Dana Nau

This professor has taught: CMSC421, CMSC474, CMSC722, CMSC798

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Information	Review
Dana Nau CMSC722 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/19/2023	Really need at least B for this class for my graduation requirements. The midterm score was low and said probably would change the cutoffs. However, final grades are not curved at all. Haven't seen a class that is not curved in computer science department in my whole undergraduate years. Probably the number of people taking this class is not worth a curve (under 20).
Dana Nau CMSC421 Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/17/2019	Nice person, not so great class. This has been the most frustrating class I have taken in my undergrad here. The projects were poorly implemented and communicated, and the TA's did not really help much. It would often be the case that there would be dozens of piazza questions left unanswered on the day before an exam or a project. In addition, expectations on projects and how they would be graded was not communicated well at all. With no semblance of tests to evaluate your performance, you just had to write something and hope whatever arbitrary grading scheme worked in your favor, if not then oh well. For this reason many people ended up with very low scores in the class, despite putting in a lot of effort. I would be very careful in taking this class. If you are expecting a class with clear expectations on projects and transparency with grading, this is not it. Instead you will feel a lot of stress over unclear grading, lack of communication and poorly defined student expectations.
Dana Nau CMSC421 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/12/2019	Uninteresting and poorly communicated projects. Lecture covers the material well but is uninteresting. Exams are very easy and it is not hard to get a good grade in the course. Homeworks are easy as well.
Dana Nau CMSC421 Anonymous 12/05/2019	This class was terrible. Very unorganized, waited forever for grades and overall sad. I already took 422 and this class was more dry and uninteresting. Thought it would be cool since ya know, AI but it was very difficult to bring myself to class and care about doing the world.
Dana Nau CMSC421 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/11/2018	One of the nicest professors I've ever taken. Taught the material clearly and commonly gives extensions on assignments if enough students ask for it. Reads from slides with heavy information, but goes back through them and students are visibly confused or ask questions.
Dana Nau CMSC421 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/11/2018	I was really concerned with this class reading the previous reviews. He's actually a pretty decent professor if you listen to him. I really kind of wish that they didn't go over as much First Order Logic in the course but other than that he really paid attention to student concerns, was lenient with deadlines and frequently added extensions. If you had a question in class he would stop everything and made sure you understood the material and would readily go over anything anyone asked to. The project was pretty fun actually and I've heard a few people talk about how it was nice to have a project that actually demonstrated AI and was something they could show to their non-CS friends. I would recommend taking this class with Dr. Nau!
Dana Nau CMSC421 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/19/2017	Pros: -Interesting and Challenging material Cons: -Professor makes mistakes during in class derivations, at one point becoming so flustered he ended class early. -Just reads from slides during lecture, students can do this just as easily on their own time and skip class -Grading was not prompt at all, project 2 of 3 was finally graded just a few days before final -Homework solutions are not posted, and homework is only returned if you go to TA office hours -Project 3 was based on TensorFlow, which the professor admitted "I don't know anything about and won't be able to help you. Just read and work through the tutorials" Summary: -Not easy, you'll have to study a lot, but the material is pretty interesting -Going to lectures isn't a good use of time -Projects are all group based and project 3 was absurdly difficult with no guidance
Dana Nau CMSC722 Anonymous 05/23/2015	As CamelCase says, his teaching style is to read over his lecture slides (which, granted, are packed with information) pretty much word for word. I found in-class lectures pretty pointless unless you managed to immediately digest and comprehend information at the (pretty quick) rate at which he presents it, and ask tons of questions. You’d be better off pulling up the lecture slides on your own and working through the examples during class time.
Dana Nau CMSC722 Anonymous 05/22/2015	WARNING: Please avoid taking this course unless you are a RA for Prof. Dana Nau. There are so many great classes in UMD CS but this one is the worst even though Prof. Dana Nau is an AAAI fellow, outstanding researcher in this field, but it does not indicate that he is a great teacher. The reasons are as follows: 1. You can HARDLY learn anything new if you have taken an undergraduate level AI course except for fancy words that defines fancy planning and acting engines & models. You will NOT learn optimization techniques for AI planning but some bad framework that you will NEVER use. 2. Unfortunately, Prof. Nau and the TA Dr. Vikas Shivashankar READ slides all the time. 3. The book draft is not consistent from section to section and full of flaws. 4. The grading is a SUBJECTIVE procedure with no room for rebuttal. Worse still, the TA has the power to grade the exams as he wishes. 5. The professor simply IGNORES the students’ questions on Piazza nor email and seldom response in time. 6. The professor once was LATE for over 10 minutes for one Ph.D. student’s preliminary oral exam and everyone waited him. 7. The professor and the TA are MEAN to students and don’t recognize your previous efforts except for the raw subjective score, which is reasonable for undergraduate level class but definitely not for graduate level class. And this class limits A to a score of 93. 8. The professor’s lecture often EXCEED the time by 15 minutes or less than. 9. The professor never grades your homework nor explain homework very well. 10. The syllabus and the actual schedule are NOT consistent. However, every coin has two sides: 1. Prof. Nau is a famous professor in this field. Taking his class and getting an A will make your resume more remarkable to AI people. 2. You can learn how to formulate things and make ordinary programming style extraordinary using what is learnt in class, which most papers do. 3. Prof. Nau gives us a good example of teaching lessons. 4. Though you cannot get a much higher score from your projects, don’t worry because it does not hurt your final score.
Dana Nau CMSC474 CamelCase 01/20/2015	Nice enough person, but a poor instructor. His teaching style is to read over his lecture slides (which, granted, are packed with information) pretty much word for word. I found in-class lectures pretty pointless unless you managed to immediately digest and comprehend information at the (pretty quick) rate at which he presents it, and ask tons of questions. You'd be better off pulling up the lecture slides on your own and working through the examples during class time. Homework sets took a bit of time to do, since there was a fair amount of having to review the slides repeatedly and first trying to understand the examples and reverse engineer them. Practice Midterm and Final Exams were given, but were much easier than the actual ones. Nau's justification was that they were all of 'easy' difficulty for him, so he didn't realize ours was harder. Final grades in this class were curved, in my opinion heavily (~8-10%). The projects are not of complex difficulty and ended up bringing up most people's grades in this class, at least a little bit.
Dana Nau CMSC421 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/24/2010	I think Professor Nau is a nice person, but not the most effective/organized teacher. I took the class because I thought AI sounded cool, and it is but I don't think I was ready to put as much effort as I would have needed to get an A. Bottom Line: He's not bad, but don't take this class if you're just looking for an easy A. Be prepared to put in a decent amount of work.
Dana Nau CMSC421 ajoshi1 05/13/2010	Do not take a class with this professor. His class was very unorganised/unstructured. For the first project he had put it on the forum for about 2 weeks before even making any mention of it. He gave us about 1 month for that project, which was a simple "get familiar with the language" sort of a project and for the other 2, which were significantly harder he gave 2 weeks. His lectures were pretty boring, and he took forever to give back the homeworks. He tried to be helpful, but his teaching style/class structure just works against him.