Franklin, Diana  

If you have a question, she won't leave you behind. She's great at clarifying any misunderstandings you might have. Her lectures are very informative. They cover everything you need to know. She's great at presenting the material. She's very energetic and knows what she's doing. She sort of remindes me of Dr. Arroway in the movie Contact. She's a very down to earth person. Ask about a lan party. ;) The tests aren't too difficult, and the labs are entertaining. I had a problem with a test program incorrectly accessing my program because of a misunderstanding in the javadocs. When I pointed it out, she was happy to regrade my program. Very cool professor. I HIGHLY recommend her.

An interesting teacher. Creative and has a sense of humor but went from "I'm teaching you like you're a baby" to "I will now confuse you completely and make you feel alone and stupid." When she did stay in normal teaching mode, she got it across and it was fine...but what a disaster by all the prof's in the program descriptions. Be ready for a mess if it continues. She's fine and nice, just survive. It's 101 but feels much less organized.

She isn't always very organized and often doesn't explain things clearly. She tends to tell us how to do things and what to do, but not why it must be done that way... This leads to a broad understanding of the material, but not much in-depth comrehension. The work load is very light and easily done. Tests are fair and (i think) curved. An easy A, but if you don't have an intuitive grasp of computers/programming you might want to take another teacher to really understand the material.

Professor Franklin is an excellent teacher, and I'm surprised her ratings aren't higher. She's friendly, always wants to answer questions (she kept trying to get us to ask them!), and she can joke around with the class, too. She teaches the material well, knows her stuff, and is very willing to help. Highly recommended.

She is a very nice person. But had a hard time answering some questions. Overall I would say she was a pretty good teacher. I just don't relly to much on her ability to help you out if you don't understand something.

Prof. Franklin has a more than adequete grasp of the concepts and seems to genuinely care about the success of her students. She alternated writing on the board, using handouts, projecting her laptop and writing code, and visual aid examples (PB&J) anyone? I will admit I almost fell asleep numerous times in class, but I do have prior experience and a lot of the class was review. Still, sometimes the lectures tended to drag. Overall, not bad though.

I believe teachers are either a hit or a miss, and Franklin was an air ball. I'm not amused when a prof. comes to teach a class completely unprepared and then... brags about it? Two things truely pissed me off about this course: Her not taking anything seriously, and the grading system. Instead of just giving us the damned required output of our programs, we have to use a checker - which means you gotta run the piece of shit after every damn correction you make if it's not e x a c t l y the same as the checker. And what the fuck was with the tests? She deliberatly tries to confuse you. I don't want to get into much detail, but a problem on a java language test that has the sentence "No ifs, ands, or buts" isn't amusing, funny, or even creative. I still don't have a fucking clue what that was asking for. I guess being 'creative' when writing tests is more important than testing your knowledge of the subject.

For her first time teaching this class, I think prof Franklin did a good job teaching the material. Some of the projects seemed to be a bit too difficult and obscure and weren't as focused on the actual material we were learning as I would have hoped. I loved the bits of cpe315 wisdom she would throw in with her lecture.

In Lecture, she's decently energetic and wont bore that easy. And she goes quite quickly, skimming over the important points briefly, so you need to be a quick note taker and not fall behind. Sometimes she adds a dash of useful wisdom here and there. She used the chalkboard heavily in our class, as opposed to powerpoint, which i see a lot of people are saying here. before finals she also held a nice game of Jeapordy for candy. The work is challenging. Your programs and labs need to work perfectly, because there won't be any partial credit here. If it doesn't work, zero. The program grading is done by a preprogrammed computer that can even check for problems you may not even realized that could happen. The difficulty of the labs and programs were a bit tough to really really hard. The instructions usually consist of a a brief and slightly vague paragraph describing the main goal. MAKE sure to plan out all parts of the program EARLY, CPE 103 is not like it's predecessors where the professors spoon feed every tiny bit of the program you need to code. you have to figure out all the methods and classes of the thing yourself, and if your idea turns out to have a flaw in it (given that some of the assignments can be plum confusing, will happen), you're gonna want enough time to go back and change it. Tests are also hard. First midterm, the class did so badly (the test was way too long for 50 mins) the professor had to mondo curve it (62%=A). Second midterm wasn't so curved. A lot of the test comes from the book, those questions are usually easy if you've read that part of the book before. Some of it's Calculus, which can be tricky at times. There are coding problems too, and these can be time consuming. For coding, you have think really fast to get a solution. And you might almost lose all the credit anyway if your solution is not the most optimized one. Problem is, it does not matter how well you did on the assignments or on the other two tests. If you fail a midterm, you fail the class. end of story. All you will have is some candy from the jeapordy game. The jolly ranchers were good.

