Vincent Nguyen

This professor has taught: ENES221, ENES401, ENME361, ENME371, ENME401, ENME454, ENME472

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Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/04/2025	Let me start by saying I am judging Dr. Vince's rating more on his ability as a professor rather than just the structure of the class, which I think needs to be massively overhauled if not fully changed, but that will come later. Dr. Vince is a professor that believes in the success of all his students. You can tell during lecture that he really cares about this class and puts a lot of effort into trying to make this class meaningful to everyone. Don't worry if you are doing subpar on the lab reports as there will be many opportunities to earn back points for the class. Unfortunately, this is about where the positives end. First off, although I was not in his section for labs, I have heard that he is a very harsh grader and for the whole class in general I think he expects way too much. This does not feel like a 3 credit class and I truly believe that a non-negligible percent of people will spend more time in this class alone than they will every other class they are taking that semester COMBINED. Though I believe he is simply a symptom of the class's problems, he certainly does not help in that department. Moving on to the course structure, this class has BY FAR the most torturous structure out of any class I have taken. In-person lectures are mandatory on top of the annoying homework questions on gradescope and the extremely long lab reports. On top of that, they use clickers which require you to pay $27 FOR A SINGLE SEMESTER'S USE. For us that was $10.80 PER PERCENT OF YOUR GRADE FOR CLICKERS. Lectures do sometimes have some topics that people gloss over too much and should actually learn, but the lectures are so boring it is more productive to do work on other things than it is trying to fully listen to what he is saying as you will not remember most of it at the end of the day. As for labs, I really think the majority of them were genuinely useless. There were so many issues I can point out with each lab but that would take entire essays to write about. Also why are we dipping a running thermistor into hot water for one of the labs??? There is no way that isn't full on DANGEROUS? To DeWalt, the company sponsoring this class, what was the thought process behind making a class like this? First of all, I don't think creating a class of suffering will make anyone in particular want to join the company. And second, we were made to sign NDAs because a lot of your parts designs are confidential, in which you are trusting random COLLEGE STUDENTS to handle. There is bound to be some guy who just completely disregards this NDA and your company would have a lot of trouble on their hands and on top of that suing said person wouldn't even matter when the average college student has a net worth in the NEGATIVES. Keep that in mind the next time you are looking back at this class. Shout out to my instructor Alex for putting in a lot of effort to help us though. He is a good instructor (at least for our group, some groups had more mixed thoughts on him but they mostly lean on the positive side) and he gave our section notes that he wrote up to help everyone understand the lab better and what to do, which was genuinely very helpful a lot of the time. Although it is practically impossible to fail this class, for me the biggest thing I would change about this class is what the topics are actually on. I thought up of an idea that if I want this class to be something else, I would much rather this be a CAD2 class of some sorts. Although me and I think most others have experience with CAD and 3D printing, they never technically taught us anything about 3D printing and ENME272 to me was too simple of a class. It would also be great if they focused more on finite element analysis (I know that is already a class, but I think most Mechanical Engineers should learn this content) and applying it to the physical world, which everyone I have talked to about this idea say they would much rather have had this over what we have now. And the best part is you can definitely apply the majority of important concepts in this class to a class like what I mentioned above. This is definitely a fever dream but it is definitely something I wished future students would have.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/22/2024	Was going to write all the problems, but it's not really worth the time. Problems with the class: Bad groupmates aren't held accountable if your group doesn't fully agree on what to do. If you're the only doing work, you're out of luck. Cheating is crazy. The PDP questions and lab reports do not change between semester, so lots of cheating happens (unfortunate). This means if you don't get high grades on these, the section curve won't help much. The workload is too high for a 3 credit course. Especially if you're in Dr. Nguyen's section. He expects way more than other instructors. This means grading between instructors isn't close to the same (inequity). Plenty of more complaints, but again, waste of time. ADVICE!!!!!!!!!!! 1. Switch out of Dr. Nguyen's section if you get him (you can't know until you see the instructor for each lab section on the canvas page) MECHE gospel atp 2. Make a good team contract that discusses how you will split contribution grades 3. Make your availability at the same time as your friends (at like 3AM for one hour). This is how he assigns groups, so if you want to dodge bad groupmates, this is a good shot.
Vincent Nguyen ENES401 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/04/2024	Vince slander is largely related to the nature of ENME371 taking up insane amounts of time which is true for any professor who teaches this. At his core, he cares a lot about students success and is more than willing to help out anyone who has questions, even at the expense of his own personal time. For this class, he gave us a lot of autonomy and only checked in once a week where we would talk about progress and next steps. I would say that this class is more of a time commitment that a traditional course, but definitely manageable across the entire group. At any issue or roadblock that we've had, he's been more than willing to help out and work with us to find a solution.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Anonymous 10/16/2024	He says a lot of words but means nothing at all. He just talks to fill blank space.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Anonymous 08/22/2024	Pros: You learn how to work as a team and Vince loves to give help. Really hard to fail ENME371 Cons: Vince is a really harsh grader. (His definition of a perfect assignment is 90% and to earn more points you need to go beyond his expectations) The time spent in this class. (10-25 hours per week)
Vincent Nguyen ENES401 Expecting an A Anonymous 07/03/2024	Vince is a decent professor. He's got a lot going on which can make things feel rushed and disorganized at times, but at the end of the day he will push you to do meaningful and rewarding work. Would not recommend for anyone who just wants a chill class and an easy A. Very tough grader as he has borderline unreasonable expectations, but if you put in good effort you will do well in the class.
