William Regli | PlanetTerp

Information	Review
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
12/10/2024

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.