Milijana Surbatovich

This professor has taught: CMSC838L

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Milijana Surbatovich CMSC430 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2025	Milijana is a pretty solid professor, but not a super engaging lecturer. Like other reviews mention, the class is basically just David Van Horn's curriculum, so professor doesn't matter much. I stopped going to lecture about a month into the semester and just read the very good notes on the course website. Also shoutout Pierce for answering literally every Piazza question. This class will test your programming skills. Many of the assignments took me hours of debugging to figure out, especially the ones that were heavy on assembly (sidebar, the CMSC4xx info website says this class uses Ocaml, but it instead uses Racket which I found way more annoying). If you had a hard time with assembly in 216 or Ocaml in 330, this class will be a challenge. The entire curriculum is basically writing and rewriting a compiler for Racket itself, with progressively more and more features. I thought all the projects were really engaging, so I didn't mind how hard they were. The two midterms and final project, despite being take home, are pretty crazy jumps in difficulty though. Implementing runtime exception handling in assembly was a truly painful experience.
Milijana Surbatovich CMSC838N Expecting an A Anonymous 05/17/2025	super fun class :) the class was structured where the first ~2/3rds was mostly lecture based and the last 1/3 was seminar style where students presented papers of their own choice, with a midterm in between. the material covered in lecture was very interesting and different, and was not something I had previously been exposed to. we had lecture quizzes which were very helpful in reviewing material (also quite easy as they were all multiple choice). the midterm was a bit long, but milijana made up for it by giving us extra time after the class had ended (by about 45 minutes) as well as letting people who didn't finish questions verbally explain answers for partial credit (and was extremely lenient with grading!) all in all super super fun and highly recommend taking the class
Milijana Surbatovich CMSC430 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/15/2025	I only went to two lectures which were quite boring. There are only take home exams where you get 24 hours to do mini projects. Exam 1 was super easy compared to exam 2. I wouldn't say exam 2 was difficult, it was just that the content on it required me to relearn everything that was taught (not very fun), but was doable. The projects are what made me do 3 instead of 5 stars. They require a lot of time, and most of it is just understanding what exactly they want you to do. The class as co-taught by Anwar, so even if you aren't a fan of one professor you could go to the other. Also we have online quizzes that randomly appear on gradescope so keep a look out for those :)
Milijana Surbatovich CMSC430 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/15/2025	Amazing professor and really great class to take. She was teaching for the first time and using David van Horn's curriculum, which is generally quite good. Projects are fair and the head TA, Pierce, is ruthless in a good way. There are secret tests, thankfully, so we actually have to think about our code, proofread, and test. You are writing a compiler to x86-64 assembly, which means you don't really get helpful error messages, especially in the second half of the semester. So you have to walk through everything to make sure it's good which really builds patience and computer science skills. I was screwed over by the second midterm so badly I might not end up with an A despite getting perfect scores on everything up to that point. I trust that they'll refine the assignments so that the difficulty is not so jarring. But by itself the exams are very fair. There are 2, 24-hour (midterm) exams and 3-week final exam. I personally think the first 2 weeks were too easy but this might have been based on David van Horn's curriculum and she still had very effective lectures for people who needed the Assembly review. She goes over Racket (which she shouldn't for a 400-level class, you should just pick up on it from writing code and from the notes) and has an entire project dedicated to writing Racket. Hopefully this is refined but the second half being insanely hard really makes up for the first half being insanely easy and it cancels out.
Milijana Surbatovich CMSC430 Expecting an A+ super_cool_student 05/13/2025	This course is literally the continuation to CMSC330 but more. Uses functional language (but in Racket not Ocaml) to develop compiler and interpreter. Professor is a very smart, enthusiastic, and kind professor. Notes are posted online and the lectures are recorded, which is very helpful for review. Projects can be tedious but are manageable if you dont procrastinate. Exams are TAKE HOME and 24-hour! This is very different but I liked it tbh. Note: the 1st exam is easy but the 2nd is much more difficult. I spent like a straight 12 hours working on it to pass all cases. They say that you should be able to finish in a normal class period but that's not even remotely true if you want a good grade lol.
Milijana Surbatovich CMSC838L Anonymous 05/17/2024	Super interesting area of research. Reading and summarizing two papers for every class is a lot of work, and the midterm was definitely challenging, but overall I learned a lot.