- 201508-CMSC435-0101-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - James Purtilo - Instructor Report

201508-CMSC435-0101-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING - James Purtilo - Instructor Report - (Instructor View) Fall 2015

University of Maryland Course Evaluation Fall 2015

Number of Students Enrolled: 49

Number of Evaluations Submitted: 42

Response Rate: 85.7%

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 201508-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: 201508
Course #: CMSC435
Section #: 0101
Course Name: 201508-CMSC435-0101-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Large Lecture Group: No Large Lecture Designation

Instructor: James Purtilo

Creation Date Tue, Jan 19, 2016

Question	Course	Department	College	Course Level
Question	Mean	Mean	Mean	Mean
The course was intellectually challenging.	2.88	3.41	3.34	3.34
I learned a lot from this course.	2.83	3.30	3.01	3.16
Overall	2.86	3.36	3.18	3.25

Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	2	4.8%
Disagree	1	4	9.5%
Neutral	2	4	9.5%
Agree	3	19	45.2%
Strongly Agree	4	13	31.0%

Options	Score	Count	Percentage
General Education or CORE Requirement	0	3	7.1%
Major/Certificate/Minor/Program Requirement	1	35	83.3%
Elective	2	4	9.5%

Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	1	2.4%
Disagree	1	1	2.4%
Neutral	2	4	9.5%
Agree	3	9	21.4%
Strongly Agree	4	27	64.3%

