William Regli | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
William Regli CMSC421 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/19/2024	Decent professor and nice guy. The midterms were fair and the lectures were good. However, he completely delegated the job of designing projects and quizzes to the TAs, many of whom were quite frankly kind of incompetent at their job. As a result, prof. Regli usually couldn't answer questions about his own homework assignments because he was not the one creating them.
William Regli CMSC421 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/13/2024	Awful teacher, has no idea what hes doing, terrible lesson plan. Do not take!
William Regli CMSC421 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/12/2024	Nice person overall. Projects are very doable and relevant. You get a cheat sheet on exams which honestly don't help too much most of the time. Homework are fine but not exactly easy. Slides are bloated and too much content is crammed into the slides. Honestly, there were interesting topics but the class structures makes it boring. Overall, class is boring but not too hard. Projects (especially this first one) will take some time but otherwise it is generally a low time commitment course. Regli is a good person and is passionate and knowledgeable.
William Regli CMSC421 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/12/2024	The concepts in this class definitely have the potential to be cool and engaging, but the way he teaches is quite disorganized and detailed in the wrong places. You learn a bunch of vocab words in every lecture that gets mentioned once and never reiterated, but he keeps moving forward so if you don't remember one word you're screwed. Even if you read the textbook, the terminology it uses is sometimes different than the terminology he uses in class. He also moves really fast and all his slides have a lot of words, so it feels impossible to take notes and if you get lost, you're not going to pick up anything for the rest of the class. He also frequently makes mistakes in his lectures or slides and has to double back on himself during class which makes knowing what is the "correct" information rather difficult. As for the assignments, they take a long time, and he lied about having only 6 assignments (we had 7). The instructions for almost every assignment were constantly changed, even up to a few days before the due date. There's almost always some type of unforeseen issue with it that several people have to address before it gets announced to the rest of the class. The exams are multiple choice which takes some stress off, but the difficulty really isn't any better, especially when you see that one question is worth 9% of your whole exam grade. The one exam on logic is literally just 250 + genuine logic. If you have your cheat sheet of definitions you don't have to go to class to get a good score if your logical reasoning abilities are strong. On the other hand, if they're not but you studied a lot, you might not do so well. The exams themselves often contain a few poorly worded questions that leave it up for interpretation, and when you ask for clarification from the TAs, they also interpret it differently than how he intended and you get the question wrong. The exams could be better structured, but at least there's a curve on it. Two stars just because there's a curve, the textbook he recommends is well written/easy to understand, and these two together + self studying make this class passable.
William Regli CMSC421 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/10/2024	Guy below me is spot on, Regli is a super cool guy and genuinely knows what he's talking about. He's been in this space for decades and is very clearly knowledgeable. This class (atleast this semester) suffered alot from projects. Hw2 (project2) was really long, but I don't think it was awful. Some of the other ones were created with very little detail and lots of revising as the due date came closer. You literally would not be able to progress on most projects without searching through Piazza for clarifications, etc.
William Regli CMSC421 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/08/2024	This class has a lot of potential to be really cool and really well done, but it was such a wash with Regli. He speaks pretty well and has a lot of charisma, and is also just a super cool dude. Loves old movies about AI and has an AI "movie of the week" recommendation, followed by an optional outside-of-class meeting with him and other students to talk about the movies. He's also just genuinely super interested in AI and that's clear to everyone. He was an AI advisor at the WHITE HOUSE??? Super neat guy. But taking a class under his administration was kind of atrocious. He was horrible at answering questions in class, and often would just ask a different question in response to get you to "think", when just giving the actual answer would be much more helpful. The projects were not described well and often were heavily revised after being released and information was not centralized at all. The first project was a humongous assignment where you solve the traveling salesman problem with seven different AI-based approaches, and it took an egregious amount of time while having open-ended instructions, which Regli said were for the purpose of "exploring". I like this idea, but when it's a big project that is graded, it's not the place for it. Another project had a bunch of starter code which was discovered to be fatally buggy AFTER the project was released, so it was impossible to do the project as written, or really at all. Rather than scrapping the project or fixing the starter code, which would be acceptable responses, Regli decided to KEEP IT and just have students "try it" and then try to debug it and come up with theories on why it didn't work. This was well outside the scope of the project and the entire reason the starter code was given in the first place. He has this