Polyratings.com: Bellardo, John

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Bellardo, John

Cumulative GPA: 2.65/4.00 with 23 evaluations
Presents Material Clearly: 2.43
Recognizes Student Difficulties: 2.43

Computer Science Department, Cal Poly, SLO
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CSC 453 Junior Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 4:06 pm, Dec 12, 2011 Report Evaluation		I sent proff an email at midnight asking a specific question about a specific point in the specification. I received a reply in the next ten minutes. I sent an email in the evening simply asking for a clue on a program, I recieved a reply almost immediately. More than any other professor I know he makes a point of making himself available for questions and help. The course load is quite reasonable (especially compared to a staley class, why is his polyrating higher???). He taught the material adequately, I failed both exams and still got a B by acing the assigned programs.

CSC 225 Sophomore Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 9:58 pm, Nov 29, 2011 Report Evaluation		Bellardo is a professor with good intentions, available at office hours who provides adequately interesting labs. All his classes go like this You buy a book Quiz and test questions are taken from the book (irrelevant to any kind of programming aptitude or intelligence). These questions are mainly vocabulary it's kinda like spanish but for X language. I personally do not enjoy his classes just because the quiz and test questions tend to be ridiculously stupid (e.g. what is ACRYONYM and why is it important? versus how do you do X). However his classes can be very easy if you study from the book.

CSC 453 Senior Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 5:47 pm, Nov 9, 2011 Report Evaluation		You know you live in a messed up world where Staley has a higher Polyrating than Bellardo. Yes he is very tough. But god damn, he is incredibly fair and straightforward with you. He makes his intentions clear. Learn from him.

CPE 569 Junior Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 6:38 pm, Jul 26, 2011 Report Evaluation		Since this is a graduate level course, it's not difficult. However, Dr. Bellardo's easy courses are not that easy. You have to present a paper in this class and he has high expectations for it. If you like group discussions on distributed systems, you should take this class. You also get to work on a team project, which is fun.

CPE 464 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 6:09 pm, Jul 26, 2011 Report Evaluation		Dr. Bellardo 464 class is even harder than 453. The upside is that you will learn a lot about the network stack. The labs are straightforward, but they are very time-consuming, and you'll often have to stay for at least 2 1/2 hours. There are also many reading questions that are hard to answer, and you don't know which ones he'll put on the quizzes. There are 4 programs that must pass a grading script, and they are all time-consuming. The last 3 are especially difficult, and only one person got full credit for the 4th. If you take this class, make sure your quarter only has 12 units. Like any class with Dr. Bellardo, office hours are your best friend.

CPE 453 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 6:03 pm, Jul 26, 2011 Report Evaluation		Dr. Bellardo has a reputation for being tough. There is a lot of work for this class, including reading, reading questions, quizzes, labs, and programs. THe labs are not too difficult and they're interesting because you get to modify the Linux kernel. His powerpoint lectures are posted online, so you can review them if you didn't get it the first time. Many people may suggest you avoid taking 453 with Dr. Bellardo, but there are many things you can do to succeed, and you'll learn a lot from him. Dr. Bellardo is one of the most frequently available professors for office hours (even outside his official times). You should visit and he'll help you understand the material and debug your program. Obviously, you should start your programs early. The entire class is curved, so you might be surprised to find that your grade is higher than you think it is even if you didn't do well on the tests. If you want to challenge yourself and learn a lot, take Dr. Bellardo for 453.

CPE 458 Junior Grade Earned: N/A Elective 10:45 pm, May 23, 2011 Report Evaluation		I am still taking this class. But a couple of us are clearly struggling. They way he presents the material is complete BULLSHIT. One of the worst professors I've ever taken. Honestly, Cal poly? For such a prestigious school, you sure know how to hire shit professors. Don't take him, whatever you do. NOT FOR IOS NOT FOR OPERATING SYSTEMS!!



CPE 464 Junior Grade Earned: B Elective 9:26 pm, Mar 17, 2011 Report Evaluation		This class is difficult. Dr. Bellardo designs the class so you essentially HAVE to attend office hours to complete the programs. The programs of this class often don't have that much to do with lecture. KEY TO SUCCESS: Start program early, and work on it during his scheduled office hours. Bug him during office hours and ask him lots of questions.

CPE 464 Senior Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 9:37 pm, Nov 9, 2010 Report Evaluation		This class is very hard. If you take Bellardo for networks, then be ready to spend a lot of your time in the CSL past midnight. The programs he assigns are frustrating and they must work perfectly to receive any credit for them. Each one soaked up much of my time and made me want to kill myself. Also, if you don\'t get a project working perfectly, it results in a grade drop of one letter. I could not get the last project to pass his grading robot despite spending countless hours on it and it working flawlessly from my end. Labs are pretty easy with Bellardo. He has a quiz every Thursday with questions that come straight from the book, so be sure to read the sections he assigns before the quizzes. The midterm and final were very challenging and raped everyone. You will get a 45% on it or so, but so iwll the rest of the class so its fine. Basically, if you want to challenge yourself and learn a lot about networks then take Bellardo. Otherwise wait and take it with Smith.