Statistics	Value
Response Count	42
Mean	2.88
Standard Deviation	+/-1.11

Statistics	Value
Response Count	42
Mean	2.83
Standard Deviation	+/-1.21

Comment
Of all the classes I've taken here at UMD this class has definitely proven the most useful. I've never worked on a class project of this scale before nor in a group with 15 members, so I learned a lot of group dynamics as well as the development process of a project. I really liked Dr Purtilo's teaching style because one class was dedicated to lecture while the other was more focused on in class discussion. The course material itself wasn't that hard to understand but still proved useful on the group project and in future endeavors. If I could change one thing about the class it would be that there should be a little more detail with personal assignments/what's due when on the dashboard.
Should have forced the deadlines for each assignments. Although for some this might be changed as in real world.
Teaching style was very engaging and material was of great quality, but there was so much material taught in class that it was hard to absorb everything. This semester the group projects were complex but rewarding and fun. As a CS student, its always great to get a chance to work with emerging technologies. I'm not sure what projects the previous semesters had, but it should be like this semester. Comments for Professor Purtilo: - Thank you for the amount of effort you put into this class and students, despite the unfortunate small effort a lot of us put into your class - Rather than just being a lecture course, you went above and beyond to get us to learn practical information, whether through invited guest speakers, or the StrengthFinder test. So again, thank you. - Normally more work is not what students want but for this class its warranted. I speak specifically about the quizzes. With so much material, only having 3 quizzes to test our knowledge isnt enough, especially when those 3 quizzes equate to 11% of the final grade. Perhaps add in more quizzes but make them worth less of a percentage.
This class had many problems. The first problem was hiding assignments on a page where all text looks alike. It seemed as if I paid money to be repeatedly fooled into missing assignments. There is a clear reason why ELMS is used for every other course in the University, it provides updates and is easy to read. Oh no! Something helping the students how terrible! Goly! Some students take many courses and a little help from the teachers would be nice. In addition, the assignments were so vague I had no clue what you wanted. Lastly, much more thought needs to put in for the team projects it was a painful experience.
One thing I did not like about the class was the quiz grading. I'm not sure how to make it better, but we never received our quizzes back, and I don't know what I only earned 25% on one quiz and 50% on another. I think you should do something different so that the average quiz grade isn't below 50% as well. I'm not sure how they should change, but I think the format needs some revision.
I thought the book policy was fine. I thought the StrengthsFinder portion had some issue - mainly that we were in groups before they began talking about it. (And we never really applied it in my team). I do think that certain concepts of Software Engineering should be introduced earlier in the major, because they are very important - I also think that the extended year long 435 would be beneficial. Overall, I enjoyed the class, and I think I learned a lot. One of my friends, when complaining about group CS programs in other courses, thought that 435 should be a pre-req for any CS course that includes a group assignment - I thought it was an interesting idea. (Because he said that he did not have time in other classes to teach people how to work in teams).
I thought the requirement to use SVN was too restrictive. It is fairly clear that most people prefer git, so perhaps setting up a private gitlab on one of the VM's would be an option, and you can still manage and see the commit churn. I thought course content was good, although sometimes you rushed through slides and I couldn't write their contents down, so I felt like I missed out there. I know you said you don't publish slides because otherwise students would not come to class, and I agree with that. However, it just bugs me that there were some slides that I just completely missed because you were rushing through them. Perhaps there is some solution for this problem. Finally, I think you should make quality examples of what you are looking for, particularly in terms of the proposal, more readily available to students. After some prodding you told us where we could find past proposals, but we had little idea if they were actually good quality. I think if you release a few quality proposals students will have an easier time learning how to properly write their own proposal, and thus have more time for the project.
He gives warnings in the beginning of the course, but these don't help as much as actually information. Instead of going over the slide show of warning he should go over a slide show of how the course is graded and structured and past projects students completed. The slide show of the failures in past projects definitely motivated groups to begin work early, this was helpful. During the early projects the grading was very unfair, I was given no points because we did not fill out a cover sheet for the very first project and a very low score on the second project because he did not have java properly installed on his computer. This would be reasonable if he gave us some sort of warning specifying he did not plan on even attempting to install java or ensure it was installed properly. Discussing with other students in the class I found this was not only me.
Software Engineering is a really interesting course and when taking it with Purtilo, you get what you put in. He does not really teach you anything technical, but rather general concepts about software engineering and its principles. I wish that he didn't have quizzes based on the lecture material because I always saw that as a supplement, but never as a main focus. I spent CONSIDERABLE time outside of class (on four separate occasions, 10+ hours a day) working on the project and I am hoping that my grade reflects such, although I'm not sure that it will.