complex where he can't admit that he's wrong and it really messes with the structure of the class. The exams were all multiple choice, which sounds nice, but he would ask these ridiculously open ended questions on the exams when the answers were multiple choice. Even after being confronted about this, he said it was intentional, again to "make you really think", and even straight out said that there wasn't just one right answer, but rather one "best" answer. For multiple choice questions that are all or nothing, not even any partial credit, this was not acceptable. TL;DR: Regli is a really awesome person, but should not be administering classes. With his inability to admit his own faults, combined with his incessant need to confuse students under the guise of "making you really think about the material" (even on exams and projects), the class really sucks with him. With that being said, I still think he's better than Zhou, and it was not that hard of a class. Just really frustrating.
William Regli CMSC421 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 11/08/2024	He’s a cool guy and pretty knowledgeable but he’s quite Incompetent when it comes to assignments. There are only 6 assignments, 2 or 3 of which are multiple choice gradescope assignments. And yet for every single programming assignment there’s always some big change in instructions and/or requirements halfway through that makes us redo things causing an extension to be granted. For every single programming assignment thus far there’s been an extension. The TA’s also generally seem to have no idea what’s going on with the projects so you’re just all on your own. How the projects are this poorly made is beyond me considering the entirety of the course material is pirated from UC Berkeley and a few projects are based on theirs too. Again Regli is a really nice guy and pretty reasonable when it comes to deadlines extensions for things and if you’re really interested in the subject there’s genuinely few better people here than him to teach you about it due to his background. But the projects, despite how few of them there are, make this class very annoying
William Regli CMSC421 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/04/2024	Cool professor. The lectures and the notes are good and teach the concepts very well, and the exams are open note. Most of the pressure is on the projects. I'm giving this guy a horrible rating because the projects were just that bad, and the TAs were annoying. The programming assignments are not only worthless, a waste of time, and take way longer than they should, but they are also open-ended in all the wrong ways. I don't think he's disrespectful, but just a little bit autistic. I feel compelled to write this because there was just a fiasco where they changed an easy planning assignment multiple times due to a bug in the given library code, resulting in part of the project being changed from 'propositional planning' to 'software development bug-hunting', which was of course stupid and a waste of time. There was also a step in that assignment which was to modify the library for yourself in order to inject the desired behavior into the library, with no additional instructions beyond that. Why am I being tasked with software development in an AI class? AM's words from 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' sums up how I feel about these programming assignments in general. They're not hard, but have far too high a proportion of time invested in busywork and unrelated tasks such as making 3000 graphs in Matplotlib than actually learning the concepts.
William Regli CMSC421 Anonymous 05/16/2022	Professor Regli is a very considerate professor as he has been both lenient with grades and deadlines. His projects can be a little challenging (and the first one was a little too open ended - but by fault of one of the TAs), but they are fair and teach you a lot more about the concepts in AI than just the slides alone. For his exams, while they are a little more on the challenging side, they have generous curves (as an 82% on one exam translated to an A). As far as workload goes, it should be pretty manageable since there are 3 programming assignments and then 3 (much smaller) homework assignments throughout the whole semester. He recommends that you read the textbook and do practice problems, but this is mostly supplementary imo (and probably not worth the extra effort). I disagree with the comment about him being disrespectful as he has always been eager to help and connect with me whenever I've reached out to him during/after class. My only complaints about Regli are that it can be a little hard to follow along with him during the lectures because he goes over a lot of content in small amount of time, without pausing to do practice problems or repeating the content, which makes it hard to retain the information. Overall, I'd recommend Regli as he does care about the content and you having practical takeaways from CMSC421.
William Regli CMSC421 Anonymous 04/06/2022	Regli started out seeming like an accomplished and interesting professor, but as the semester went on that facade faded. He is one of the most disrespectful professors I have ever had. The first programming assignment he gave us had 3 conflicting sets of instructions, took the longest of any cs project I've ever taken (for some people ~40+ hours), and was detrimentally open ended, which is something I normally appreciate. His exam questions are extremely vague and have no clear answer. You can know your stuff and still fail the exam because you have no idea what the questions are asking. Overall this has been the least organized and most condescending class I have ever taken. Regli sees himself as above the students and above the class. He has not dealt with the material in 30 year and when pressed on an answer will just try to make you look stupid. Take this class if you have to, it won't be the end of the world, but you will probably hate him and the class.

