- 202508-CMSC435-0101-SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (James Purtilo) - Preliminary Instructor Report

The content covered in the course was directly related to the course goals and objectives.

Graphs illustrating the information in the accessible table that should immediately follow it.

Table for [QTitle]-The content covered in the course was directly related to the course goals and objectives..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	1	6%
Neutral	2	1	6%
Agree	3	5	29%
Strongly Agree	4	10	59%

Table for [QTitle]-The content covered in the course was directly related to the course goals and objectives.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.4
Standard Deviation	0.9

The assessments (e.g., tests, quizzes, papers) were directly related to what was covered/practiced in the course.

Table for [QTitle]-The assessments (e.g., tests, quizzes, papers) were directly related to what was covered/practiced in the course..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	1	6%
Neutral	2	4	25%
Agree	3	3	19%
Strongly Agree	4	8	50%

Table for [QTitle]-The assessments (e.g., tests, quizzes, papers) were directly related to what was covered/practiced in the course.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	16
Mean	3.1
Standard Deviation	1.0

The required texts (e.g., books, course packs, online resources) helped me learn course material.

Table for [QTitle]-The required texts (e.g., books, course packs, online resources) helped me learn course material..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	1	8%
Disagree	1	3	23%
Neutral	2	3	23%
Agree	3	2	15%
Strongly Agree	4	4	31%

Table for [QTitle]-The required texts (e.g., books, course packs, online resources) helped me learn course material.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	13
Mean	2.4
Standard Deviation	1.4

This course pushed and expanded my ability to think deeply about the subject.

Table for [QTitle]-This course pushed and expanded my ability to think deeply about the subject..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	1	6%
Disagree	1	0	0%
Neutral	2	2	12%
Agree	3	1	6%
Strongly Agree	4	13	76%

Table for [QTitle]-This course pushed and expanded my ability to think deeply about the subject.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.5
Standard Deviation	1.1

I believe the content of this course was a valuable part of my education.

Table for [QTitle]-I believe the content of this course was a valuable part of my education..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	1	6%
Disagree	1	0	0%
Neutral	2	2	12%
Agree	3	2	12%
Strongly Agree	4	12	71%

Table for [QTitle]-I believe the content of this course was a valuable part of my education.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.4
Standard Deviation	1.1

I believe I learned a lot from this course.

Table for [QTitle]-I believe I learned a lot from this course..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	0	0%
Neutral	2	1	6%
Agree	3	4	24%
Strongly Agree	4	12	71%

Table for [QTitle]-I believe I learned a lot from this course.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.6
Standard Deviation	0.6

On average, how many hours each week did you spend on this course (e.g., attending class, doing homework, studying, completing assignments)?

Table for [QTitle]-On average, how many hours each week did you spend on this course (e.g., attending class, doing homework, studying, completing assignments)?.
Options	Count	Percentage
Less than 3 hours	0	0%
3 up to 6 hours	1	6%
6 up to 9 hours	3	18%
9 up to 12 hours	3	18%
12 up to 15 hours	6	35%
15 hours or more	4	24%

Table for [QTitle]-On average, how many hours each week did you spend on this course (e.g., attending class, doing homework, studying, completing assignments)?-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17

How did this course fit into your academic plan and/or educational goals?

Table for [QTitle].
Options	Count	Percentage
Required for program/major/minor/certificate, or as a prerequisite	11	65%
Elective for program/major/minor/certificate	5	29%
To satisfy an undergraduate General Education requirement	2	12%
In preparation for research, employment, or future program/degree	9	53%
Personal interest in content	11	65%
Other/It doesn't	0	0%

What about the course and/or instruction most enhanced your learning?

Table for [QTitle].

Comments

The individual assignments were quick and thought provoking. Assignments such as the Terp AI agent proposal were very good at teaching us what to do in our projects without being time consuming.

You, the professor. Your availability and lightning fast email responses made you a reliable way to clarify things about the course. I also appreciate in hindsight how critical of a grader you were.

The opportunity to put the instruction into practice immediately demonstrated the value of the instruction.

Working on an actual project.

The workflows and how to think as a software developer. The fact that we could work with different clients made it very easy to learn and grow.

