Adrianos Papamarcou

This professor has taught: EDSP652, ENEE222, ENEE322, ENEE322H, ENEE323, ENEE324, ENEE324H, ENEE620

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Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/29/2023	Papamarcou is a really good lecturer and explains all the topics clearly. He could always answer students questions about the concepts clearly in a way that we could understand, his homeworks were always fair, the exams were always straightforward and very similar to the practice exams. He made it very easy for anyone who wanted to succeed to be able to with a reasonable amount of effort and paying attention in lecture. He made 222, an undeniably hard class, quite manageable and even easy at times.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/12/2023	Honestly, I really liked this professor. He did pretty much everything to make this class suitable for virtual learning, and even asynchronous learning, but I still found myself consistently going to lecture regardless. Sometimes he skips over steps in derivations, but he gets the main points across in a very understandable way. The homework can be difficult, but I feel they reinforce the main concepts well. The exams can also be difficult, but the professor provides ample resources to study for them. He's also very good with communication. At the end of the day, I felt that I have learned a lot from this class. I highly recommend Dr. Papamarcou. Even though this course is challenging, and you should plan to spend significant time on it, he sets you up for success as much as he can.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/25/2023	Absolutely amazing professor for people who self-study. Basically gives you the entire course materials in convenient modules in ELMS, including practice problems, example solutions and old exams. Exams are VERY similar to past exams. He doesn’t give “gotcha” questions. He records all lectures and posts them quickly (including his digital notes during the lecture). Homework is a little tedious, but not too bad. 222 with Papa is an Easy A if you put in the work.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Anonymous 11/09/2022	Very organized and gives the most material I've ever had a professor give. Weekly homework problems, short pre-lecture videos, practice problems (video and text) for each lecture, and plenty of exam review material. The only thing is he runs through his lectures and never really explains why something is "x*y/m" he just says it is which I found very annoying.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE324 Anonymous 05/24/2022	This was Papamarcou's teaching 324 in a couple of years and it showed. However, the class was well structured and organized. He teaches the material well. If you have taken probability before, this class should be a breeze. He provides plenty examples in his lecture notes. Homework are extremely long and lecture alone are not enough to figure out what the homework asks for. The exams and practice exams were very similar, but he still threw curveballs. He is a harsh grader. Some problems on the exams, more points could have been given. The average on the exams were: around 75 for the first exam, around 66 for the second exam, and 63 for the final. He was alarmed to see how low the second average was, so he made the final best four out of five problems, which was nice. 60% was a passing grade and 85% was an A-. I would recommend this class with Papamarcou as he cares about his students. However, this class isn't as curved compared to other 324 professors. A 60% in other 324 course would be considered an A- or a B+ in some scenarios.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Anonymous 05/05/2022	Papamarcou himself is a decent lecturer and takes pride in his knowledge and willingness to teach others. The material he teaches is just hard and confusing in its own way, but he makes it bearable. There are always 2-3 homeworks to do each week, except during exam weeks then there is still one to do, along with a lab each week in matlab. The class is very time consuming and difficult but taking it with Papamarcou helps relieve some of the stress.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Anonymous 05/21/2021	He is really nice and a good lecturer. As others have mentioned he uses a flipped lecture style which might not work for everyone. Exams are pretty straightforward and the questions are mostly taken from worksheets or past exams.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE322 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 02/04/2021	Dr. Papamarcou is definitely one of the best professors at UMD. ENEE322 is a difficult course, but Dr. Papamarcou provides more than enough resources for his students to succeed. For every lecture in the course, he records 2 to 3 videos that go over the content in detail. He's great at explaining difficult concepts, both in lectures and in his videos. He also provides tons of solved example problems. If you put in a decent amount of work into this class, you will almost certainly get a great grade. Also, if you take ENEE322 with Dr. Papamarcou, you will most likely come out of it with an interest in signals.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE322 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/12/2021	Recommend taking 322 with Papamarcou if you didn't hate 222 with him. He does a flipped lecture that takes some getting used to if you haven't had him before, but he also has a text version of all the content so you don't actually need to watch the lectures if that's more your thing. 322 is hard. It's a lot of math-y computation, so not a lot of it is actually useful and applicable for stuff outside of school. Exams are pretty straightforward. Some questions may have twists, but they're mostly the same type of questions as in the practice exams. Homeworks are helpful for learning the content for each week/couple of weeks, but by the time each exam comes up there has been so much content covered that you'll probably just need to learn everything again even if you got the homeworks all or mostly right. He also uploads practice problems. Highly recommend just doing all of the problems and exams that he uploads.