Simulation · Industrial Engineering And Operations Research
Assignments every 2-3 weeks. 1 of them was very tough, the others were pretty straightforward and didn't take too long. Two exams, multiple choice/fill in the blank. Done online.
20% Weekly homeworks - will be assigned rain or shine including right before and right after exams. Graded by graders (completely arbitrary). Officially, there are "extra credit" problems, but until today I don't know how they factored into the grade (does the extra credit count only towards that homework, or does it count towards homework in general?) . They are due at "6pm" on Fridays outside the professors door, but since slum-dog MS students will steal the stapler if they are let into the department with no one to supervise, your id card won't open the main door after 5 pm, so effectively, it's due at 5pm for you if you are an MS student. 25% 1st mid-term. Extremely long, not by accident, but by design. This will be after a deceptively short practice mid-term is posted on course-works, so don't be fooled by the practice. Basically a bunch of algorithm to simulate this or that questions which have at least 10 answers, but unless you do it the way she's thinking you won't be able to do the remaining sub-parts which build on the algorithm from subpart a) of the problem. 25% - 2nd take home midterm. If you want an A range grade in the class it's imperative that you cheat on the on this "48 hours" mid-term by working in groups although you are supposed to work individually. The way it works is that you will be given a bunch of incorrect code written by the professor (implementi…
The homeworks were super tough. Luckily, a few of my friends had the homeworks from the previous semester and that's how we got by. The midterm and final were impossible. I got a 48/75 on the midterm (grad and undergrad average of 64) and a 43/100 on the final...and I got a B+. But I easily could have gotten a C-. The grading is incredibly arbitrary.
Weekly problem sets, and roughly-weekly (sometimes twice a week) in-class homeworks (these are not announced, so you have to actually attend, or at least make it to class 15 mins before the end), 2 midterms, a final
I'm not sure what's up with some of the other reviews. I really enjoyed this class. Chris was very friendly and helpful, and he made a pretty heroic effort at having people get involved. He learned everyone's name and told some pretty decent jokes and stories. If you thought the class was boring, maybe you're studying the wrong subject. Some of the homeworks were tough, and much more coding based than the lectures/exam, but if you actually paid attention he explained why he did this and why the exams were different. They were also graded very easily.
If you got to be God for a day, I bet you couldn't create a being as rude, obnoxious and condescending as this professor. The TAs (John Zheng, Juan Li and Yiping Du) had the same attitude - "we are Ph.D.s, - undergrads are stupid and the cash cow MS students even stupider, so don't waste our time on doing the TA work for we are being paid because they don't deserve it." One gem includes telling us on Thursday, the last of the reading days, at 6:00 pm, that if you want your 2nd mid-term back you have only 1 chance to pick it up - tomorrow Friday 4-6 pm. The worst is how they took out the grade-book on course-works once the finals were done so that you never found out how much you got on the final. As far as I am concerned, this is what they did - due to graduations etc they had to submit grades by Friday night, 2 days after the exam - since the TAs grade those and Ph.D.s generally don't have exams this was doable, but why bother doing an all-nighter for these bunch of loser students so lets just put in the same score as their current average as the final exam score, assign the grade and not bother grading the finals, or do it eventually and make sure they get exactly what we put in earlier (given that grading in this course is completely arbitrary this is not very difficult to accomplish). I know that sounds impossible, but I don't put it beyond this teaching staff to do it. Th…
I'm an undergraduate student so please keep that in mind as I review this class. This is an awful class. It's incredibly stressful for someone who has had only one course in Probability & Statistics, no experience in Matlab and very limited recollection of ODE and Calculus tricks. This was the same for all undergrads in the course. Nothing that Jose said or wrote made any sense. The lectures were way over my head but a few of the Asian graduate students followed along and had very lively debates with Jose. It's next to impossible to teach this course to undergrads and grads at the same time especially grad students who have strong backgrounds in probability.
Professor Kou was a very clear and easy to understand professor. Simulation was a hard class, but he had an incredibly lenient curve - if you were half a standard deviation above or below the average you got an A-. SERIOUSLY WHO DOES THAT IN SEAS???!? He posts lecture notes and basically just goes through them word for word in class on the blackboard. This makes it easy to follow along and to study later on.
Homework 25% (5 of them on Ed) Midterm 25% Final Exam 35% Higher of Final Exam and Midterm 15% Notes: - Very generous grading for the homeworks - Exams were both online using Proctorio - Possible grade boost of 1/3 of a letter grade (ex: B+ --> A-) if you participate enough in class!
Weekly assignments. Programming involved can be time consuming at first, but gets easier as the semester goes along. 2nd takehome midterm was quite awful, but very generous grading done for that.