Alejandro Flores Velazco

This professor has taught: CMSC420

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Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting a B Anonymous 08/30/2021	Class was unorganized this summer, but it was his first time ever teaching a class. Alejandro was a good TA when he TA'ed for Nelson and I am sure he will become a great instructor some day. He genuinely cares about teaching his students the most relevant concepts and pushing out some outdated material. He's a definitely was really accommodating to anyone who had an internship or job over the summer.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting a B Anonymous 08/12/2021	Unorganized, unprofessional, hectic. Held TAs to no standards. Lied about what programming language we would be using. Stay away take and take this class with Mount.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting an A- Anonymous 07/30/2021	The material was as difficult as it should have been, and there were many resources given that would help understand it. The programming and homework assignments were fair and completable, some required deep thinking and the TA's were often able to help. The class was however rather disorganized, but it is fair to mention I took his class in his first semester of teaching and I believe this is something that will improve as he teaches more. He had a good plan (at the end of the course, it was easy to see how each topic contributed to the next topic), but I think his inexperience and the fast pace of summer courses made it more difficult to follow in real time than it could have been. Overall I give him 4/5 because despite the disorganization, I came out knowing a good amount about each data structure, the assignments were fair, and he was really receptive to input from students.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 07/30/2021	Great lecturer, keeps students engaged and tries to always ensure their understanding. I have mixed feelings about the SPOJ assignments. I appreciated being introduced to the platform, and I think it emphasized the difference in speed from using one approach versus another which I normally would not be able to detect. However the prompts are sometimes very vague, and the edge cases can be very hard to guess, so I spent more time guessing obscure edge cases and less time on understanding the course material than I would have liked. If given more adequate time I think Alejandro could have designed assignments more tailored to the data structures we were studying.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 07/30/2021	Alejandro is incredibly approachable and helpful, he responds quickly to emails and piazza. He is knowledgeable and lectures well. Grading issues mentioned in other comments are noticeable but most of the projects were easy or well telegraphed by the course material so it sort of works to the effect that you have a higher grade overall by the end except for the midterm and maybe the last project or 2. Even then, noticing that most students were unable to get project 6 in the summer session, he altered the grading scale to be more fair, so like I said, he responds to students' issues quickly and helpfully.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 07/28/2021	This class was a bit of a learning curve ngl, but it provided invaluable skills and concepts that can be applied in the industry or at least coding interviews. Alejandro is one the most understanding instructors at UMD and is very approachable. I say that you should take this class before you graduate, preferably with him.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 07/28/2021	Alejandro is very new. I took the first class he taught on his own and his lectures could definitely have been smoother and the ideas presented in a more coherent order. I got the impression that some of the lecture material was presented in the order he remembered it. He would be 30min into the lecture, realize something didn't make sense, and then realize it's because he forgot to explain something earlier in the lecture. He is quite caring and often worried that his English was difficult to understand though I never had trouble understanding him, and think that his lectures will naturally become better organized the more he teaches this class. I really enjoyed the projects. Alejandro's projects are different to Mount's and his grading requires that solutions are both correct and efficient. Moreover, the projects aren't just mechanical implementation of each data structure. Often they are challenge questions where most of the work is in thinking up a solution, rather than implementation. They make you intuit when different data structures can be used in real world problems and were very beneficial to my programming.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 07/28/2021	I felt Alejandro was a very good professor. Summer classes can often be chaotic as they are fast paced and have very few TAs. But Alejandro gave good lectures and had very reasonable expectations on the exams. One or two of the seven projects were pretty difficult, but I felt they made me a much better programmer. Some students really did not like that C++ usage was pretty much mandatory in this course (generally this course is taught in Java) but to be honest, there was very little you have to actually teach yourself that you won't already know from learning C in 216. Also, I felt the TAs could have been a lot better, but that is mostly on the department, and not Alejandro's fault. Overall Alejandro is very nice and the class was not terribly difficult. 30% of the class got As, 45% got Bs. That's about as good as it gets for upper level CMSC courses. And the things you learn are very useful, I watched some FAANG interview question videos recently and many of the questions can be solved with data structures you will learn in this course.