The course was extremely organized. The professor was very knowledgeable and extremely hard working. He would reply back to emails within minutes regardless of which day it was. The professor putting so much effort into this class made me put in more effort too to match the energy as a student. He was extremely detailed with everything and always explained every thing well. Amazing professor, he helped me learn a lot as a software engineer.

I think that the being thrown into the fire mentality aspect of this course made it a course where you were required to learn or fail.

The extra materials provided on the course website did a good job at preparing me for what to expect. The lecture content was kind of abstract at times and hard to apply but would eventually click due to something that happened during the project. Overall I think attaching real world skills to an actual product was the most helpful aspect. Also keeping expectations clear but open ended allowed us to explore and test different approaches to the assignments to figure out what is the best way of showing cost or what is the best way to describe the value of a feature. I know the demo days were new this semester and I would definitely keep those.

The collaborative part of the course was the most important and interesting, in my opinion. Having to work with a group of like–minded people really helped me be in a mindset to complete the requirements of the course and succeed. Also, setting the pace in the first 3 weeks with the scrimmages was a really good strategy since it shaped our expectations for the course and the flow of things from the first day.

I genuinely will recommend this class for anyone who really wants a unique and fruitful experience.

Real project to work on

The professor clearly cared about his students and wanted everyone to succeed. He was the most communicative professor I've ever had and was always quick to reply to emails or hop in a call at any time. You can feel his passion. He doesn't babysit people and lets them explore things on their own; he treats his students like adults. The curriculum also isn't handed to you on a silver platter and there's a lot of decision–making that students will have to do withing their teams. They can discuss with the professor, of course, but the way the course is set up, people won't be able to just mindlessly follow instructions. They have to think for themselves.

I also really enjoyed the aspect of having a real client and product to create that'll be used even after the class is over (hopefully). This class was by far the most free thinking I've had to do, since we're tackling a new problem as a team. There is no rulebook.

I think this class has directly prepared me for the workforce more than any other. You learn teamwork, how to interact with a client, standard business and engineering practices, gain coding experience, learn new technologies, and more. Definitely a great class if you want to learn.

The tough love approach. The real world is harsh, and I think Purtilo does a good job of tearing down the bad habits students have and letting them learn from it, without feeding them the answer.

The course was unlike any other CMSC course I had taken at the university. Focusing on my efforts on a capstone during the entire semester was a really rewarding experience. Owning the product from start to finish and really learning the software development life cycle felt like I was able to learn so many valuable life skills and industry–relevant skills. That's what made this course stand out compared to the other 4xx–level courses I have taken. Dr. Purtilo really invests a lot of time into making sure students can succeed when taking this course. He lays out all his expectations at the start of the semester and that is exactly how the semester went. It was a truly rewarding experience and a great time with a great team.

This class challenged my software engineering skills as well as time management skills.

What about the course and/or instruction can be improved the next time it is offered?

Table for [QTitle].

Comments

I think the instructor could be more flexible when it comes to disagreements between him and the client. During the semester my team and I ended up in a situation where our client and the instructor wanted different things and we were forced to balance both of them. This led to our resources being divided on different tasks and we were not able to give our full attention to the product that was being delivered. Also, I feel like the clients could be vetted better. Our client did not have a clear idea of what he wanted out of the app. While I agree with the spirit of this type of client being something that we have to deal with in the industry, I think for the purpose of this class, it creates unfairness when some teams have very clear and technical project goals while some teams have to fight and claw for clear specifications for a project. I know that the projects will never be completely equal in this regard, I think it would be beneficial to get as close as possible.

I think the team formation should have been based on a metric other than engagement on the scrimmages. Before I continue, I'd like to disclose that this is coming from a certain someone on team 7 :). Anyways, I get that this was probably done to force the unengaged students to do something, and it definitely worked for me by the end of the semester, but ultimately I found it more of a recipe for disaster than anything. It felt like for any given week, only half of my team members had their heads in the game which got tiring. If, hypothetically, I were on a team where everyone was engaged except for me, I would've been much more motivated to get my act together compared to my actual experience, where it felt like either nothing was happening or I'm putting in the effort and no one cares. I get the adage "if you want a better team, be a better teammate" too, but in my case, just me being a good teammate felt nowhere near enough to salvage my situation. I don't mean to sound entitled to a good team, I genuinely do see the merit in how the teams were decided, but I don't think how students do on an assignment explicitly advertised as a trial run should determine their fate.

