- 201501-CMSC435-0101-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - James Purtilo - Instructor Report

201501-CMSC435-0101-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - James Purtilo - Instructor Report - (Instructor View) Spring 2015

University of Maryland Course Evaluation Spring 2015

Number of Students Enrolled: 43

Number of Evaluations Submitted: 26

Response Rate: 60.5%

Subject Details
DIVISION_SD	CMNS
DEPARTMENT	CMNS-Computer Science
INSTR_CT	1
TA_CT	0
TEACHING_ROLE	INSTRUCTOR

Report Comments

This report presents feedback received from students for the course 201501-CMSC435-0101-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING and for the Instructor James Purtilo in that course. Course means are provided as well as department, college, and college course-level means (e.g., all 200-level courses in a college). Means are calculated from all responses by all students in the unit (i.e., course section, department, college, course-level in a college) on that item and exclude N/A (not applicable) responses. A grade table is included on the next page.

Indication is provided below for the Large Lecture Group if there is one affiliated with this course section.

Semester: 201501
Course #: CMSC435
Section #: 0101
Course Name: 201501-CMSC435-0101-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Large Lecture Group: No Large Lecture Designation

Instructor: James Purtilo

Creation Date Thu, Jun 04, 2015

Question	Course	Department	College	Course Level
Question	Mean	Mean	Mean	Mean
The course was intellectually challenging.	3.19	3.37	3.35	3.37
I learned a lot from this course.	3.42	3.23	3.04	3.18
Overall	3.31	3.30	3.20	3.27

Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0.0%
Disagree	1	1	3.8%
Neutral	2	3	11.5%
Agree	3	12	46.2%
Strongly Agree	4	10	38.5%

Options	Score	Count	Percentage
General Education or CORE Requirement	0	0	0.0%
Major/Certificate/Minor/Program Requirement	1	21	80.8%
Elective	2	5	19.2%

