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Title of Course: DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Course Number: E81 530A
Section: 01
Semester: Fall 2004
Instructors: Clark Butler (Instructor);
Completed Evaluations: 25 of 40 (63%)
Display Mode: Detail Averages | Chart Averages | Comments
Key: The number next to each response represents a student Learn more

Engineering Template

General Comments
Please make comments and criticisms as constructive as possible; personal remarks or attacks are contrary to the spirit of this evaluation process.
What did you like most about this course and professor?
  00 The professors obvious expertise in the field and willingness to share this.
  02 The book for this class is very good, and the course material is interesting.
  03 It's a practical course.
  05 Course material was interesting, and professor was very enthusiastic about it.
  09 saw how databases work underneath
  10 professor is a great guy
  12 I think the teacher really wanted to emphasize to us how database were in the 'real world'. He also seemed to really care if we understood the material or not.
  14 I enjoyed the labs and homework assignments where we got to apply the theoretical concepts to real world applications.
  16 Professor was very understanding and helpful when we needed extra help.
  17 Really liked the relational algebra, normalization, optimization parts of the course
  18 The course gave me a good intro/understanding of RDBMS. Prof'r Butler was enthusiastic about the course and made it really interesting.
  20 Expertise.
  23 I actually liked the group presentations. They each give a different take on the material, which adds some nice variation.
  24 Professor was very nice and concerned for students. He made the course interesting. The material itself was pretty good. The student lectures were fun and very informative.
How could this course and professor improve?
  00 Have the TA's take the exams before you give them to the class to gauge the length. 2 of the 3 exams given to this point were unfinishable.
  02 More organized lectures, faster return time of labs/homeworks, more connection between lecture/reading and exams. More engaging lectures - create more interaction from start to finish, especially considering how practical the course is.
  03 I think it's quite good.
  04 More engaged with the class.
  05 Stick to the most important topics and explain how to apply them, with specific examples that explain how to do things that we need to do for the tests and the project, not just the general concepts.
  07 Return exams and homework in a timely manner. E.g., one exam was returned 4 weeks following the exam.
  08 Tests and assignments can be returned more promptly.
  09 not so many details
  10 more organized, thoroughly planned lectures; more in-class guidance/instruction on homework/lab topics
  11 Make the lectures a bit more interesting
  12 I think if the professor was a bit more involved in the creation and grading of homeworks and tests that would be good. It took a really long time to get anything back so it was difficult to understand how we were doing in the class before the next thing was due. If we were doing something wrong we really wouldn't know it. Also, more guidance along the project would have been good. I understand the intent was to get us to work with real world situations, but sometimes we just couldn't get a question answered
  14 Power point can be helpful but is not a great teaching method. Students are less likely to take notes if the slides are posted on the web and therefor are less engaged in the class. Distraction is easy when you can get lost reading the slides and tune out the speaker. Too much information was on each slide and often felt like the class was a process of reading power point slides outload. I enjoyed when the professor used the chalkboard and went through examples. This was much more engaging. The group presentations were often equally non-engaging when students had poor presentation skills and relied on reading power point slides. Use less power point and more chalkboard. Technology is not always a good thing. Graders did a poor job of getting work back to students in a reasonable amount of time.
  16 grades for the hw and lab could be returned to the students faster. more help for the project can be given to the students in class.
  17 The last exam was probably unnecessary especially since the time given for the project was so short and no new material was going to be included in the final exam anyway, as compared to the previous exams.
  18 The workload is a bit too high. Maybe the final exam is not needed since the project drives a lot of the concepts taught and required.
  22 There course was too heave, i.e. We had 5 labs, 5 homeworks, 3 exams, 1 presentation, and a final project. Instead of focusing on the quantity of work given it would be more beneficial to focus on the quality and what the student can gain from the assignment. Also the homeworks/labs didn't correspond to any of the exams. The point of spending time on the homeworks and labs is to prepare for the exam.
  23 Instead of having a giant project at the end of course to learn all the ideas in the course, incorporate labs throughout the semester. I felt like I really didn't understand the material because I wasn't actually applying it. Dr. Butler, please work out all your examples before class. It is confusing when you make mistakes; I only learn the wrong way.
  24 Professor could have better powerpoint slides. The work load was uneven, and it wasn't always very clear what was expected. Sometimes, the professor would spend too much time on something not too important, or did not have the appropriate knowledge. Labs/homeworks could be better.
What would you tell another student who asked you to describe this course?
  00 A broad introduction to databases
  02 I think it's worthwhile, but the lectures are very hard to follow. It also was a challenging course to seem engaged during lectures.
  03 This is a useful course and very practical.
  09 good to learn theory but not to learn applications of using in the real world
  11 Its fine