- Course materials were extremely vague and unavailable. There were no lecture material / slides shared with student for later study/reference. Students had to take notes in the class, however the teacher browsed the slides so fast -one after another- that there was not enough time for a student (with average typing speed) to take useful notes. In response to this issue, the instructor suggested to stop by at his office every time to review the materials again. However, for a student who has other courses in his/her plate or works full time, it is not possible to spend twice as much time for each session of class, just to be able to have something written for later study. - The instructor's way of verbal communication was very poor and unclear. He spoke very fast and used a lot of American idioms/expressions that made it so hard for an international student (like myself) to understand what he was talking about, or what point he was trying to make. - The instructor's answers to students' questions about the class projects, were sometimes vague. A good amount of students' time went for guessing or interpreting what he meant about a particular question. - Grading method was extremely unfair: 1- Part of a student grade was determined by his/her peers in a class project and based on their opinions and sometimes their biases. For example, in a team consists of 16 people, if two students could not meet in weekly project meetings due to conflicting schedules, they would grade their peer very low, just because they had never gotten a chance to work with each other in person. 2- Some of the students lost points just for missing the peer evaluation deadline which was set on 5pm on Fridays. This didn't have anything to do with the knowledge competence and for those who work full time it is very likely to miss it because of being at work at that time. 3- There was grading points set for students to share their resume with the instructor. Not everybody is comfortable with sharing their wok background with others, and I think it should not have been mandatory. 4- There were some grading points listed as 'Maloney Baloney' which didn't have anything to do with the students academic knowledge. 5- Class quizzes were conducted in the beginning of the class and those who were stuck in traffic or was late for a few minutes, would lose the time and therefore, the score. Unfortunately, after passing two-thirds of the semester, I decided to drop the course because of extreme dissatisfaction about the way the course was conducted. Sadly, I was not refunded for the amount I had paid for this course.
Lectures werent very engaging, and the ppts weren't available online so quizzes were difficult to study for. Team sizes were way too big which made it difficult for every single member to make a substantial contribution. There was a lot of freedom for us to do what we wanted with the project, but I wish we had more freedom to choose the nature of the project and implement it. That would've been way more fun and engaging, along with smaller team sizes of maybe 4-6 people.
I definitely think the teams should be smaller for the next course. A 16 person team is too large and too many people got away with doing absolutely no work at all. They claim they did, but they really didn't. I think a team of 10 would be better. Also, it was a bit frustrating not able to plan ahead of time because the professor was vague in what he would be grading us on. He encouraged us to ask him questions about the project by not giving too much, or any details about how to proceed with the project. I understand this, as a way to 'encourage' students to communicate with the 'customer', but even when we asked him questions, it seemed like the answers were vague and not organized in itself. I always felt like a lecture came a bit too late for the actual project. It would have been helpful to know some of the stuff we learned before the actual deliverables. I do appreciate Professor Purtilo encouraging us to see the bigger picture and how to handle working with people to really be 'software engineers' and not just programmers or developers. But I wish his directions were more clear and concise. I don't know if he was intentionally trying to be vague to show us how real customers would be like in the work force, but he must also realize that we are taking this class for a grade to graduate and ear n a degree. So, I would have appreciated some sort of rubric of some kind from the very beginning of class. I can deal with the vagueness of having the students learn on their own what they need to do, but we can't plan ahead towards success if we don't even know what success is in this class. The quizzes were also a bit unfair. I felt like they tested us on whether he happened to pay attention to one sentence he said in class, or what article he happened to put up the day before class, rather than what we were actually learning in class in a general sense.
There was really no structure to the course, the professor would pop up assignments randomly and they would be due at arbitrary times. The instructor gives students a speech that the class is to learn by doing but very little learning takes place. Its just a big project that people who had internships in the past do not take much out of. The lectures are not very informative, I do not think I have learned anything this entire semester. The quizzes come with arbitrary and opinionated material. He shows students evaluations of students from the past, my advice to any students (if he shows this evaluation, or if anyone asks me) is to drop this course, you may get a good grade, but it will not be graceful and it will not be worth it. There are many better classes to take. The professor also tries very hard to be hard on his students for no reason (there is no teaching involved with it as he will argue to you).
It is very difficult to discern what material needs to noted to future quizzes and exams and what is merely supplemental material the instructor found interesting.
Lots of content introduced in lecture that was our responsibility to use and implement into our projects. I feel far too much time was spent building up to the green-light proposals, leaving groups rushing to finish and not being able to take advantage of all the resources (like mentors) before knowing what we were doing.
Definitely learned a lot in this class, but I would have enjoyed it and read more into the stuff he talked about if I was only taking 435 and not another comp sci class too. Also, the main project for the class encompassed stuff that no one had worked with before and that really hurt my group in the end. Also, Purtilo thought that we had all this knowledge about things when we totally didn't so maybe he should refresh on that. The amount of outside work for this class is literally ridiculous. I wish the whole point of the final project wasn't to try to do all this stuff and then have Purtilo watch as we crash and burn. I understand wanting to make real things that haven't been made so much before, but the unknown is really stressful in the end.
