: Nakajima gives partial credit (not much though), and Silio's tests are slightly easier. Good luck. Try not to FAIILLL
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Anonymous 10/19/2010	Took ENEE244 with him and that was the biggest mistake in my life at umd. Don't take the class if you are not Japa***. I am dead serious. All Japa students got A in the class. In class you will understand only 10% materials. You have to learn 90% on your own or from TA or buddies. Avoid at all costs even if you have no other choices (delay your graduation 6 months) but don't take him. With due respect, he is very old guy, mind set is similar to military, countdowns in seconds when he collects quiz in class. If you are one second late then he won't accept it. Laughs at his own jokes. Sometime you will get it sometime not. I always laughed just to make him happy. Questions (half page each) on the exams are similar to history essay. You need 10 min to read the question and 10 more min to understand it, but usually japa** students get it quick :)
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Anonymous 12/31/2009	Great class. Fair exams.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Anonymous 12/31/2009	This class was cake. People need to relax. Nakajima is a very easy professor, all his antics are just for show. And he is actually very good. Do the homework and you'll breeze through this class.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/31/2009	This class is a cinch. I studied my butt off for the first test, I got a 50.9%. Didn't study for the last exam and final, got an A on both exams. What I learned from this class, studying makes it worse. The problems are always very tedious though. So learn some time management or something. Quizzes are random. Either way, by the time you finish the class(hopefully passing) you will evolve into your next form via the Nakajima stone. Good luck. P.S. He has corny jokes. And speaks Engrish. Not English.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/28/2009	You will learn a lot in Nakajima's 244 class from the book and the TA's. You will not learn very much from Nakajima. His English is not that great, so the first few classes it's basically impossible to understand what's going on. After a while you will get used to this though and you will be able to discern sentences from what he is saying. Once you can actually understand him, you will realize that he is not presenting the information very well at all and that you should probably just read the book during class. So you basically have to learn the material by going to the TA's and by doing problems and looking at the solutions he hands out and by reading the book (although the book is very long-winded and hard to read). That being said, you can do well in his class. He is a very tough grader because he wants students to work hard, but I think there is a curve in the end, so your grade will turn out better than you thought. His exams are hit or miss. Our first exam was really long and had some very unfair questions on it (two 5-variable Karnaugh map questions which basically test how well you can circle groups of 1's, which is not a very useful skill to test students on). However, our second exam and the final were very fair based on what we practiced on the hw and he gave extra time to make sure people could finish. The key factor was that if you did all the hw and worked out all the problems that you got wrong until you understood them and then made sure you knew how to do all the problems before the exam, then you were very well-prepared to do well on the exam. So if you work hard, it is very possible to do well in this class. One thing that I liked about Nakajima, which a lot of people hated actually, was that he would take class time to explain important practical things about getting a job and about various programs in the ECE department that can give you some great opportunities, such as the BS/MS program. Also, Nakajima is a pretty nice guy, and it's apparent that he cares about his students and wants them to learn, which is good. I am rating Nakajima pretty low because he really isn't that great at explaining the material. However, he will force you to learn the material by making the class hard, so it's good to know that you will come out of it with a lot of new knowledge. And it is possible to do well if you work hard. But really you should try to find a professor who is better at explaining the topics. Petrov seems to be a good bet. He taught one of our lectures when Nakajima was away traveling and I thought his lecture was excellent, so I would recommend Petrov based on that.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/27/2009	One of the nicest and most inspiring professors I have yet. He really teaches you that hard work pays off. If you are one of those students that likes getting 1 point above the average and expects a B, you are in the wrong class. However, if you are a student who is interesting in really working hard, going to office hours, actually reading the book and learning the material in conjunction with attending lecture you're in the right place! Nakajima is a very nice professor who will help you if you have decent questions in office hours. Don't come in saying 'I don't understand anything help me!' Instead come in and ask, 'I am having trouble with this concept.' I will admit he does have a habit of predicting which students will do well, but that doesn't mean that he is putting the rest of the students down. If you prove to him that you work hard and care about his class a little bit, you will be okay in this class. BTW, he does curve. He curves the final grades of everyone. He doesn't say he curves because he wants students to work very hard, but he does indeed curve. Earning an A in his class isn't easy, but as long as you are in the top 15% of the class you have a set A.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting a C Anonymous 12/16/2009	The worst professor I have ever had at UMD. Avoid him at all costs. It seems like Nakajima almost tries to screw everyone over in the class. Studying for the final exam is difficult because he doesn't post any practice materials. The last day of class included a ridiculous pop quiz that took about an hour to complete. Basically going to lecture is like reading the book since he literally scans the book page by page and puts the scans on the powerpoint presentation with little supplement. I learned more about Digital Logic from reading the book than attending lectures -- and the book cost a whole lot less. Horrible Experience.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE244 Expecting a B Anonymous 10/28/2009	This professor is horrible. His most recent stunt left 44 of 60 people in the class not passing the exam according to university standards(D{18 people} or F{26 people}) and he will not curve exams if one person gets an A on the exam. Well, 1 person got an 89.5 and he said that was an A meaning no curve. 8 B's and 7 C's were scores of the other students. He spends an average of 15-30 minutes of each class talking about terrible jokes and statistics to try and scare you into dropping the class instead of actually teaching the material to help you pass it. His idea of teaching is taking worked-out examples from the book and putting them on powerpoint to talk about/run through during class. He assigns "suggested"(still graded for completion) homework out of the book for almost every class, and there are no answers in the back of the book, so you have no idea whether you are doing it right or not and have no opportunity to learn from it. After you hand that in during class, he then assigns a HW assignment graded for correctness which he writes on the same material; however, the catch is that he hands out solutions for both assignments a week later - AFTER you had to complete the HW for correctness. The process ends up as that you have no idea whether you're doing anything right on the book-hw because you can't check your answers anywhere, and then you find out you were doing it all wrong on the correctness-hw and the pop-quizes and end up with horrible scores for 20% of your grade (hw + pop quizes). The worst part about all the homework is that you don't get your homeworks back until a week before the exam. Listening to him talk is also tough to get through because he has extremely poor English and says the word "right" every other word. A friend of mine held a counter one class and tallied a little over 300 times in an hour and a half class. I can't say much about Silio (the other professor who teaches 244), but from what I understand, he uses the same tests every year with different numbers but gives no partial credit on anything; you either have it 100% correct or its all wrong. You have a choice to make if you have to take this class between a horrible professor and tough grading. Overall 244 with Nakajima has so far been a horrific experience and I'm just trying to survive through his antics. Hope for a good TA like I have.
Kazuo Nakajima ENEE408C rkt 05/19/2009	This guy is just a person who does not respect to his student. He yells at the student whom he doesn't like, and smile to those he likes. He has such a bad attitude. And, he doesn't speak English at all. I would suggest not to take his class. If you have no other choice, good luck then.