I think the gallup strengths, goals documents, and 400 level course survey would all be better metrics to judge when deciding how to build the teams if they weren't considered. I understand that may be more work on your end, but if it results in more balanced teams then I think it would be worth it.

I would've liked more of a push to show more initiative in the beginning of the class, so that every student can get the whole value out of the course.

Ability to rank projects you want to work on and teammates you want to work with.

More in class time to work with the project. The scrimmages felt short and not too valuable. Especially scrimmage 3 was a time crunch.

I think there should be more education about specific software development tools and not general advice. I think that we could benefit from learning more about how full time engineers construct large scale systems.

Personally, there is nothing I can say for improvement because it was one of the best structured course I've taken. The only improvement for next time is to maintain it this way.

Please set up an announcement page on the website or just a more focused version of the blog page. I think that the website itself is fine but the way information is given should be improved.

For the demo days maybe have a short 1 paragraph due the morning of each demo day as a short description of 1. What are you demoing? 2. What is new this week that you didn't show last week? What existing problems do you know exist in what you are demoing? For the reports maybe try to pull some industry examples to help guide people's thought. I know the class is designed as an exploratory journey in product development but a lot of the time things were so abstract that the lesson never gets learned. I think overall there needs to be a bit more nudging as most people have been taught their entire lives that asking questions and being exploratory is bad and that you must only do exactly what you are told. With the instruction itself, I think it could be a bit more streamlined. A lot of the slides are skipped or covered for such a short amount of time that the value from them never actually gets to sit it. I know personally I came in with the intention of taking notes but the pacing is so fast that trying to take notes and pay attention enough to know what to take notes on is extremely difficult. Maybe more materials like the principles card you gave us to help summarize the topic for each day.

Please give him a two–semester capstone. I feel this amazing class would be even better if it were a 2–semester capstone like every other major. Also, I feel that the university should be more collaborative with this class to ensure more projects are offered to the professor, so more students can have a meaningful experience they can reference when seeking jobs or internships.

This class can be an alternative to an internship if the college can find more projects, including more name–worthy ones, in collaboration with Professor Purtilo.

Give him some TAs or an opportunity to hire mentors to guide each group.

The way the assignment are announced. This semester it was done through a website, but whenever there was a assignment assigned you wouldn’t be notified since it was on the website, you would have to check the website, prefer using canvas to assign assignments and have deadlines.

I mentioned the fact that students explore things on their own as a pro, and one thing the professor is trying to accomplish during the semester is forcing students to get more comfortable with obscurity. This can be beneficial, but I think it can be a bit overdone at times. Some assignments felt like they had extremely vague requirements and the professor was seemingly purposefully vague when responding to questions to see what we would do. When significant portions of our grades are on the line, it's more stressful than is necessary, in my opinion.

Students are placed in teams by the professor near the beginning of the semester. For the first few weeks, the professor silently observes students' work ethic and then decides what team to place them in based on that, which isn't revealed until later. For example, this semester there were seven teams. Team 1 contained people who had great work ethic during the first few weeks, where Team 7 had people who had horrible work ethic during the first few weeks. I was personally placed on a pretty good team with teammates who helped out a good bit, but I know people who got placed on worse teams and just get completely screwed over; this is especially so if they happened to do work slower or were off of their game for the first few weeks. I'm not really sure how to fix this issue, because placing people together who have similar work ethics does make the most sense. If the professor didn't do that, the case I just mentioned above would happen in almost every group — where some students would end up doing all of the work and others would do nothing. Organizing it like this levels the playing field. Unfortunately, it still really sucks for some people and they can't do anything about it as of how the class is run right now.

This class is a lot of work. I think I've put more time into this class than any other during college. It can feel overwhelming at times keeping up with class, team meetings, client meetings, meetings with the professor, coding, and documentation, and deliverables. And it's a lot to fit into one semester. Since we're building up software products (some from the ground up, some continuing off of previous versions), it takes a long time. If we had longer, we'd be able to do a lot more and get into important topics we didn't get time to delve into. This is a capstone class, which are normally two semesters long, but this is only one.