William Regli
CMSC421

Expecting a B
Anonymous
12/19/2024

Decent professor and nice guy. The midterms were fair and the lectures were good. However, he completely delegated the job of designing projects and quizzes to the TAs, many of whom were quite frankly kind of incompetent at their job. As a result, prof. Regli usually couldn't answer questions about his own homework assignments because he was not the one creating them.

William Regli
CMSC421

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
12/13/2024

Awful teacher, has no idea what hes doing, terrible lesson plan. Do not take!

William Regli
CMSC421

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/12/2024

Nice person overall. Projects are very doable and relevant. You get a cheat sheet on exams which honestly don't help too much most of the time. Homework are fine but not exactly easy. Slides are bloated and too much content is crammed into the slides. Honestly, there were interesting topics but the class structures makes it boring. Overall, class is boring but not too hard. Projects (especially this first one) will take some time but otherwise it is generally a low time commitment course. Regli is a good person and is passionate and knowledgeable.

William Regli
CMSC421

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/12/2024

The concepts in this class definitely have the potential to be cool and engaging, but the way he teaches is quite disorganized and detailed in the wrong places. You learn a bunch of vocab words in every lecture that gets mentioned once and never reiterated, but he keeps moving forward so if you don't remember one word you're screwed. Even if you read the textbook, the terminology it uses is sometimes different than the terminology he uses in class. He also moves really fast and all his slides have a lot of words, so it feels impossible to take notes and if you get lost, you're not going to pick up anything for the rest of the class. He also frequently makes mistakes in his lectures or slides and has to double back on himself during class which makes knowing what is the "correct" information rather difficult. As for the assignments, they take a long time, and he lied about having only 6 assignments (we had 7). The instructions for almost every assignment were constantly changed, even up to a few days before the due date. There's almost always some type of unforeseen issue with it that several people have to address before it gets announced to the rest of the class. The exams are multiple choice which takes some stress off, but the difficulty really isn't any better, especially when you see that one question is worth 9% of your whole exam grade. The one exam on logic is literally just 250 + genuine logic. If you have your cheat sheet of definitions you don't have to go to class to get a good score if your logical reasoning abilities are strong. On the other hand, if they're not but you studied a lot, you might not do so well. The exams themselves often contain a few poorly worded questions that leave it up for interpretation, and when you ask for clarification from the TAs, they also interpret it differently than how he intended and you get the question wrong. The exams could be better structured, but at least there's a curve on it. Two stars just because there's a curve, the textbook he recommends is well written/easy to understand, and these two together + self studying make this class passable.

William Regli
CMSC421

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/10/2024

Guy below me is spot on, Regli is a super cool guy and genuinely knows what he's talking about. He's been in this space for decades and is very clearly knowledgeable. This class (atleast this semester) suffered alot from projects. Hw2 (project2) was really long, but I don't think it was awful. Some of the other ones were created with very little detail and lots of revising as the due date came closer. You literally would not be able to progress on most projects without searching through Piazza for clarifications, etc.

William Regli
CMSC421

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
12/08/2024

This class has a lot of potential to be really cool and really well done, but it was such a wash with Regli. He speaks pretty well and has a lot of charisma, and is also just a super cool dude. Loves old movies about AI and has an AI "movie of the week" recommendation, followed by an optional outside-of-class meeting with him and other students to talk about the movies. He's also just genuinely super interested in AI and that's clear to everyone. He was an AI advisor at the WHITE HOUSE??? Super neat guy. But taking a class under his administration was kind of atrocious. He was horrible at answering questions in class, and often would just ask a different question in response to get you to "think", when just giving the actual answer would be much more helpful. The projects were not described well and often were heavily revised after being released and information was not centralized at all. The first project was a humongous assignment where you solve the traveling salesman problem with seven different AI-based approaches, and it took an egregious amount of time while having open-ended instructions, which Regli said were for the purpose of "exploring". I like this idea, but when it's a big project that is graded, it's not the place for it. Another project had a bunch of starter code which was discovered to be fatally buggy AFTER the project was released, so it was impossible to do the project as written, or really at all. Rather than scrapping the project or fixing the starter code, which would be acceptable responses, Regli decided to KEEP IT and just have students "try it" and then try to debug it and come up with theories on why it didn't work. This was well outside the scope of the project and the entire reason the starter code was given in the first place. He has this complex where he can't admit that he's wrong and it really messes with the structure of the class. The exams were all multiple choice, which sounds nice, but he would ask these ridiculously open ended questions on the exams when the answers were multiple choice. Even after being confronted about this, he said it was intentional, again to "make you really think", and even straight out said that there wasn't just one right answer, but rather one "best" answer. For multiple choice questions that are all or nothing, not even any partial credit, this was not acceptable. TL;DR: Regli is a really awesome person, but should not be administering classes. With his inability to admit his own faults, combined with his incessant need to confuse students under the guise of "making you really think about the material" (even on exams and projects), the class really sucks with him. With that being said, I still think he's better than Zhou, and it was not that hard of a class. Just really frustrating.