Professor Franklin did an excellent job preparing us for CPE 315 - Computer Architecture. I admire her puntuality especially getting our tests graded and done in less than 2 lectures. Her lecturs are quite straight-forward (but sometimes a little bit too fast) and she's able to answer your questions quite well. I highly recommend her and I hope to see her teach x225.

Prof. Franklin is a difficult teacher. She will challenge you to learn this material for yourself, which you will have to do mostly outside of class because the lectures were quite fast and shallow as far as explaining the material. The labs ranged from moderate to "good lord we have a week for this?" but she was usually helpful when you ask her questions. I say usually because she has this thing where if you haven't researched and tested the problem fully by yourself, she almost refuses to help. Asking her questions should be a last resort in her mind. This is both good and bad, but she was helpful in Office hours. Overall Id say shes a good teacher, but expect to spend some time outside of class learning the material.

During this entire quarter all I could think about was how this professor reminded me of that small little dog that runs through the back of scene 23 in The Incredibles by Pixar. Seriously, if you look it up you will only be able to see it...

There's not a whole lot to say... Keen is a very straight forward teacher who has a fair grading sctructure. Labs were like 20%, homework 10%, 2 midterms 20% each and final 30%. Some people had a tough time on some of the tests but others did pretty well; overall I think people did about as well or better than they had expected. From what I hear baout other 315 proffessors Dr. Keen definitely sounds like the best choice.

Dr. Keen's lectures, like most CSC prof's lectures, involved passing out a batch of Powerpoint slides and then reading them. She consistently had her syllabus pointing to labs and homework that had been turned in the week before. She's basically the only option for 315 at this point, so who cares what this evaluation says?

She goes very fast in class. The class is hard and she encourages you to go see her during office hours. Grading's pretty tough. You must have at least 60% average on all exams or you fail the class. And mandatory labs must be 100% done or you fail the class. Everything else is same old traditional stuff.

I hear alot of complaints about intructors who rely primarily on powerpoint. I like the fact that we dont have to write everything down and can instead concentrate on what is being disscussed. Diana is an excellent professor who loves computer architecture. The labs arent to bad (about the same as the other instructors). There are a few that are manditory but they arent to tough. She assigns homework on average 1 assignment every 2 weeks. Her tests are very reasonable as well and she even posts her old exams online to help you study. Shes huge on partial credit and so long as you reasonably understand the material you sill get a decent grade on her tests. I recieved a C but i worked alot this quarter. The average student with enough time should be able to pass this class with no trouble. The only thing i would recommend for future students is to make sure you take her tests seriously. They arent bad but dont screw around. If you dont average a 60% on all of them she will fail you.

Prof. Keen knows her stuff, for the most part. Yeah, whe lectures off powerpoint, but what shes saying, for the most part, is good. Its not like shes just reading whats up there. She actually explains the subject of the lecture in a clear way that you can't get directly from a powerpoint slide. Her labs are good after the first two or three. She does go faster than Prof. Seng's labs, but we did more labs than them, especially a fun one where we optomized microcode, with prizes! And the last day of class was a really fun jeaprody-style review session. I'd recommend Prof. Keen over Seng anyday without hesitation.

Diana Keen is a knowledgable and enthusiastic professor. Her lectures are fast, and she uses PowerPoint. She is not very helpful with labs, and they are a challenge. But I guess most people did fairly well. It's easy to get grades on the homework and the MIPS quiz. Her mid-terms are a bit tough, but they are reasonable. She is kinda helpful during office hours. She never answer your question. She tries to make you figure out problems by yourself. A few times I became more confused after meeting her. The final exam is comprehensive, but again, reasonable.

