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Course:Object-Oriented Software Development (SE-450-704) Quarter:Autumn 04/05 Time: 01:00 - 01:00 Location: Distance Learning |
James Riely PhD Associate Professor jriely@cs.depaul.edu Instructor homepage
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Summary 1 2 3 4
What are the major strengths and weaknesses of the instructor?
2. He is skilled in presentation, he is interesting and tries to present the material in an interesting way. He has a very solid mathematical background. He teaches through example, this is very helpful for a visual learning student such as myself.
4. strength-seems to know material wellweakness-teaches "iteratively", which means he showed us a way of doing something, but then says, that's crap, and shows us the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th ways, each of which are progressively better implementations. While this was good, for example, to explain the Observer pattern as Sun has implemented it in Java, the rest of the time it was highly annoying to erase or scratch out notes as we were going through lecture. If you don't, then it's confusing as to which is the better implementation when you look at your notes during the test.weakness-exams are far too long. 2.5 hours for a mid-term is alright, but there should be a little time in the 2.5 hrs to go back over the work, for instance. It was a mad dash to finish.weakness-the amount of homework. Usually I think a lot of homework is fine, but here there was superfluous work that took too much of the time we could've been devoting to design and coding. For instance, I will mention the defect tracking log and the time recording log. Neither are greatly useful except as metrics for the teacher later, but they certainly take time for the student to fill out. Also, while writing unit tests is valuable, I absolutely thought there wasn't enough time to give them much thought. I was way too busy completing the designing and coding tasks at hand.
What aspects of this course were most beneficial to you?
2. Design patterns are to object oriented programming as bees are to flowers... essential. Taking the time to work through, understand, and implement design patterns in Java is the most important aspect of this class in my opinion.
What do you suggest to improve this course?
2. Assignments of smaller programs that are to be done each week that make the student program design patterns that were learned that week.
3. Lower the work load. Unfortunatley, there is not enough time to incorporate an incremental software project using PSP.
Comment on the grading procedures and exams
2. I felt like this professor was very fair in grading the course work and exams. I am happy as well as impressed that the professor admitted to a single question on an exam that was not worded correctly and actually corrected his mistake by adjusting grades. I also believe that grading on a curve is superior to the hard coded grades... exams change from year to year in difficulty, so the grading scale should be flexable by a few points.
Other comments?
1. This should be taken in a classroom.
2. I really enjoyed this course... even though the homework was pretty difficult.