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/29/2019	I have such mixed feelings about this professor. Clearly very intelligent and passionate about his work, however he just doesn't teach this class well. His new flipped-classroom-esque style is inefficient at best, and flawed at worst. I feel if he just did lectures in class instead it would be much easier to pick up on concepts. However, this is not my main beef with this class... You don't need to study. Period. You can, but it won't give you a significant advantage over anyone else with a good memory and 6 hours the night before a test. He gives carbon copy midterms and finals every single year, and he gives you four to study from. I know multiple people who, after figuring out this trick, didn't study at all during the semester until the day before the second midterm and the day before the second final, where we just grinded and memorized how to complete the previous tests. And that's all you need to do, as we all ended up with A's. In my opinion, this is unfair as I feel like I came out of the semester not learning anything and with a grade that I don't deserve. It's just that if I'm handed a slice of cake, I'm not gonna run circles around it for three hours a day when instead I could just grab it and go do something else. Papamarcou, in my opinion, could restructure this class into something very useful if he changed the format of the exams and instead made them about understanding of material instead of solving memorization puzzles. But hey, if you can memorize stuff easily and want a free A in a weed-out course, take Papa.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE322H Expecting a C Anonymous 01/24/2019	It's a hard course and the professor doesn't provide any motivation for why we are learning the subject. However, the professor is obviously extremely knowledgeable.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting a B Anonymous 07/28/2018	Overall Papamarcous class is easy as you can do well in each exam by practicing his past exams which he posts on ELMS. However I feel like I havent really learnt anything from this class other than the MATLAB portion.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE322 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/16/2014	Papamarcou is a great professor. I won't lie to you, this class is extremely difficult, but that is the content, not the teacher. He does a really good job of explaining everything, and posted all of his lectures on elms in case you need to hear something again. Homeworks were difficult and assigned once a week, but only a subset of problems got graded, and if your exam average was better than your overall grade with homeworks, then (if I read the syllabus correctly) homework grades get dropped. Exams were fair. There are two midterms and a final, each covering material from their respective unit. The exams have similar problems to the homework, but are made slightly easier to compensate for the time constraints. Honestly, this is just a really hard course with a lot of material to get a hold of. If you can get Papamarcou, he will help you through it and you should get by okay. This professor is a good idea.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE620 Expecting a C- Anonymous 05/05/2014	I really like Papamarcou. He cares about his students and attempts to help them navigate his course. He is thorough in teaching the material and the homework is tough but you learn a lot. On the downside, his exams are super-tough and the scores you make on the exams make up 90% of the grade. So, while I learned so much in this course, my grade won't reflect what I learned, but only how I performed on the timed exams.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE222 Expecting an A umdee 04/25/2014	Papa is a great lecturer and makes fair exams that can easily be aced by looking over practice and past exams. Only complaint is that he sounds like a book when lecturing (not a bad thing, but can be hard to understand sometimes with the terminology he uses).
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE324 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/21/2012	Great professor. Had him for both 324 and 241. He can be a bit verbose (tends to speak like a textbook) but always precise, which can be very useful for simpler topics but confusing for more complex ones. He has a very fair grading scheme based on point values, which is nice since you know what you need to get going into the final. He is a very organized teacher, and studying for this class is not difficult due to his lecture notes and provided solutions. The only downside: if you don't understand how to do certain problems, his solutions can be hard to understand since he skips many steps, so they cannot be relied upon exclusively. Overall, highly recommended as long as you are able to keep up with material as he presents it in class. I wish I had looked at notes for lectures beforehand, as that would have helped immensely.
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2011	Papamarcou is a great teacher. If your hcoice is between Papamarcou and Blankenship, CHOOSE PAPAMARCOU. I am speaking from first hand experience when I say you will have no idea what Blankenship does in class. I was in his section for the first week of classes, realized I HAD to get out, and switched to Papamarcou. Wow, huge change. Blankenship talks really quietly, and was doing some weird stuff when I was in his class. A week later, Papamarcou was still reviewing complex numbers and such. His class goes at a nice, slow pace and he commonly stops to see if any student has a question. His exams are EXACTLY like his practice exams, so definitely get a hold of those. Also, his final is NOT COMPREHENSIVE. Some people think this is a bad thing, but I tend to think this is a great thing. Overall, this class is a breeze if you go to class, do the homework, and look at practice exams. Don't stress too much over the homeworks either, as he has a nice policy where if you do well on exams, homeworks don't even factor into the grade.
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting an A Anonymous 01/28/2011	His lecture notes are very good. He also wrote his own textbook which is in .pdf so you can get away with not buying a text at all. I found his lectures to be somewhat lacking in mathematical rigour to the extent that some of his explanations could have been more clearly and concisely been conveyed in a rigorous proof. Study any test bank exams you can get, plus his practice exams. The curve is insane... I think 30-40% get A's or something like that. The exams are more about precision than anything else... just make sure you can plow through all the test bank exams without having to 'think' very much and you'll be fine.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE425 Expecting a D Anonymous 12/21/2010	This class was 10 times harder then 322. He doesn't make it any easier. If you don't understand his lectures drop the class right away.