Professor Keen is a good lecturer but a very harsh grader. Expect to take this course again if you slack off even a little bit. She is also extremely strict about pre-requisites: once I took a priority just to get in the class and I was taking CPE 103 concurrently (which has little impact on this class if at all). She blatantly refused to let me join the class (and there went my priority). If you get in her section then prepare to bust some ass or else your ass will feel busted when you get your grade.

[for Spring 2004] Dr. Keen, now Dr. Franklin, is an excellent teacher. She's sharp, engaged, and informative. She lectures with Powerpoint, but uses the board and handouts as necessary. She encourages class participation up to and including stopping her presentation to back-track or segue into a related topic. This class has a lot of material and work to keep up with, but she's a fair grader. Overall, a great course!

Tests are pretty unfair and pretty un-representative of what was presented in class. I aced all of the labs and totally understood everything that was going on, but her test asked questions that I had no possible way of knowing. For example, you would work on learning to program in MIPS for a week and then the test would ask you how many memory cycles it took to do something. I have no idea how anyone got these questions right because it was never presented in class and I can't think of any other way to find the answer than google'ing it. Labs were pretty easy if you knew what you were doing and the homework was easy to find if you were good with looking in the book, looking at her online power point slides, and knew your way around google. I don't know why, but this teacher absolutely hated me. She seems REALLY nice in class, but after going to her office hours for help the first or second week of the quarter I was insulted both personally and as a student for several minutes (with no apparent cause) until I gave up and left. She's an OK professor but I would definitely suggest studying all of your MIPS stuff so that you can get 100% on the MIPS quiz. Do your HW with others and make sure you are getting as high as possible grades on it, and A's on all the labs are a must because test scores will probably be pretty low.

Diana Franklin is a tough professor to review. She definately had her days (and no, this is not a female based comment)... Some days she was completely unapproachable and snappy, while others she seemd to almost go out of her way to help out. As far as labs went, the single-cycle computer lab was deceptively difficult, and took quite a bit of time. However the other labs were extremely easy in my opinion. Tests weren't that bad, as you are allowed one page (one side) of notes for the first two midterms and an entire sheet for the final. The test problems were not difficult in hind sight, but I struggled with them at the time. Overall, Franklin is a pretty decent teacher, but I wouldn't go out of my way to get her for this class.

I agree with another comment in that she is hard to grade. First of all, you do have to work a bit to get the grade, but this is a 300 level class, and a very important one, if you don't get this now, you will have trouble in the future. She does lecture extremely fast, but mainly because she crams so much in every fifty minute lecture. I have a very long conmute and couldn't make it to class one out of three or four times and it almost costed me the grade, but I could get by with the online notes and the book, most of the time. She does not babysit you, and has no time to do full-blown examples during lecture, but that is what the homework is for. Me and my partner finished all labs earlier than the due date, basically because we worked outside the class. If you are not used to that, start now, it will be a must later on. The tests were fair, although challenging. The midterm was actually tougher, since with 50 minutes you don't have time to reflect and the solution is only implied in the lecture material. However, you have all the pieces if you just put a little effort. I believe she prepared us well beyond the average.

AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!! If you want a professor who REFUSES to answer your questions, won't help you with homework, won't discuss concepts with you, and will purposely make you feel like an idiot, then take Franklin. Go for it - you have a death wish. She takes no pride in her work at Cal Poly, and even dissed our own school one day in class! She takes no pride in her students - because she refuses to help them with ANYTHING, and will give you super vague answers that usually even lead you in the wrong direction! She takes no pride in her (lack of) teaching, and always prefaces her lectures with "whatever happens in class don't expect me to remember, cuz once I leave class I forget it all." What kind of teacher says that!??!?! Teachers need to be IN TUNE with their students and, it has been my experience, that teachers ACTUALLY PAY ATTENTION to their students, so that they can alter their teaching styles or explain things in different ways, if students aren't getting it. I bet she didn't even know my name, and I asked questions in class, sent emails, etc! She uses Power Point ONLY so all she has to do is click a button and not actively teach the class. Power Point works for many teachers, but Franklin uses it as a way to be LAZY. She rarely says anything other than what's on the slides...I went to EVERY class but probably would have done just as poorly had I never attended a single class!! She also has this dumb policy that you need a certain grade on each test or she'll fail you flat out....so, you could have like a C+ in the class and she'd still (coldy) FAIL YOU!!! The thing is, she'd probably enjoy failing you, too! To reiterate: AVOID THIS B*TCH AT ALL COSTS. ANY other teacher will be better!

