| Information | Review |
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Niki Vazou
CMSC330 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/10/2018 |
She can be a little difficult to understand at times, but it is nothing compared to other TAs and professors I've had in the past. She is very knowledgeable about the content covered in the course despite this semester being the first time she taught 330. Honestly, she is a fine lecturer and if for whatever reason you don't find it enjoyable, you can always watch the recorded lecturers from other professors or even go to their lecture instead. My biggest gripe with her lecture was not her, but the incredibly rude students who would often talk loudly with one another while she was talking! If I could give her any advice, it would be to lay down the law and tell those people outright to shut up. |
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Niki Vazou
CMSC330 Expecting a B Anonymous 04/11/2018 |
Enjoyable and always seems to be in a good mood. She is clearly so smart and her class is straight forward, co-taught with Gilray and an enjoyable lecture. No complaints! |
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Niki Vazou
CMSC498V Expecting a B Anonymous 01/05/2018 |
Avoid her if you want an A. She makes exams extremely hard - it won't be direct material from the notes. I got an A in CMSC 330 and thought this would be easy but the final basically dropped my grade from an A to a B. If you are taking her for a class with more than exam then I'd seriously reconsider. When it comes to projects, she isn't bad although she will have some tricky things that you need to figure out without much material. She's not the best teacher either. The way she explains things is a bit overcomplicated at times, and she focuses more on calling on people instead of simply explaining it. |
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Niki Vazou
Expecting an A- Anonymous 01/02/2018 |
Class/Teaching: Overall the class was interesting. But since there is so much to cover in a semester, and functional programming takes a while to get used to, its easy to get bogged down in the class. Niki's teaching is mediocre at best. Although she has decent notes, she usually rushes through them and focuses more on calling on random students without considering the difficulty of her questions. On the first class she collects name tags of everyone, and randomly shuffles through them and calls on people on each class. Sometimes she asks some difficult programming questions that she expects students to suddenly figure out within a short time of covering a section of her notes and to explain it to her. As a result most of the students ended up skipping class out of fear. Her voice is hard to hear, and her accent can make the lecture hard to follow. For a CS elective class, I found it harder than what I expected it to be. Projects: Projects are called homeworks in her class. There are 4, and most of them can be challenging. Usually, she has functions that you need to complete. The first homework is easy but she is savage with her grading on projects. If you get simple base cases wrong you can lose up to 20 points on those functions. Some of the functions require a concept that was barely taught in class and can kill hours. Otherwise the project would only take about 2 hours to finish. Expect at least 2 difficult functions to figure out per project. There is a final project that you can work on with a partner. The final project won't be easy either, especially since the Haskell ecosystem barely has anything. Except to spend hours debugging weird things. Libraries don't make this any easier, and can make or break your project. Most of them take hours to install and get working properly and have terrible/missing documentation (Avoid GUI libraries.. use web app libraries instead or make your own library for the final project). Extra Help: The TA did a good job helping students and explaining things after class. But Niki doesn't seem to give much help to students outside class. Piazza for the class was a complete waste. Most questions go unanswered, and only the TA answers them if you're lucky. Difficulty: The class is not easy. If you want an A you need to work really hard or should learn haskell really in depth prior to taking this class. Most people end up with high Bs and As on the homeworks, that is unless you miss base cases and end up with Cs. The last two homeworks take a lot of time, because she tests functions that she barely even taught in class or may not even be in the notes upon first glance. The final exam was brutal. It starts off with some multiple choice but most of it is fill in the blanks or complete functions. The second half of her exam is about figuring things out and thinking outside the box, and involve problems you have not seen before. Think back to CMSC 330's ocaml and combine that with difficult algorithm questions you get on coding interviews-- except this is in haskell and she formats the questions in a way that she wants you to quickly solve using a specific pattern. If you want to do well in this class, I suggest you visit the haskell reddit and use their suggested books because her notes alone may not give you the intuition to ace her projects and final exam. Grading: Questions (10%). In class participation and responses on questions. Homeworks (20%). Four comprehension, programming assignments. Tournament (10%). One tournament on a strategy game (like tic-tac-toe). Project (30%). Haskell implementation of a (semi-) realistic project. Final (30%). In class final. |