Ciro Pinto-Coelho | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
Ciro Pinto-Coelho HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 02/07/2021	If you have good friends and/or good coding experience, this class will be annoying but easy. There is quite a bit of work assigned but if you're any good, it does not take much effort and the time commitment is fine if you work efficiently. However, Ciro is a very nice person who tries very hard. Talk to him out of class and you'll see that he genuinely cares and is easy to talk to. Unfortunately, the class itself forces me to give him a 4 rather than a 5.
Ciro Pinto-Coelho HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/12/2021	This class required an excessive amount of work for 2 credits. As stated in other reviews, the weekly assignments were often redundant. We were often assigned 40+ pages or dense slides of reading on which we had to write a reflection. After this reflection was due, he would present the same slides that we had read for homework. On the positive side, the TAs were helpful, and I did learn some new things from this course.
Ciro Pinto-Coelho HACS100 Anonymous 12/16/2020	TLDR: Avoid this professor at all costs - if you can. Sorry ACES freshmen. As a preface, since I'm the only reviewer currently, I will advise you that I have also seen and heard other students complain about this professor as well, and some considered dropping out of ACES because this was their first impression of the program. Classes were overall boring and therefore nobody spoke. To counteract this, he made us do a 'discussion' each week where we were placed into groups and had to answer questions about content we had already learned through the weekly summaries we were supposed to do. This made the class overall redundant. Sometimes, these weekly summaries also required reading documents over 100 pages long. There were also large projects assigned that were difficult to understand the requirements for, therefore resulting in lowered grades. Even after students asked for clarification, requirements remained unclear. These projects could take 6 hours total, on top of the other required work for the week which could take about 1-2 hours. For a 2 credit class, this is excessive. And as another incentive to participate, 10% of the grade was based on participation. This would be acceptable if it were simply showing up to class and participating in the 'discussions' mentioned previously, but we were also expected to ask questions and have a real conversation about these topics. To me, this seems excessive considering this was the first semester of online classes at UMD, with the pandemic going on. Everyone has enough on their plate already. Another section of the participation grade was known as 'Where in Maryland' - we had to email a TA each week with the location of a picture that was placed in the weekly slides. I already showed up to class. Why do I have to go through the effort of finding some location in Maryland for an actual participation grade in a class about cybersecurity? Don't get me wrong, the teacher himself isn't a bad person. I just thought I'd be done with all of the terrible teachers from high school, considering ACES is supposed to be good.
Ciro Pinto-Coelho HACS100 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/29/2020	Very bad professor. He doesn't teach anything in class and lifts some of his slides from Wikipedia. The professor rarely gives good answers to questions and has a very confusing style of grading which means you won't know your grade until the last week of school.

Ciro Pinto-Coelho
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
02/07/2021

If you have good friends and/or good coding experience, this class will be annoying but easy. There is quite a bit of work assigned but if you're any good, it does not take much effort and the time commitment is fine if you work efficiently. However, Ciro is a very nice person who tries very hard. Talk to him out of class and you'll see that he genuinely cares and is easy to talk to. Unfortunately, the class itself forces me to give him a 4 rather than a 5.

Ciro Pinto-Coelho
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
01/12/2021

This class required an excessive amount of work for 2 credits. As stated in other reviews, the weekly assignments were often redundant. We were often assigned 40+ pages or dense slides of reading on which we had to write a reflection. After this reflection was due, he would present the same slides that we had read for homework. On the positive side, the TAs were helpful, and I did learn some new things from this course.

Ciro Pinto-Coelho
HACS100

Anonymous
12/16/2020

TLDR: Avoid this professor at all costs - if you can. Sorry ACES freshmen. As a preface, since I'm the only reviewer currently, I will advise you that I have also seen and heard other students complain about this professor as well, and some considered dropping out of ACES because this was their first impression of the program. Classes were overall boring and therefore nobody spoke. To counteract this, he made us do a 'discussion' each week where we were placed into groups and had to answer questions about content we had already learned through the weekly summaries we were supposed to do. This made the class overall redundant. Sometimes, these weekly summaries also required reading documents over 100 pages long. There were also large projects assigned that were difficult to understand the requirements for, therefore resulting in lowered grades. Even after students asked for clarification, requirements remained unclear. These projects could take 6 hours total, on top of the other required work for the week which could take about 1-2 hours. For a 2 credit class, this is excessive. And as another incentive to participate, 10% of the grade was based on participation. This would be acceptable if it were simply showing up to class and participating in the 'discussions' mentioned previously, but we were also expected to ask questions and have a real conversation about these topics. To me, this seems excessive considering this was the first semester of online classes at UMD, with the pandemic going on. Everyone has enough on their plate already. Another section of the participation grade was known as 'Where in Maryland' - we had to email a TA each week with the location of a picture that was placed in the weekly slides. I already showed up to class. Why do I have to go through the effort of finding some location in Maryland for an actual participation grade in a class about cybersecurity? Don't get me wrong, the teacher himself isn't a bad person. I just thought I'd be done with all of the terrible teachers from high school, considering ACES is supposed to be good.

Ciro Pinto-Coelho
HACS100

Expecting an A
Anonymous
11/29/2020

Very bad professor. He doesn't teach anything in class and lifts some of his slides from Wikipedia. The professor rarely gives good answers to questions and has a very confusing style of grading which means you won't know your grade until the last week of school.