Vincent Nguyen ENES401 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/18/2024	Course IS a mech-e capstone class, despite having the ENES course tag. Vincent is a great guy and very real, but don't expect to be able to architect your own product. if you're a CS major trying to take this for a ENES4xx class for an easy ULC I would NOT, this is not a simple class and you will regularly put in many more hours than you would a typical ENES class like ENES472/475/463/461 etc. Also other 371 reviews apply.
Vincent Nguyen Expecting an A Anonymous 05/15/2024	He is an okay guy but in my opinion he overcomplicates a lot of material. Personally, I find that he should give more time for the students to collaborate together. Hes a yapper. But honestly, this class was just annoying regardless.
Vincent Nguyen ENME361 Expecting a C Anonymous 01/25/2024	Very tough grader. He won't give partial credit at all. He is a nice person, but his lecture is really fast-paced.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/27/2023	The thing about this class is it's really hard to get an A or A+ but it's also really hard to get a C and literally no one fails. If you want in A you're going to have to put in a frankly ridiculous amount of work. I'd regularly put in 25-30 hours on top of lecture and lab time on each lab assignment. Honestly you're probably better off putting in less work and just being happy with a B and focusing on your other classes. I pulled way to many all-nighters for this stupid class. Not worth it. Also do anything you can to avoid having him as your section teacher, he grades super super harshly compared to the others. I don't think we had a single assignment where the lowest grade in the entire class wasn't someone in our section.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/22/2023	This class should be at least a 4 or 5 credits class in terms of the course load. Even though Dr. Vince is a very knowledgeable guy, he does not know what kind of pain students are going through while taking his class. He will assign as many reports as possible so that you will have to at least dedicate 8-10 hours outside of lecture time for the reports. The grading for his sections is especially tough and not reasonable compared to other groups.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Expecting a P Anonymous 04/22/2023	teacher demands too much out of students. class drains my time and mental capacity. idk how this is allowed. he has absolutely no guilt either. id love to see him put 10 hrs a week on top of lecture ...
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Expecting a P Anonymous 03/15/2023	horrible , has no respect for students time. He must legitmatley think his course is the only course we are taking. probabaly have to dedicate 20 -25 hours a week for this class a week a report is due... which is every week
Vincent Nguyen ENME361 Expecting a B Anonymous 08/15/2022	This class was incredibly challenging, but not for the reason of the content being overly difficult. The lectures are insanely fast paced, and you'll get one, or maybe half of an example that will be extremely easy compared to HW and exams. HW much easier than exams, so not really relevant for helping your grade. For our section, you basically got a handful of practice exam questions that might be similar to what was on the exam, but the exam would be different enough to throw you off. He refused to give practice exam solutions which made it impossible to tell if you were doing anything correctly. Harsh grader as stated, but HW was graded on completion not accuracy. Massive curve for our class so a few F averages ended up passing with minimum C- or better. Class content could be interesting but this class is so focused on derivations that I feel very little real world use is gained from this class.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Expecting an A- Anonymous 08/04/2022	371 is broken up by having lecture taught by Vince and then studio sections led by other professors at UMD. Vince led lectures and these were very boring and long. He speaks very fast where he trips over his own words at times, but is a knowledgeable person. To ensure students attend lecture, he does clicker questions, but he will go over and give the answer as long as enough students attempt to answer and participate. Vince does lead one section for studios and you should AVOID him at all cost. His section normally has the lowest averages as Vince is a tough grader. There is a curve applied, but it varies across each section leader (each section has it's own curve). To do well in 371, it really depends on who your group is and who your section leader is. There is a lot of work to be done in studios and outside of class, so having a group of students that do not procrastinate is super helpful. The work is not too challenging, it just is a lot to do and is tedious, especially if you make a mistake in a lab and need to start over.
Vincent Nguyen ENME361 Anonymous 01/11/2022	Very good professor. Explains the material well. Exams are similar to the practice exams but he's an extremely tough grader. If you make a minor mistake at the beginning of a problem and other questions depend on that answer, you will get something close to a zero on the rest of the exam.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Anonymous 02/22/2021	Vince is very particular professor. He thinks he knows the best way for students to learn and ubiquitously applies that learning methodology across all of his students. For example, requiring students to attend lecture with clicker participation quizzes and then creating weekly quizzes that pretty much check that you went to lecture. He assigns a ton of work to keep you busy. He also speaks very loudly over Zoom. On the other hand, I think his exams are fair, though he is a very harsh grader and is definitely looking out to take off points.
Vincent Nguyen ENME361 Expecting a B Anonymous 01/25/2021	So I took this class over the winter. Overall it is a lot of material in a short amount of time. There are 4 exams, 5 Hw's , 8 quizzes, and one take home exam. A lot of work for only 13 class sessions. Vince is tough, but he really wants us to be great engineers. Vince is concise, he clearly explains and relates all the material to real world examples. He does hold all students to a high standard, so just be prepared to suffer, but its for a good reason. I would take Vince again because I will be a better engineer for it, not because I enjoy working so hard. In short, Vince is a great professor.
Vincent Nguyen ENME361 Anonymous 01/24/2021	He cares about you learning the material. So learn it. Try not to make mistakes on the exams though.
Vincent Nguyen ENME371 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 06/08/2020	Vince is nice and cares about his students BUT he's a tough grader.