Wow, I am surprised her ratings aren't any higher than this. Professor Franklin knows her stuff and is very helpful and enthusiastic. Her tests are the perfect difficulty rate. I mean, c'mmon, we don't go to Cal Poly to get good grades (necessarily): we come to Cal Poly to get an education. She definitely gave me one.

Lectures were based on PowerPoint slides. She gives you the slides with some blanks in them to fill in the important parts so you don't spend all your time writing down information and spend more time paying attention to lecture. As someone else stated, she has pretty much equal amounts of information on slides for simple material and complicated material, which was a bit troubling because there were several instances where I couldn't figure out things just from the slides. She was pretty approachable though, in her office, through email/Gmail, and through AIM. She never stood with us in lab because of some back issue, but that was okay. Some labs were really easy and others were intense. Expect to spend a lot of time on those hard labs. The single-cycle CPU implementation was "only" 3 labs - not the entire quarter. For non-assembly programs, you program in your language of choice (C/C++/Java), and handin a makefile and runscript. Class averages on programs were actually quite low, and this isn't one of those classes where you have to make the program work 100% in and out. She gives a huge amount of partial credit for programs. The exams were at the right difficulty level, and she gives you a lot of sample midterms to study. The homework is not cake, but not hard at all - you just have to put decent time into it. Last but not least, she will give you an F if your (weighted) average on the exams is lower than 60%, since labs can really bring up your grade. Do well in the class for the whole quarter, and you won't have to worry about it. Overall, I could recommend Franklin for 315, but I think Seng does just as well.

FINALLY, a professor for 315 that there aren't horror stories about. Of course, this is probably because this is the first quarter she's taught here. After having heard all of the 315 horror stories, I expected to get a B- or a C, but Prof. Keen was an awesome teacher, and saved me from that fate. Her presentation style was engaging and interesting, she always stopped to make sure everyone understood, she did lots of in-class examples (she calls 'em "group work"), and her exams were straight forward and covered exactly what she said they were going to cover. My only complaints are that in the 2nd half of the term, she started relying on PowerPoint a *little* too much, even though she still gives handouts of the slides; lots of the presentation were animated, which helped with the concept, but left you wondering what to write down. The other thing is that the simulator we use to build circuits and stuff sucks ass. It's this C++ piece of crap from like 1980, and it segfaults all over the place and never works. She said she was planning on using a new simulator for next quarter though, so hopefully that won't be a problem anymore. The other thing you have to be careful of in her class is deadlines... she's a real stickler for 'em, but she also makes it clear when they are. Overall, I'd *highly* recommend her and take anything else she teaches (if I weren't about to get out of here...)

Prof. Keen is a very animated, excited teacher - she loves computer architecture and shares her enthusiasm well. The course is easy to follow conceptually, but the details can be tough to nail down on the homework. She gives great outlines of all the material you're expected to know before the exam and keeps her online syllabus up to date (helpful when the lecture gets a day or two ahead/behind). She does expect homework to be turned in the second that you walk in the door - so don't try and do it during lecture. Overall, taking her class was a great experience and I wish I would have worked just a little bit harder to get that A...