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting a B Anonymous 07/28/2021	Alejandro is a nice guy and very accommodating about due dates with projects. However I felt he could've been more organized with regards to the class, he didn't have a syllabus until the end of the first week and decided at the last minute to replace a homework assignment with a project and scrambled to find a project. Projects were done using SPOJ and they were really annoying because you ran them on the website and a huge chunk of your grade depended on them passing under a certain time. Theoretically you could use whatever language you wanted but youre better off using C++ for speed. The TA's for the most part were not that helpful and sometimes wouldn't show up to office hours During lectures he's very dry but more helpful one on one, also Professor Mount's notes are the GOAT. He's very strict about formatting for exams which I understand wanting to reduce grading time but it's annoying because not all of us can print or edit PDF's.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 07/28/2021	The first semester teaching any course so obviously, there was a learning curve on both sides. The midterm was way too difficult with hard-to-follow and unspecific directions and unfair grading with a 63% class average. Luckily the final exam was a lot fairer with a way higher average score. He was lenient with due dates and grading for the final/regrades. There was a 1% curve in the class with about 75% of the class getting Bs and up.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting an A Anonymous 07/28/2021	I liked this class, in particular giving the coding assignments as SPOJ problems was a good decision, it helped me to get started with competitive coding. Also, it would have been better if he used some other platform like Leetcode/Geeks for Geeks. But overall, given that Alejandro was teaching for the first time, it was a nice experience.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 07/27/2021	Really nice and respectful lecturer. Empathetic and lenient for sure, but there are areas for improvement. I think this is a great example of a lecturer giving resources for their students to learn, and not so much ramming the information into their head. The exams were extremely fair (take this from someone who did poorly on the first and well on the second), it's truly just a matter of time investment (in my opinion). There might be controversy surrounding the SPOJ approach (basically medium to hard leetcode but without the thousands of accessible solutions), but it's made me a better programmer. Moreover, this has forced me to learn C++ (I did the entire class in C++, not sure why the other comment mentions exclusively C), and since there is no (to my knowledge) class that teaches C++ at this university, I really appreciated this. If you're looking for an easy A in 420, probably not the professor for you. If you're looking for an enthusiastic, young, relatable lecturer who will make sure you get what you should want out of an upper level programming class, just sign up. Also, the project that the most students struggled with, Alejandro made it so that you practically are given a 70% for turning literally anything in, and a perfect score would come from getting AC (accepted) on SPOJ. The benevolence is real and appreciated. Just for reputability, I'm a senior and this was my last class for graduation. Not my best performance, but probably my favorite and most impactful class (seriously, I may never go back to python ;) ).
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 07/27/2021	He was pretty chill and provided pretty good lecture sources. He's really helpful for answering questions because he's good at explaining concepts and diagramming them, though his lectures can get a little long-winded which is why I usually watched David Mount's lectures and asked him questions about those concepts afterwards. His exams are quite fair and he doesn't test you on anything you never learned before. So the pros? - Chill and friendly - Listens to student concerns (not guaranteed to comply with them but he listens LOL) - Doesn't test you on what you didn't learn - Good at answering questions Cons: - Lectures can be long-winded if not directed by student questions - Grading for coding assignments has had some debate (some coding assignments had incorrect specifications but Alejandro tried his best to help out) Not the best but also not the worst, though it's his first time teaching and I would say he's done more good than harm so I'll give him a 4/5 stars. _________________________________________________ A lot of the struggles in this course could have been greatly alleviated if we had more effective TAs. Personally, the TAs were really helpful for answering questions that they knew answers to but most of the time they weren't caught up with the lectures on what we learned (it's not necessarily a bad thing but it made office hours really useless at times). However this is only a side-note and will not affect Alejandro's rating since it's not his fault the TAs did not learn the same thing that he was teaching.
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Expecting an A- Anonymous 07/27/2021	He really cares about your learning and wants you to succeed. Yes, due to SPOJ, the course is a little hectic, but you will grow a lot as a programmer as a result. The TAs were not very helpful, especially at debugging C. Sometimes when I went to office hours the TA hadn’t even looked at the project yet and was not supplied with project solutions. Hopefully in the future, he can be a little more stringent on the slacking TAs (though not all were bad.)
Alejandro Flores Velazco CMSC420 Anonymous 07/20/2021	He does seem to be lenient at times with due dates and is somewhat of a good lecturer regarding material for a new teacher, but there are complaints about his grading policies during this summer term. Using competitive programming sites like SPOJ and then basing 70% of the grade based on whether it gets accepted or not (you’d most likely want to use C for its speed despite being told to use any language since a lot of the time others will still fail even if correct due to the execution time) as well as grading the midterm with a fairly low average resulting from a rubric that assumes information that wasn’t clear in a few questions leaves a lot to be desired. And the TAs could’ve been more helpful too.