William Regli
CMSC421

Expecting a B+
Anonymous
11/08/2024

He’s a cool guy and pretty knowledgeable but he’s quite Incompetent when it comes to assignments. There are only 6 assignments, 2 or 3 of which are multiple choice gradescope assignments. And yet for every single programming assignment there’s always some big change in instructions and/or requirements halfway through that makes us redo things causing an extension to be granted. For every single programming assignment thus far there’s been an extension. The TA’s also generally seem to have no idea what’s going on with the projects so you’re just all on your own. How the projects are this poorly made is beyond me considering the entirety of the course material is pirated from UC Berkeley and a few projects are based on theirs too. Again Regli is a really nice guy and pretty reasonable when it comes to deadlines extensions for things and if you’re really interested in the subject there’s genuinely few better people here than him to teach you about it due to his background. But the projects, despite how few of them there are, make this class very annoying

William Regli
CMSC421

Expecting an A-
Anonymous
11/04/2024

Cool professor. The lectures and the notes are good and teach the concepts very well, and the exams are open note. Most of the pressure is on the projects. I'm giving this guy a horrible rating because the projects were just that bad, and the TAs were annoying. The programming assignments are not only worthless, a waste of time, and take way longer than they should, but they are also open-ended in all the wrong ways. I don't think he's disrespectful, but just a little bit autistic. I feel compelled to write this because there was just a fiasco where they changed an easy planning assignment multiple times due to a bug in the given library code, resulting in part of the project being changed from 'propositional planning' to 'software development bug-hunting', which was of course stupid and a waste of time. There was also a step in that assignment which was to modify the library for yourself in order to inject the desired behavior into the library, with no additional instructions beyond that. Why am I being tasked with software development in an AI class? AM's words from 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' sums up how I feel about these programming assignments in general. They're not hard, but have far too high a proportion of time invested in busywork and unrelated tasks such as making 3000 graphs in Matplotlib than actually learning the concepts.

William Regli
CMSC421

Anonymous
05/16/2022

Professor Regli is a very considerate professor as he has been both lenient with grades and deadlines. His projects can be a little challenging (and the first one was a little too open ended - but by fault of one of the TAs), but they are fair and teach you a lot more about the concepts in AI than just the slides alone. For his exams, while they are a little more on the challenging side, they have generous curves (as an 82% on one exam translated to an A). As far as workload goes, it should be pretty manageable since there are 3 programming assignments and then 3 (much smaller) homework assignments throughout the whole semester. He recommends that you read the textbook and do practice problems, but this is mostly supplementary imo (and probably not worth the extra effort). I disagree with the comment about him being disrespectful as he has always been eager to help and connect with me whenever I've reached out to him during/after class. My only complaints about Regli are that it can be a little hard to follow along with him during the lectures because he goes over a lot of content in small amount of time, without pausing to do practice problems or repeating the content, which makes it hard to retain the information. Overall, I'd recommend Regli as he does care about the content and you having practical takeaways from CMSC421.

William Regli
CMSC421

Anonymous
04/06/2022

Regli started out seeming like an accomplished and interesting professor, but as the semester went on that facade faded. He is one of the most disrespectful professors I have ever had. The first programming assignment he gave us had 3 conflicting sets of instructions, took the longest of any cs project I've ever taken (for some people ~40+ hours), and was detrimentally open ended, which is something I normally appreciate. His exam questions are extremely vague and have no clear answer. You can know your stuff and still fail the exam because you have no idea what the questions are asking. Overall this has been the least organized and most condescending class I have ever taken. Regli sees himself as above the students and above the class. He has not dealt with the material in 30 year and when pressed on an answer will just try to make you look stupid. Take this class if you have to, it won't be the end of the world, but you will probably hate him and the class.