  12 I would say that the class was a little boring, although I think the professor did a decent job with lectures. I would tell them that the course seemed a bit disorganized, which made things more difficult than they really should have been.
  14 Challenging and a lot of information. Useful for real world applications and knowledge. Very beneficial for future work in companies.
  16 Material was well taught but the timing and over all organization was poor
  18 Yes.
  23 The conceptual understanding of databases, database design, the relational model. Not too much hands-on work or coding.
  24 good course. not overly difficult, but challenging
Was the text useful? Was it understandable? Why or why not?
  00 The text was very good.
  02 Yes, useful and understandable.
  03 Yes, very easy to understand.
  04 Text was a fairly good reference.
  05 Yes. The book was often more concrete and easy to follow than the lectures, though not everything was in the book.
  09 so-so, lots of reading material, course covers about 1500 pages of the book
  10 yes; yes
  11 Yes, indeed
  12 Yes the text was useful. Most of it was understandable, although I really didn't like the way it read. Also the FD parts were much more confusing than other books I've seen, so I relied on lectures for that information.
  14 Yes, the book clarified much of what was discussed in class.
  15 The textbook was terrible. The example SQL is not MS SQL compliant a good amount of the time, which makes it very difficult to figure out how to execute them
  16 yes, the text was useful.
  17 Yes it was useful and understandable
  18 Yes.
  20 Yes. Yes.
  22 The class material didn't really seem to correspond to the book.
  23 I didn't really use the text much, although for some people I know, it clarified some ideas in lecture. I thought at times it was too dense or too abstract, with poorly explained examples
  24 Yes, the book was very good and useful. Very clear with many examples, and complemented the lecture nicely.
Were the assigned homework or problem sets helpful and relevant to the course? Why or why not?
  00 The labs and homeworks were very useful.
  02 Yes.
  03 Yes.
  04 Homework was useful.
  05 The sql and relational algebra homeworks were helpful, but the other labs weren't always useful. They seemed like they involved fairly simple procedures that would have been easier if someone had just told us how to do them, and it would have been more useful if they had given us a chance to actually do the concepts that we were learning in class and that we needed to prepare for the tests and the project.
  09 some were and some were not
  10 no, first we didn't receive them back promptly enough to learn anything from our mistakes. second, much of the homework was far beyond what we saw in class and beyond what was in the book, which made it difficult to learn -- almost had to make up answers some time, which doesn't really contribute to learning... and we didn't get them back OR receive solutions, so who knows what the answers were supposed to be?
  11 Yeah, for the most part
  12 Some of them were, some were not. I found most of them helpful, although the SQL labs got repetitive and jumped from simple to quite difficult for what we had learned. The ASP lab was ridiculous, as it required people to have ASP knowledge that quite a few of us did not have. If that had been gone over in class, it might've been ok. But as it stood that was not a helpful assignment at all.
  14 Yes. The projects allowed you to really work with SQL and try things out, not just learn about it in a book.
  16 it was helpful but not helpful on the exams. Instructions for the lab, hw and exams could of written clearly.
  17 Yes they were
  18 Yes. It would be helpful if it could be returned earlier.
  20 Sometimes. Project involved a lot of work which was not of any real benefit. Use of real-world data may actually be less effective than using contrived data (or some combination) designed to expose students to all concepts explored in class.
  22 No I do not feel they were helpful. We had homework, that took a lot of time to complete, that did not help with the material covered on the exams or the final project.
  23 Sometimes, the assignments were repetitive or ambiguous as to what the assignment was.
  24 varies...usually the assignments were relevent to the course, but often the workload was uneven and the assignments themselves were unclear. Usually, they were a bit frusterating, but useful in the end.
Please use this space to comment on any other aspect of the course. (i.e., help sessions, teaching assistants, etc.)
  00 Besides the length of the exams, the class should have a better idea of what to expect content-wise. Writing SQL was at least 70% of the first exam and yet was not listed as a subject to prepare.
  04 TAs were bad.
  10 teaching assistants seemed unfamiliar w/ materials/specific homework/lab details
  17 The exams and the homeworks need to be returned a little more quickly, By the time I got the exams back I had forgotten most of the questions and when I did get it back I could really relate it to my thought process at that time. Also the professor spent a lot of time explaining SQL queries, well the syntax wasnt as important to me as compared to the logic behind the syntax. The exams for this course should be allowed cheat sheets especially since remebering the syntax of a SELECT statement isnt as important as getting the statement right itself. Instead of doing three different ways of ER modelling, it would have been better for me to be taught just one convention and concentrate on the design of the database.
  20 The group presentation format is severly flawed. Groups were presenting, not teaching, and effectively 8 very important topics were in one ear and out the other. This is most evident by the lack of questions from the class after presentations (and the fact that the questions which were asked were topical, not conceptual).
  22 cut out some of the work. There is a reason why we haven't gotten grades for homework we were assigned in October..its because there is just too much and neither the student nor the TA's can keep up.
  23 The teaching assistants were extremely slow to grade and didn't seem to do much at all for the class. They never seemed to get their act together.
  24 the class was enjoyable.

