| Grade A | Grade B | Grade C | Grade D | Grade F | Grade PS | Grade W |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16 | 16 | 17 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Question | Course | Department (CMNS-Computer Science) | College (CMNS) | Course Level (CMNS_400) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Mean | Mean | Mean | |
| The course was intellectually challenging. | 3.50 | 3.35 | 3.29 | 3.41 |
| I learned a lot from this course. | 3.50 | 3.15 | 3.13 | 3.21 |
| Overall | 3.50 | 3.25 | 3.21 | 3.31 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Neutral | 2 | 3 | 8.3% |
| Agree | 3 | 12 | 33.3% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 21 | 58.3% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 36 |
| Mean | 3.50 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-0.65 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Neutral | 2 | 2 | 5.6% |
| Agree | 3 | 14 | 38.9% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 20 | 55.6% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 36 |
| Mean | 3.50 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-0.61 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| General Education or CORE Requirement | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Major/Certificate/Minor/Program Requirement | 1 | 36 | 100.0% |
| Elective | 2 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Comment |
|---|
| First I just want to clarify, I said the workload was "appropriate" because I think it makes sense in context with the class idea and with the project, but I definitely worked more in this class than I ever have for any other computer science course. Honestly, this is probably the best computer science class I have taken at this university. There were a lot of stress moments, a few curveball moments, some times when I thought "this is way too much work for me to handle", and some points when I thought "how am I even going to get all this work done?", but I feel like I learned so much in one semester. Each failure I had wasn't exactly a failure because I learned about software engineering and development from it. Each success made me feel more confident in my ability to develop a project. At the beginning I thought it was a little unfair that Purtilo didn't announce upcoming homeworks in class because I missed at least one from him not mentioning it, but you could argue that just helps people realize they need to be more involved and not hand-held all the time. I also really appreciated how available the professor was at all times. He responded to emails almost instantaneously, which was very helpful for the project and for any personal life questions I had. I think at this point if I had to recommend any one 400 CMSC class to my friends, it would definitely be this one. Thank you so much for a great semester! I've really appreciated this course. |
| Great teaching style. Definitely learned a lot! |
| Forgive the wall of text, but I have a lot to say. At the beginning of the course, when you said you thought this class gave 412 a run for its money on workload? I was skeptical. I took that deathmarch, and even managed to enjoy it. But the last few weeks of devoting every waking moment that I wasn't in class to this project certainly were on par. 412 was still more consistently a slog, but 435 was on the same level. But it was great. I don't know how you matched up half-teams after the elevator project into full teams, but it turned out really well. My large-group teammates really complemented our workstyle, and things got better after that (intentionally?) disastrous exercise. Yeah, I'm onto you. I know you intended the elevators to fail. I hope. On the whole, I really appreciated the experimental approach to pedagogy. I really appreciated how much time and effort you put into the course, and the degree of thought that went into project organization. Sometimes lectures were a little wandering, but that's ok. Actually, if I had a big criticism, it was probably that the lectures could have been more "concrete". We talked "about" agile processes, but I think we might have benefitted a lot from a "this is how you run a scrum session", or "this is how you do xxyy" a bit more of the time. I'm glad to have come through Purtillo's school of engineering. Keep on showing us how it's done. Oh, one other thing: grades. I'm (hopefully) graduating in 2 weeks. I have no idea whatsoever what grade I'll get in this class. I don't know whether I'll have an A, or fail and have to redo my whole job search because I failed to graduate. I have difficulty relating how stressful that is. All the gradeserver tells me is that I'm sitting about the median. Which is like 40. It's hard to sleep at night with that hanging over me. |
| Purtilo really cares about his students and wants to prepare them for the real world outside of our academic bubble. |
| I thought the lectures, while interesting did not really provide help for the project which was our main grade and tended to provide information that was already known. |
| I wish the Professor would be more specific about what he wants, but it's not really his style. The benefit is a ton of freedom, the downside is you might not know what to do with that freedom to succeed. |
