Evaluation Comments

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His strengths were that he is always in a good mood and enthusiastic about the material when teaching or talking to us in class. Not a lot of weaknesses it just if you email him about an exam or why you did bad, he sort of looks like he doesn't really care about it, and just tells you to ask questions more.
Professor Riely seems incredibly smart, is rather charismatic, and accessible outside of class; also seems like he does care about student success based on how he talked about reaching out to certain students before the term started. However, the class structure is very flawed as outlined earlier, and I believe a large part of that is due to teaching methods; it felt like I was expected to learn most of the material on my own, but not given the adequate tools to do so.

I think working on the homework was
The examples and mini quizzes in class helped me understand the content better.
Learning to think about algorithms/coding on a more conceptual level
the online lectures were great to refer back to.
The online lectures, written exams, and James' website. His site is better designed than d2l. Als
Works in tandem with my major (game programming)

make exams open note
- In-class lectures; this is a very challenging class as you are dealing with not only a new language but also with more conceptual material, and the ability to cover material in class where questions can be asked and the environment is more conducive for learning would be preferable to the semi-flipped module currently in place - Better study strategies/mock exams to adjust for insane difficulty spike of paper coding - Spending extra time (or having a separate video series) going over syntax, general concepts of Java, etc. It felt like I had to learn the basics of the language almost entirely by myself.

This is too heavily weighted on exams, It should be less percentage on exams than it is on homework and quizzes.
exam was very hard and most got below C on it. Of course the obvious paper exam making most do way worse then they normally would.
Paper exams are already an incredible difficulty spike. While I understand the value and their place, I believe less intensive time constraints/less problems and maintaining relative difficulty of exams to homework problems (exam problems were significantly harder, and not just due to format) would be beneficial, especially given how heavily weighted exams are.