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Oliver, John 
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CPE 329 Junior Grade Earned: N/A Required (Major) 12:01 am, May 15, 2012 Report Evaluation |
This teacher doesn't even teach. It's basically show up to class and figure it out on your own. The kid doesn't even have facial hair. He shouldn't be allowed to teach. Especially cuz he acts like he's in high school, or middle school. He's too obsessed with himself to even care about students. He just needs someone to tell him to step away from a mirror and teach. Oh and to just stop talking about cool beer stories. They're not cool. | |
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EE 229 Sophomore Grade Earned: F Required (Major) 9:50 pm, Sep 28, 2011 Report Evaluation |
I'm sitting at a coffee shop with three colleagues. We're still complaining about this man after years and years. Grading policies = suck, homework LOAD = suck, tests = icles. He's fake. Don't take him. | |
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EE 229 Sophomore Grade Earned: F Required (Major) 10:17 pm, Mar 28, 2011 Report Evaluation |
Grading is bad just bad. Expect no partial. | |
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EE 229 Junior Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 1:57 pm, May 12, 2010 Report Evaluation |
Professor Oliver is an excellent professor and is definitely worth taking in my opinion. He tries to make every lecture at least bearable by making jokes and having examples you can relate to and understand easily. He holds study sessions before each midterm and the final and is very understanding of difficulties that students have. He\'s also helpful during office hours and will walk through problems with you to try and help you understand it. The only reason I got a B was because I stopped trying at the end of the quarter and didn\'t do very well on the final. | |
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CPE 315 Junior Grade Earned: B Required (Major) 1:24 pm, Mar 24, 2009 Report Evaluation |
This was Oliver's first time teaching CPE 315 at Cal Poly. He first taught the class at UC Davis. My first impression of Oliver was quite positive: He's a friendly guy with a great sense of humor, and he seemed interested in the class (gave the class a quick poll via a class activity to see where we stood in terms of comfort with software vs. comfort with hardware), and adjusted the class accordingly. His class consisted of weekly homework assignments worth about 15% of the course grade in total, three labs (5% for short ones, 10% for the longer one), one midterm worth 25%, two quizzes (one before and one after the midterm) worth 5% each, and a final exam worth 30%. Since I took CPE 357 with O'Gorman (outstanding but demanding professor) at the same time, I was quite pressed for time. I struggled in Oliver's class for the most part because of my time shortage, and because he didn't provide enough examples. The book didn't provide enough examples either. The day before our second quiz (all on caching), for example, I asked him a caching question I was confused on and he worked it out on the board. Quite a few other students suddenly 'got it' too, an indication that he didn't provide enough examples (or dedicate enough time) to the subject. Oliver pushes 2 main concepts in the class: 1) Pipelining and 2) Caching. The class average on the midterm was about 55%. He seemed concerned, but also seemed reluctant to actually ask us what problems we were having. He asked us to make up problems of our own. He hosted several study sessions during finals week, which definitely helped, but when he posted solutions to his sample Davis final, half of them basically said "Yeah, you should have known this since we did it so much in class" and didn't give an answer. Made it seem like he was a complete jerk. So overall, I have mixed feelings about Oliver. He's a really nice guy, but I don't think he has enough 315 experience. He curved our class a whole 10%, so I got a B- instead of the C- I had, and I think that was an appropriate curve. However, I don't think I'll be forgetting the "sideways pants" (joke term for an ALU drawing) anytime soon... | |
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