| Overall, there are a lot of valuable things about this class, particularly in the class project. The completion of this project forced me to develop skills in many aspects of software development that I otherwise don't have to deal with in courses with more isolated programming projects. The lecture material was overall pretty interesting, and Dr. Purtilo's lecture style was engaging. However, along the way, I feel that it was unnecessarily difficult to figure out exactly when and how we were supposed to complete assignments. Most other courses at UMD have a Piazza or ELMS page where there's an easy interface for finding a list of assignments or for searching for posts made by the instructor with specific information. Instead of using one of these platforms, or at least using a similar model, Dr. Purtilo posts to a blog on his website. Any time that any of us want to find a piece of information that he's posted, we have to search through his list of posts; by the end of the semester, this is quite a long list. For many of the smaller assignments, it's difficult to keep track of all of the due dates. For example, there was a pretty large set of assignments toward the beginning of the course that are each worth 1-3 percent of the course grade. Little to no reference was made to these assignments in class; consequently, a very large portion of the class forgot to do them. It would have been helpful if the website had an "Assignments" tab where there was a list of all assignments, their due dates, and a description of the expectations for that assignment. A course calendar might also have been helpful. I also think that all dashboard posts should have been sent to our emails, though based on the instructor's comments in class, this seems to be a suggestion that a lot of people have given him, and his response seems to be that we should write our own service to monitor the dashboard and report back to us. For what it's worth, I don't think this is an appropriate representation of how clients communicate with the companies serving them. I and many of my peers have had internships, and we all seem to agree that when the customer has a concern, we get an email about it. |
| Purtilo was the professor who had the greatest impact on me. Best Pedagogy NA. |
| Dr. Purtilo is a very talented instructor. It's a shame that the class is over, because I really feel like there is so much more that we could do to extend and enhance the product that we built. Would be nice if it could be some kind of 2-course sequence. |
| Teaching style was very fair, letting everyone know about what to expect way ahead of time. Forcing functions are great for inciting disinterested students who don't know each other to action. To see more than just a weeklong burst of activity at the end, consider moving deadlines up and eliminating "quiet" weeks where no deliverables are expected or due. Generally people coming in don't anticipate how much time they will need until they actually do the work. |
| My biggest issue with this course and it's structure is the high time commitment needed for each project. I understand that this is deliberate, due to the lack of specifications and the intricacies that come from such a loosely defined problem, the amount of time needed to truly gain what you are trying to teach is unreasonable at this stage of our collegiate career. I felt as if you were asking us to treat this assignment as a part time job to simulate our experiences in the professional world. But in the real world, I wouldn't have 4 other part time jobs which I have to spread my time between. Additionally, due to the timing of the semester, thanksgiving fell right around the time of the green-light proposal. As you made a point to tell us to not put too much time into working on the project before the proposal is approved, since if the specs changed it would be wasted time, that left our team in a tough place. Either we work through thanksgiving or sprint in the last week before the walk-through. As I had already made plans to spend thanksgiving with my family (equivalent to requesting time off for the holiday), I could not do any work during this time, while the rest of my group worked through the holiday. I appreciate what you are trying to teach, but I feel the structure of the class and the difficulty of the proposed projects prevent those lessons from being effective. |
| A single book or two not many resources. |
| I've never left a class being so unsure if I learned anything useful or not. It's really a course that I can only evaluate after 4 years in the field, so I guess for now I'll give Jim the benefit of the doubt. But seriously though someone needs to help him out with creating a reasonable website that isn't like trying to read a chapter from Grapes of Wrath. I still get headaches just thinking about the endless wall of text that is his website. |
| Professor Purtilo mentioned he will read these so I'll address some of the things he asked for in class today: Book policy: I appreciate that we did not have to buy any books for this course, but I feel like the lecture material was sufficient to get the point of the course. Maybe my understanding is incorrect, but I feel like the real value of this course comes from the practice we get out of the projects. Yes, there is some content at the beginning so we know what to practice, but I think the lectures are sufficient for that information. I did not have such a rigorous software engineering experience in my internships and I am glad that I took 435 because it gave me that experience. At the start of this course, I felt that my internships were almost a waste of my time. I didn't learn much technically and I really didn't get the chance to participate in an engineering environment, so I felt very much behind the curve coming into this course. I did get to see what SE looks like, though, and I can tell that this course very closely models what I observed at my internships, and this time I got to take part. We got to work our way through the whole process on our own in a relatively low risk environment, which is perfect for allowing us to learn. On top of that, I was forced to learn new tools and technologies to use for our projects - I'll have to do the same thing when I start my career in the "real world" so it was good to, again, get to practice getting over that initial learning curve in a low risk environment (I say low-risk because our product didn't really work by the deadline but we still passed - in the real world, we get fired and/or the company loses money when our product can't meet the deadline). Overall, I think I see the value of this course and I'm sure I will look back fondly on the experience I gained from taking this course. |
| Enjoyed the class. Instructions were vague at times but that seems intentional. |