We made our own goals along with the needed goals stated by the Professor
I love how this class teaches us to make a product, instead of just asking to do projects. If this class is one of the best in preparing us for actual work in the industry.
I think that having 16-person teams is a bit too big. You could argue that it's "by design," but I don't see how working with a 16-person team vs. a 10 or 12 person team would be any more of an learning experience; it's just more of a pain. Depending on which point we were at in the process, there sometimes wasn't enough work to go around. In other cases, it was easy for people to hide and not doing any work; people (at least at first) wouldn't really notice. Also, I wish that Professor Purtilo would have been more clear/direct regarding what we were expected to know for quizzes. It's one thing to have pop quizzes when you at least have a pretty specific idea of what you're going to be assessed on, even though you don't know when. In this case, we don't know the what or the when. I know that I personally took very good lecture notes, but to no avail. I feel that if we had a clearly idea of what to study for the quizzes, we'd get more out of the course, and we wouldn't be demotivated by pathetic quiz grades.
First teacher in computer science that ever actually seemed to care about how the students were doing in the course and helped introduce us to a large amount of potential employers. Best professor i've had at UMD.
This class broke the chain of following the rubrics in a good way. The teaching style meets the expectation of the course. If you were at a workforce, how would you act? What would you do? I think this course makes you answer that.
While I think this is a good course (good enough, in fact, that pretty much every student who wants to do anything with computers outside of academia should take it), I also do not think this is a one-semester course. The work we put into the initial activities and scrimmages plus the proposal are about 3/4 a semester of work, and the actual development of our product is at least another 1/2 a semester of effort. Furthermore, while many of us came in with prerequisite knowledge from our own professional experiences, anyone who has not had an internship or other technical-related job would have been coming into this course woefully under-equipped for what we had to do to succeed. I realize these are more issues with the curriculum of the major than with the class, but there they are. As for the class itself, there were a couple minor issues that sometimes made the class a bit more irritating than it necessarily needed to be. The quizzes were usually a bit unexpected, and given that the questions were on lecture material that never got posted or made available in any way outside of class, some questions were sometimes hard to have answers for, and the nature of them all being pop quizzes made studying nearly impossible. Also, while I see the point in the approach, intentionally not going over content until after it has been practiced in the project is a bit stress-inducing. Lastly, I got a bit of the impression that most of the actual value of the course came from additional interaction outside of class. While extra interactions are obviously a good thing, some students simply don't have the time to do that, and it feels as though we maybe got shortchanged a bit in that regard when not everything fit into the scheduled lecture times. While that probably sounds like a lot of gripes, those are really the only negatives I can think of. Overall, my impressions can be boiled down to the following: Good course, okay class (here referring to what we could actually get out of lectures), poorly fit into the overall structure of CMSC courses, great Capstone. Everyone who wants to work outside of academia should be required to take this, in some form or another.
1. Please be more transparent about grading. Right now (last day of the course) the max grade is just under 50. You've said things are going to end up fine, but it's more stressful than this course should be when we don't know specifically how our final grades are going to end up. It is not enough to say "everyone's grades are going to end up fine", as there are people on the lower end of the spectrum that are unsure if that applies to them as well. 2. I'm sure this is asked for frequently, but lecture slides would be beyond helpful. Your lecturing style is fine and the lectures aren't boring. Attendance has not changed to a statistically significant amount in any of my courses because of the offering of lecture slides, and I'm sure that the department (or other professors) have more thorough details on this. Sometimes you go through the slides too quickly and it's hard to get all the notes down. 3. Be clearer about requirements on assignments and where assignments should be submitted. 4. Mercurial instead of Subversion? 5. Longer Login session retention for evals.
Purtilo doesn't make the material he will put on quizzes very clear. However, I'm still not sure how much my grade will depend on that number. I'm not quite sure how my grade in the class will look even now at the end of the semester. Despite the previous comments, I view this class as one of the most important classes I've taken in college yet. If you put in the effort, you will learn so many important things from this class.
Purtilo is a fantastic teacher. Although this course is very challenging, the lessons learned in this class are invaluable towards your career and moving forward with computer science. The skills learned in this class are exactly what is missing from all other computer science classes. Also Purtilo has really good ideas on what to add to the computer science major in terms of courses, you should listen to him. He has some ideas about adding leadership courses and technical literacy courses to the major and I think these would be very helpful.

Question	Course	Department	College	Course Level
Question	Mean	Mean	Mean	Mean
The instructor treated students with respect.	3.43	3.32	3.36	3.38
The instructor was well-prepared for class.	3.57	3.31	3.31	3.27
Overall, this instructor was an effective teacher.	2.93	3.05	2.92	2.95
Overall	3.31	3.23	3.20	3.20