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting an A fma1 05/08/2010	Okay, yeah, I admit that I don't fully understand the DFT. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/explained-fourier.html That article explains it well. Music is composed of many different instruments, and the DFT does what the human ear does. It splits the sound into the sounds made by different instruments. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObklYbQaX24 It's also basically another way to look at the same data, to see things you wouldn't normally see. Okay, now for my review. I think Papamarcou is a really awesome teacher. Anyone who has ever taken Blankenship will tell you, "I have no idea what I learned in 241." Never take Blankenship. EVER. Unless you are like super freaking smart and I mean SUPER, you will have no idea what Blankenship is doing. Papamarcou explains the concepts as well as possible. Just make sure you read the lecture notes, and skim the book sometimes. He's not that difficult, actually. I found this class to be challenging, but not impossible to get an A in. Also, like everyone else said, he cares a lot. That is really surprising because most of the ENEE2xx level teachers just don't care.
Adrianos Papamarcou ENEE324 Expecting an A Anonymous 04/08/2010	i had papamarcou for 241 and 324.. while he is a good enough teacher, and i think that he genuinely cares about students and how they do, i really really REALLY hate the subject matter for both 241 and 324. not papamarcou's fault, but maybe it biases my review a little. papamarcou teaches like he is reading a book so it takes a good bit to get used to the way he describes things. ive done a lot better in 324 than i did in 241 i think because of that. either way, i think he is a little overrated. he might be better than the alternative, but he is a very very difficult professor. the workload that he gives you is a little unreasonable i think, but i suppose that his grading scheme accounts for that a little.
Adrianos Papamarcou armantheman 12/31/2009	Very good professor, keeps you engaged. However he is frankly too smart, and the material is far to dense and nonsensical. Easy to get a B at least though.
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting an A Anonymous 12/21/2009	Even though I didn't come to many lectures and I never paid attention to the lectures I came to...I did all the homeworks and I was 100% fine. I even bombed one of the exams and he disregards it. It was awesome, I did work very hard for the final exam and I am very happy with him. In person he is amazing and actually cares about his students. Def take him!
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting a B Anonymous 12/16/2009	Great Professor, but the course content is horrible. Some of the calculations get really tedious and can be very confusing at times.
Adrianos Papamarcou Xin 11/25/2009	Ok teacher, the course is just really, really, really boring. You learn all this computational stuff that you really don't understand. Like the other person said, you learn a 1000 ways to computer a DFT but never understand what a DFT actually is. He is helpful and nice. So take him if you get the chance.
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting an A Anonymous 05/14/2009	Papamarcou was an ok teacher. I found his exams to be pretty easy and I got good grades, but I didn't really feel like I learned much from the course. You will learn about 1000 ways to compute the DFT of a signal, but in the end, unless you are really smart, you won't understand what the DFT is. Basically this class is about becoming a computational robot and sometimes it's really annoying when you realize that you have no idea what you are computing or why you are computing it, even though you may be very good at computing it. Papamarcou himself is alright, although it often seems like he doesn't trust the students that much. I think part of the problem is that the course is relatively new and needs a lot of tweaking. I hope for the future that he will teach fewer methods of computing DFTs and convolutions and such, and spend more time trying to get across the purpose of each step and what objects such as the DFT actually represent so students can know why they are doing these computations.
Adrianos Papamarcou vbury 02/25/2009	Even though Papamarcou's class covered some pretty hard material, his method of teaching is awesome. He is particular with his examples and tries to fully explain each concept as he comes up. You don't have to buy a textbook, he gives you one for free on blackboard. Not only that, with each homework set he gives you 3-4 pages of notes that explain the material that the problem set covers. The problem sets were time-consuming, but the included notes were a godsend. His tests are tricky, so you have to prepare well. Great guy and a great professor.
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting a B Anonymous 01/22/2009	Really good teacher. He understands the material very well and communicates very well to students. He gives a lot of homework but without it there is no way to understand the material. I would definetly take 241 with Papamarcou.
Adrianos Papamarcou Anonymous 11/19/2008	he was awesome, great teacher, just do the hw and listen to him and you will do fine
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting an A ProphetElisha 09/03/2008	Easily one of the best professors in the department. He is a great lecturer and his lectures are well organized. The material he covers is tough, but if you can follow him and take notes (or get help when you need it) and complete his assignments you'll have every opportunity to do well.
Adrianos Papamarcou Expecting a C funkbomb 11/12/2007	He's hands-down a great professor. Not easy, but if you're looking for easy you're in the wrong major. If you care about your grade enough to see him every once in a while you'll be fine. He goes fast in lectures but he tries to explain things in great detail and simple explanations, and tells you what you do or don't need to know--he knows it's difficult material and levels with you. Nice guy too.