| I learned a lot in this class. I wish there had been more support for starting the semester-long project earlier. We were repeatedly told in class that we weren't pursuing this avenue, but since we weren't particularly excited about a particular project and didn't have our full group assigned yet there wasn't much we could do. We learned the hard way about many things, but I think the message stuck with us better. I learned a lot about leadership and the value of colleagues. I think I got some friends out of the class. Honestly, I think that's one of the benefits and points. They are people I can count on who care about me. I've never had a class like this before...where you take a project from beginning to end, design and negotiate what it's going to look like and do, block out the architecture yourself, code it, debug it, test it, measure your own success, present it, package it up as an installable unit with instructions. That was really empowering. |
| Question | Course | Department (CMNS-Computer Science) | College (CMNS) | Course Level (CMNS_400) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Mean | Mean | Mean | |
| The instructor treated students with respect. | 3.56 | 3.40 | 3.50 | 3.49 |
| The instructor was well-prepared for class. | 3.81 | 3.26 | 3.39 | 3.34 |
| Overall, this instructor was an effective teacher. | 3.39 | 2.92 | 3.10 | 3.06 |
| Overall | 3.58 | 3.19 | 3.33 | 3.30 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 1 | 2.8% |
| Neutral | 2 | 2 | 5.6% |
| Agree | 3 | 9 | 25.0% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 24 | 66.7% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 36 |
| Mean | 3.56 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-0.73 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Neutral | 2 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Agree | 3 | 7 | 19.4% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 29 | 80.6% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 36 |
| Mean | 3.81 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-0.40 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 1 | 2.8% |
| Neutral | 2 | 2 | 5.6% |
| Agree | 3 | 15 | 41.7% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 18 | 50.0% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 36 |
| Mean | 3.39 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-0.73 |
Scale is Strongly Disagree (0) to Strongly Agree (4) with a Neutral mid-point
| Competency | Course |
|---|---|
| The course was intellectually challenging | 3.50 |
| I learned a lot from this course | 3.50 |
| The instructor treated students with respect | 3.56 |
| The instructor was well-prepared for class | 3.81 |
| Overall, this instructor was an effective teacher | 3.39 |
| Total Score | 3.55 |
| Question | Course | Department (CMNS-Computer Science) | College (CMNS) | Course Level (CMNS_400) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Mean | Mean | Mean | |
| The standards the instructor set for students were... | 1.22 | 1.17 | 1.12 | 1.14 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Too Low | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Appropriate | 1 | 28 | 77.8% |
| Too High | 2 | 8 | 22.2% |
| Question | Course | Department (CMNS-Computer Science) | College (CMNS) | Course Level (CMNS_400) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Mean | Mean | Mean | |
| Course guidelines were clearly described in the syllabus. | 2.89 | 3.11 | 3.21 | 3.16 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 4 | 11.1% |
| Neutral | 2 | 8 | 22.2% |
| Agree | 3 | 12 | 33.3% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 12 | 33.3% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 36 |
| Mean | 2.89 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-1.01 |
| Question | Course | Department (CMNS-Computer Science) | College (CMNS) | Course Level (CMNS_400) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Mean | Mean | Mean | |
| Based on the quality of my work in this course, the grades I earned were | 0.69 | 0.82 | 0.83 | 0.83 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Too Low | 0 | 14 | 38.9% |
| Appropriate | 1 | 19 | 52.8% |
| Too High | 2 | 3 | 8.3% |
| Question | Course | Department (CMNS-Computer Science) | College (CMNS) | Course Level (CMNS_400) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Mean | Mean | Mean | |
| Given the course level and number of credits, the workload was | 1.25 | 1.20 | 1.13 | 1.12 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Too Low | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Appropriate | 1 | 27 | 75.0% |
| Too High | 2 | 9 | 25.0% |
| Question | Course | Department (CMNS-Computer Science) | College (CMNS) | Course Level (CMNS_400) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Mean | Mean | Mean | |
| How much effort did you put into the course? | 1.67 | 1.51 | 1.48 | 1.53 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Little | 0 | 1 | 2.8% |
| Moderate | 1 | 10 | 27.8% |
| Considerable | 2 | 25 | 69.4% |
| Question | Course | Department (CMNS-Computer Science) | College (CMNS) | Course Level (CMNS_400) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mean | Mean | Mean | Mean | |
| The instructor was effective in communicating the content of the course. | 3.22 | 2.96 | 3.10 | 3.05 |
| The instructor was responsive to student concerns. | 3.69 | 3.24 | 3.30 | 3.30 |
| The instructor helped create an atmosphere that kept me engaged in course content. | 3.36 | 2.85 | 3.02 | 2.99 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 2 | 5.6% |
| Neutral | 2 | 5 | 13.9% |
| Agree | 3 | 12 | 33.3% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 17 | 47.2% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 36 |
| Mean | 3.22 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-0.90 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Neutral | 2 | 2 | 5.7% |
| Agree | 3 | 7 | 20.0% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 26 | 74.3% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 35 |
| Mean | 3.69 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-0.58 |
| Options | Score | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strongly Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Disagree | 1 | 1 | 2.8% |
| Neutral | 2 | 3 | 8.3% |
| Agree | 3 | 14 | 38.9% |
| Strongly Agree | 4 | 18 | 50.0% |
| Statistics | Value |
|---|---|
| Response Count | 36 |
| Mean | 3.36 |
| Standard Deviation | +/-0.76 |