Overall, this was an enjoyable class. She does rely on Powerpoint just a little too much though. Keen will hand out printed out slides of the whole Powerpoint presentation before class, leaving a few blanks for the students to fill in. So most of the time is spent copying off of her slides onto your paper. Homework was collected once a week but when the midterm average was under 75% she changed to having quizzes on the homework problems because she thought that people would take the homework more seriously then. But the scores of the quizzes were terrible because no one was doing the homework because it wasn't collected. So after the second midterm, she went back to collecting homework. The tests were fairly straight forward if you know your stuff and she hands out a semi-study guide for each test along with old midterms to see the format. My advice is to not get behind because there is a lot of material to cover and keep your slide handouts in order to help out when studying for the cumulative final because the stack of papers will be about an inch thick.

Diana Keen is a certainly a good choice for 315. It was her first quarter at Cal Poly when I took her but it didn't really show. She does a good job of explaining the material and has a very reasonable, straight forward grading system. Her lectures are a bit dry, but hey this IS computer science... What do you expect? Some people had trouble with her tests but I thought they were very reasonable and only put in an average amount of study time for them. Summary: I recommend taking Dr. Keen for 315.

This instructor has alot of enthusiasm in her class. She is very passionate about the subject, but tends to go very fast in her lectures. She is alot of help if you visit her office hours, but she will never give you a straight answer. She seems to have a philosophy that you need to learn it on your own(which can be hard if you don't know where to start). She is a great instructor and I recommend her for more advanced students because she is very challenging.

Franklin is good teacher is in class.. lectures kept me awake at 8am. Outside of class and in lab, though, she has some flaws. She withholds answers in an attemptmemt make you do your own work.. which works most of the time but is plain annoying, when you don

Professor franklin is a pretty good teacher. She presents the material in a way that is typically fairly easy to understand. The one problem i think she makes is that she pretty much spends the same amount of time on everything. For instance, sections that are very confusing and difficult she just skims through them like everything else. And simple sections get just as much attention. She covers a lot of material. THe other problem she has is labs. She never says a word in lab. No explanation, and no clarification. If you ask her a question, she will typically answer it, however, she almost never goes over what we are trying to accomplish in lab, and just lets us dive in. This is fine for the easier labs, but some labs are quite difficult, while others take only a few hours total. The first midterm was simple, the second midterm was a bit more challenging, and the final was hard I'd say.

Professor Franklin is an excellent teacher. She gives you the course notes that you just need to fill in if you'd like. She adapts her classes each quarter based on how students have been performing and to make sure to emphasize what is important to industry. My only warning to student's taking her class is to be careful of critiquing her teaching style. She will get very defensive, very quickly if you do.

Well I enjoyed the class and think she did a good job except for one of the labs being far too difficult. Too bad she is leaving after this quarter, I'd recommend her.

Just in case, her last name changed to Franklin. She is definitely one of the funnier teachers. She is really upfront and wants the class to speak up. The Labs took a bit longer than expected because the software we used always malfunctioned with the board. She goes off of slides so be sure to print them out before class every time. Her grading is very straight forward. For the lab writeups, they are simple but be sure to follow her example online. The tests are difficult but we were allowed to have all our of notes during the test. I would recommend her for 316.

Diana is decent. Apparently this was her first quarter (winter 05) teaching 316, which made for an interesting if somewhat entertaining lecture. The solution to everything is, "it's in the manual", which is at times frustrating, but she definitely gave her best and wanted us to learn the material. The book that you're supposed to buy is, of course, completely useless, but apparently it's used for 329 or something like that. Don't buy it until you take 329. In lab, she will try to help you out with sticky situations, but often become just as frustrated as you are when the code looks fine but the hardware doesn't work. And as a bonus, she was never quite clear on a few little details of a few labs that turned out to be crucial to their functionality. She's definitely friendly and pretty lenient on late-days (for labs, not homework). Tests are pretty straightforward, because they're open-note, and she posts her powerpoints. "Oh, god, not powerpoints!" Yes, but she keeps you on your toes by not filling them in completely in the student copies, only on her presentation copy. And she'll use the board sometimes too. Bottom line: I'd recommend her for 316, since she's probably learned a few things about how to run the course by now.

I really enjoyed taking CPE-316 with Dr. Franklin. Her lectures were organized and clear. Sometimes things went a bit quickly, but she always took time to explain things more clearly any time anyone had questions. The assignments were reasonable, not too hard but challenging enough to help one learn.