CPE 464 5th Year Senior Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 8:49 am, Jun 13, 2010 Report Evaluation		I highly recommend taking Bellardo for Networks. The most important aspect of a professor is his ability to convey information. Bellardo has organized lectures and presents material clearly. The programs are challenging, but getting them working is just a matter of effort. Networks is not as hard as many people hype it up to be. On the contrary it is a very interesting class, giving students a broad overview of how the internet was built and works. Take it with Bellardo and you will learn something.

CSC 101 Freshman Grade Earned: F Required (Major) 10:20 pm, Mar 23, 2010 Report Evaluation		I am not a big fan of this guy. In general he made no effort to give feedback or instructions for labs and programs. His lectures were not very useful for the problems the class was having as a whole and placed ZERO emphasis on actual labs and homework. I felt overwhelmed by the amount of work i had to do and the time it took. I feel that i learned the material somewhat but found it very difficult to get the programs exactly the way he wanted. If you are completely new to programming like i was be ready to put in alot of extra effort and time. in the end i do not recomend the proffesor.

CSC 225 Sophomore Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 12:37 am, Feb 2, 2010 Report Evaluation		His lectures didn\'t help at all with the labs. Also he expects you to read and understand about a chapter and then test you on it then teach it to you. It should be the other way around. He also laughed at me for asking him a question that he thought was so obvious. Teachers shouldn\'t do that. In my opinion I feel I have learned nothing from him or his lectures. The most help you will find if you have him as a teacher is to go seek help from the tutoring center.

CSC 101 Freshman Grade Earned: D Required (Major) 2:12 am, Jan 25, 2010 Report Evaluation		This guy is retarded. Fails as a teacher. He expects you to know everything as he assigns programming homework that covers stuff that was not covered in lecture or is against what the book states is practical. For example: He asks you to use a SWITCH statement to process a richter scale input (DOUBLE type value) and compare it to a set of decimal ranges ranging from 0 to 10. Obviously, a SWITCH statement is not appropriate for this as the input is not an INTEGER type value as required by the SWITCH statement... In addition, it would mean a large number of cases to adequately evaluate the numerous amount of decimal numbers within the 0 to 10 range if one were to multiply the input by 100. ...Overall, this guy is a joke. PhD or not -- He\'s new to teaching and obviously does not know how to teach, most especially considering how this class taken was a novice-rank class.



CSC 101 Freshman Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 4:33 pm, Nov 20, 2008 Report Evaluation		Bellardo's CSC101 Class is TOUGH, DO NOT take it unless you are willing to devote a good portion of free time to finishing labs and programs. His grading scripts are automated and 100% pass or fail, everyday late you loose 33.3% so submitting a day ahead of time is strongly suggested. Some of his grading policies were beyond harsh, but after consulting with him he agreed to adapt them to better suit students. This is the kind of class if you do not put forth the effort you will FAIL. But if you go in for extra help, email him with problems, HE WILL do his best to help you out. +++ :)! Average grades for midterms are 50/100 or an F, but the class is heavily curved at the end of the quarter, if you fail both midterms but do well with programs/labs/hw you can have a very good chance of passing the class. Lab exams are a bit tough, but not impossable and origional course req. was to pass 2/3. But seeing most of his class has not fulfilled this req by the 2nd exam, he offered a fourth. All in all Bellardo is willing to adapt to suit students needs, and provide extra assistance if you need it. But you have to take the initiative and talk to him about it. And be willing to spend alot more time than you intended to get programs just right. If you are able to pass his 101, other CSC/CPE classes will come with ease.

CPE 464 Senior Grade Earned: F Elective 11:41 am, Jul 28, 2008 Report Evaluation		Dr. Bellardo is a good instructor. He is newer, but has done a great job of having high standards and sticking to them(Clint would be proud). The class is very hard. You have to be pretty good at programming in C/C++. I didn't pass, because I was lazy and didn't do the programs(a natural way to fail). The biggest problem is that the lectures, labs, hw, and programs, don't sync up with each other very well. In lecture and hw you learn one thing(more high level network concepts), in lab another(practical; how you actually connect wires), in programs another(how you write the programs which implement some of the high level ideas). I found that it was a lot of information to absorb and apply. If you can get the labs and programs done you would pass for sure.