Statistics	Value
Response Count	26
Mean	3.19
Standard Deviation	+/-0.80

Statistics	Value
Response Count	26
Mean	3.42
Standard Deviation	+/-0.86

Comment
Perhaps better budget time over the semester for the bigger project? Also try to make project guidelines a bit clearer for each project - if another professor/etc is involved maybe make the purpose of this course a bit clearer to them.
I appreciate the fact that this course is basically a job experience. This is one of the few courses offered at UMD that prepares students for the real world, in my opinion.
My only issue with this course is that it should be worth 4 credits. Consumed about 75% of my time this semester when I had 3 other classes. The workload is appropriate for the course, but not for the credits received. About Dr. Purtilo - I know he wants a detailed sign-off on all of his expectations here, but I'm not really interested in doing that right now. He did everything he promised to do and did it all well. The big thing about Purtilo is that he's the only professor I've had in the CS program that really cares. He cares deeply about the class, his students, the subject material, all of the above, and it really shows. I've never been more engaged in a course, and haven't learned this much in a single course since... ever. Whatever he gets paid isn't enough, he's out there killing himself over this class, especially with no TA.
The lectures can be a little boring. More engaging slides could go a long way
Good class!
I feel this class is very helpful in experiencing how an actual company approaches a problem. I do agree that there is not enough time in a semester to give this class justice as some more time time would have allowed us to focus on some important topics for a longer period of time. This class is also very useful for experiencing group work. It was definitely a good experience to work with a group for the whole semester and learn everyone's strengths and weaknesses and how to use them to make a good product. My one suggestion to make the class better in the future would be to make the slides available on the class webpage. Honestly, I went to every class, but it is hard to write everything down and take in everything just from being in class. I think the projects were fair and given at the right times. I thought the elevator project was good in preparing us for the final project. I would keep the elevator project for future years. Overall, I think this was a useful class. I think I may find it even more useful in future years.
VERY HELPFUL AND INFORMATIVE!!!!! Previous courses focus mainly on just writing code and sending it to the submit server. This course was more about getting an assignment, writing up a proposal, sending it to the client, and waiting for the greenlight before building. I think it's good to have this class to push people away from just throwing code at a test wall. I also like the Tuasday lecture and Thursday lab format, since this was a group-oriented course.
Awesome, one suggestion though: have scheduled quizzes in addition to pop quizzes. I never once looked at the textbook. Nor did anyone else in my group to the best of my knowledge.
I don't really like the current way that announcements are delivered to the class. While the information is available I feel like I have to trawl through a lot of text to find what I need to know. At first I thought this was by design, but from some of the comments Dr. Purtilo made is class it was not intended to be as opaque as I thought it was.
- Jim Purtilo is an incredible teacher. I love his teaching style and initially I was a bit annoyed at how strict he is about turning in stuff with the correct format (eg. filename), but I found it really helpful for myself to be so disciplined. - I'm really glad we had guest speakers tell us about the real world. - The elevator project definitely helped us get in shape for the real large group project. - The topics chosen for the project are really exciting too. I put in at least 50 hours (on my own) into the group project, but it was worth it when Professor Purtilo told us he was impressed at the walkthrough.
I like how he stressed day after day how important these engineer-business concepts are, no matter how obvious they seem. As a student who has gotten a little bit of the real world, Jim couldn't have been more correct about the tech industry. I have a feeling that what he taught me will translate very well to my work upon entering the career field.
I definitely picked up, learned, and experienced a bunch of things you don't get from the other cs courses. Learning how to work in a group and combine components is a challenge never really presented to us outside of this course.
Let students look at your slides outside of class. And change the webpage. Otherwise, great class.
The lectures would be a lot easier to follow if Dr. Purtilo spoke slower and stopped doing that thing he frequently does by trailing off, decreasing his volume, and mumbling towards the end of a sentence then quickly beginning the next one. That's just a minor annoyance. There was a lot of confusion among me and other students as to what was due when and it what form. For example, it was hard to find info on the webpage about submitting engineering logs. It's as if Dr. Purtilo said something about how to submit logs in class and if you missed it then you had to ask around or email him. It would have been easier if the information on assignments were in one easy to find location.
Just needs a better class dashboard with important links posted somewhere. Loved the course!
Overall, I did learn a lot from this course. I will say that I do not agree with some of the teaching methods. Nearly none of the assignments (reports and projects) were given concrete or even comprehensive descriptions. The professor explains that this is done by design to provide a "teaching point", but in reality it is nothing more than an inability to, or intentional refusal to communicate with the students effectively.
While there is definitely something to be said for giving loose requirements so that the students try to figure out on their own the best way to do something, this also has the cost of increasing the workload drastically and slowing down the group, since the members have to try to figure out and agree on what to do. This is especially true for the cost estimation exercise, since we did not realize that you expected something at the level of function point analysis, and the subsequent revision delayed our green light more than it needed to. The scrimmage assignment required considerable effort from each group member, and expecting us to work on the final project at the same time is unrealistic. While there was a lot of red on the status board, it overestimates our delay in getting started. Adding on to the loose requirements, while you said that a light-gapped data transfer tool had been done before when we spoke to you as a group before writing our proposal, I do not believe you gave us any pointers as to the specific implementation that inspired you to give this assignment in the first place until during the walkthrough. If a customer expected our application to have a better performance than that implementation, I would have expected that customer to show the programmer that implementation directly so that the programmers know what to beat. I feel like not showing us that implementation for pedagogical purposes was not necessarily helpful. In addition, although it may force students to pay attention and come to class, I would suggest putting the slides for each lecture online for students to look over. It prevents us from having to parrot what is on the slides onto our notes and instead lets us take notes on what you say that is not already on the slides. As for the website, I actually liked it for the most part. The only part I found annoying was the lack of links in the sidebar for the project timeline, peer evaluations, and project status, along with some other links. As a final thought, while this is a capstone course, it is still one of many courses. For this reason, when assigning things, it is important to take into consideration other classes students may also have. This means that any pedagogical benefit to an assignment must also be weighed against the increase in workload it creates. Also, as the last week of classes tends to be the most work-heavy and stressful part of the semester, giving surprise assignments during this week is generally not well-received, no matter how much the students care about the class. I would like to stress that the points do not necessarily have to add up to 100.

Statistics	Value
Response Count	26
Mean	3.58
Standard Deviation	+/-0.70