More time, this should be a full–year course. Please organize the course blog to make it more visually appealing. The UI is so nauseating.

I think Dr. Purtilo is the type of professor who would like to get to know his students better so maybe setting up 1 on 1 chats just to learn more about the student's perspectives and then potentially provide them with all the industry experience and advice that Dr. Purtilo has garnered.

I love Dr. Purtilo; he is an amazing and caring guy. He always sounds like he doesn't care and is strict, but deep down he wants your success. Next time maybe don't make the class look scary; one of my friends dropped the course after the first day.

The instructor provided constructive feedback on my work that helped me to learn.

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor provided constructive feedback on my work that helped me to learn..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	1	6%
Neutral	2	1	6%
Agree	3	4	24%
Strongly Agree	4	11	65%

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor provided constructive feedback on my work that helped me to learn.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.5
Standard Deviation	0.9

The instructor provided feedback in the course in time to apply it.

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor provided feedback in the course in time to apply it..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	1	6%
Neutral	2	1	6%
Agree	3	3	18%
Strongly Agree	4	12	71%

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor provided feedback in the course in time to apply it.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.5
Standard Deviation	0.9

The instructor clearly communicated grading criteria for my work throughout the course.

The instructor clearly communicated grading criteria for my work throughout the course.

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor clearly communicated grading criteria for my work throughout the course..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	3	18%
Neutral	2	6	35%
Agree	3	1	6%
Strongly Agree	4	7	41%

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor clearly communicated grading criteria for my work throughout the course.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	2.7
Standard Deviation	1.2

The instructor clearly communicated the purpose, instructions, and deadlines for my graded work throughout the course.

The instructor clearly communicated the purpose, instructions, and deadlines for my graded work throughout the course.

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor clearly communicated the purpose, instructions, and deadlines for my graded work throughout the course..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	1	6%
Disagree	1	1	6%
Neutral	2	4	24%
Agree	3	3	18%
Strongly Agree	4	8	47%

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor clearly communicated the purpose, instructions, and deadlines for my graded work throughout the course.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	2.9
Standard Deviation	1.2

The instructor helped me understand new content by connecting it to things I already knew.

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor helped me understand new content by connecting it to things I already knew..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	1	6%
Neutral	2	5	29%
Agree	3	3	18%
Strongly Agree	4	8	47%

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor helped me understand new content by connecting it to things I already knew.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.1
Standard Deviation	1.0

The instructor created an inclusive environment where everyone belonged.

The instructor created an inclusive environment where everyone belonged.

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor created an inclusive environment where everyone belonged..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	1	6%
Neutral	2	2	12%
Agree	3	6	35%
Strongly Agree	4	8	47%

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor created an inclusive environment where everyone belonged.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.2
Standard Deviation	0.9

The instructor demonstrated confidence in everyone's potential to succeed in the course.

The instructor demonstrated confidence in everyone's potential to succeed in the course.

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor demonstrated confidence in everyone's potential to succeed in the course..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	1	6%
Disagree	1	0	0%
Neutral	2	2	12%
Agree	3	4	24%
Strongly Agree	4	10	59%

Table for [QTitle]-The instructor demonstrated confidence in everyone's potential to succeed in the course.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.3
Standard Deviation	1.1

I felt like the instructor cared about my learning in the course.

Table for [QTitle]-I felt like the instructor cared about my learning in the course..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	1	6%
Disagree	1	0	0%
Neutral	2	1	6%
Agree	3	4	24%
Strongly Agree	4	11	65%

Table for [QTitle]-I felt like the instructor cared about my learning in the course.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	17
Mean	3.4
Standard Deviation	1.1

I would recommend this instructor to other students for this course.

Table for [QTitle]-I would recommend this instructor to other students for this course..
Options	Score	Count	Percentage
Strongly Disagree	0	0	0%
Disagree	1	1	6%
Neutral	2	4	25%
Agree	3	2	13%
Strongly Agree	4	9	56%

Table for [QTitle]-I would recommend this instructor to other students for this course.-Statistics.
Statistics	Value
Response Count	16
Mean	3.2
Standard Deviation	1.0