CPE 464 Senior Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 6:08 am, Jul 10, 2008 Report Evaluation		Bellardo is a recent PHD graduate from UCSD and so the expectations he sets for his classes are very high, but don't let this discourage you from taking him. He is extremely knowledgeable in the area of networks and operating systems and is a generally approachable and friendly guy. His projects can be quite time consuming but he usually picks projects that are somewhat fun to work on, so you don't burn out coding 30-40 hours a week. His grading scheme is also way way way way easier than a certain someone cough staley cough. His tests are insane and the class generally performs pretty badly, but he curves the final grade. Take bellardo, put in some effort and you'll be amazed at how much you can learn in a quarter.

CSC 465 Senior Grade Earned: N/A Required (Support) 3:45 pm, Jun 4, 2008 Report Evaluation		Bellardo is a very well versed teacher in the area of networks and you will definitely learn a lot from any of his classes. His classes require a very LARGE workload and should not be taken with other programming intensive courses. He expects a lot from his students and his grading makes it known, but is always helpful during office hours. Also, he does curve so it is not like everyone fails. The course load was heavy, but I learned a lot from this class.

CSC 464 Senior Grade Earned: A Required (Major) 9:13 pm, Jan 28, 2008 Report Evaluation		So, this is not an easy class. You've probably heard the stories, and all that, but in the event that you haven't, most people have a good deal of difficulty in passing the assignments. The good news is, he grades on a curve, so if everyone else does badly (likely), you can all do OK. The Wiki previously mentioned is gone, and it's back to a 2 lecture/1 lab class. The material he presents is really cool, especially the projects. I think he's a black hat, and just won't admit it. If you're looking for an easy quarter, Bellardo is not the guy, but if you wanna learn cool things, this is the prof to take.

CPE 453 Senior Grade Earned: C Required (Major) 10:25 am, Jan 10, 2008 Report Evaluation		Professor Bellardo has been teaching at Cal Poly for less than two years and has a lot to learn about setting up a course. His projects can be very challenging for novice, even intermediate, programmers. His philosophy about grading is very subjective and although his exams rarely have toppers, he grades based on a curve. If you take one of his exams, make sure to attempt every question and write as little as possible for theory based questions. He doesn't mind if you write broken sentences as long as you cover all the points. The practical questions weigh more; hence try to spend an even amount of time on all those questions. He is very helpful during office hours. Make sure you ask him the right questions as he is somewhat Staley-like when answering questions. My experience was rough but I don't completely attribute that to his teaching abilities. I did learn a lot from the course nevertheless.



CSC 453 Graduate Student Grade Earned: C Required (Major) 5:28 pm, Dec 5, 2007 Report Evaluation		Are you a CSC/CPE major? Would you like to spend 30 or so hours a week on this course? Are the words "harder than Nico" a challenge, rather than a deterrent, to you? If the answer to all of those questions is yes, Bellardo's your man for OS. Totally nice dude, but he's not a great teacher at this point. He's young, and he might very well improve. I can't speak to that. I can only speak to my experience with this class, which was not so good. Excessively hard, programs that take too long and that you have to program without much knowledge about how the evaluation will go, little to no partial credit. I'm willing to cut the guy a little slack--he has high standards, and I respect that. I just wish I had taken this course with someone else.

CPE 464 Junior Grade Earned: A Required (Support) 10:40 am, Apr 2, 2007 Report Evaluation		Bellardo in general was a nice guy, and taught the subject well. Beware his projects though. This was his first quarter teaching networks, so maybe it'll be different in the future, but as it was the feedback for programs was somewhere along the lines of horrendous. The 2nd and 3rd programs were the most complex, and grades for them weren't recieved until the week AFTER finals week. Because he doesn't actually grade it, he just runs a script, the scores were completely non-related to how well the program was written / how well it worked. It was based entirely on how robust his script was. On program 2, the class avg was 8 / 45 and on program 3 it was 3 / 20. That said, each program was only worth 2.5% of the final grade. The tests were fair, and the class was curved.

CPE 464 Senior Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 11:43 am, Mar 17, 2007 Report Evaluation		Bellardo does not understand students' struggles. He is very stuck in his ways, and won't change the format of the stupid "hybrid learning" crap. There is only one lecture a week for a 4 unit class! The other day that we were supposed to meet, we have "virtual lecture" which is like instant messaging him questions at night. He expects his students to do everything on their own. His tests are rediculously hard also. None of the topics related to the programs were EVER discussed in class. You are on your own there. The most annoying this is the stupid wiki, which is the most busy work EVER. This is the most frustrating class ever!

CSC 349 Senior Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 10:22 am, Jan 5, 2007 Report Evaluation		Professor Bellardo can drive any student insane! He doesn't teach very well and the material he presents can over your head. I suggest not taking John Bellardo as a professor in Algorithms.

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