Title of Course: DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Course Number: E81 530A
Section: 01
Semester: Fall 2004
Instructors: Clark Butler (Instructor);
Completed Evaluations: 25 of 40 (63%)
Display Mode: Detail Averages \| Chart Averages \| Comments
Key: The number next to each response represents a student Learn more

Engineering Template

General Comments
Please make comments and criticisms as constructive as possible; personal remarks or attacks are contrary to the spirit of this evaluation process.
	What did you like most about this course and professor?
00	The professors obvious expertise in the field and willingness to share this.
02	The book for this class is very good, and the course material is interesting.
03	It's a practical course.
05	Course material was interesting, and professor was very enthusiastic about it.
09	saw how databases work underneath
10	professor is a great guy
12	I think the teacher really wanted to emphasize to us how database were in the 'real world'. He also seemed to really care if we understood the material or not.
14	I enjoyed the labs and homework assignments where we got to apply the theoretical concepts to real world applications.
16	Professor was very understanding and helpful when we needed extra help.
17	Really liked the relational algebra, normalization, optimization parts of the course
18	The course gave me a good intro/understanding of RDBMS. Prof'r Butler was enthusiastic about the course and made it really interesting.
20	Expertise.
23	I actually liked the group presentations. They each give a different take on the material, which adds some nice variation.
24	Professor was very nice and concerned for students. He made the course interesting. The material itself was pretty good. The student lectures were fun and very informative.
	How could this course and professor improve?
00	Have the TA's take the exams before you give them to the class to gauge the length. 2 of the 3 exams given to this point were unfinishable.
02	More organized lectures, faster return time of labs/homeworks, more connection between lecture/reading and exams. More engaging lectures - create more interaction from start to finish, especially considering how practical the course is.
03	I think it's quite good.
04	More engaged with the class.
05	Stick to the most important topics and explain how to apply them, with specific examples that explain how to do things that we need to do for the tests and the project, not just the general concepts.
07	Return exams and homework in a timely manner. E.g., one exam was returned 4 weeks following the exam.
08	Tests and assignments can be returned more promptly.
09	not so many details
10	more organized, thoroughly planned lectures; more in-class guidance/instruction on homework/lab topics
11	Make the lectures a bit more interesting
12	I think if the professor was a bit more involved in the creation and grading of homeworks and tests that would be good. It took a really long time to get anything back so it was difficult to understand how we were doing in the class before the next thing was due. If we were doing something wrong we really wouldn't know it. Also, more guidance along the project would have been good. I understand the intent was to get us to work with real world situations, but sometimes we just couldn't get a question answered
14	Power point can be helpful but is not a great teaching method. Students are less likely to take notes if the slides are posted on the web and therefor are less engaged in the class. Distraction is easy when you can get lost reading the slides and tune out the speaker. Too much information was on each slide and often felt like the class was a process of reading power point slides outload. I enjoyed when the professor used the chalkboard and went through examples. This was much more engaging. The group presentations were often equally non-engaging when students had poor presentation skills and relied on reading power point slides. Use less power point and more chalkboard. Technology is not always a good thing. Graders did a poor job of getting work back to students in a reasonable amount of time.
16	grades for the hw and lab could be returned to the students faster. more help for the project can be given to the students in class.
17	The last exam was probably unnecessary especially since the time given for the project was so short and no new material was going to be included in the final exam anyway, as compared to the previous exams.
18	The workload is a bit too high. Maybe the final exam is not needed since the project drives a lot of the concepts taught and required.
22	There course was too heave, i.e. We had 5 labs, 5 homeworks, 3 exams, 1 presentation, and a final project. Instead of focusing on the quantity of work given it would be more beneficial to focus on the quality and what the student can gain from the assignment. Also the homeworks/labs didn't correspond to any of the exams. The point of spending time on the homeworks and labs is to prepare for the exam.
23	Instead of having a giant project at the end of course to learn all the ideas in the course, incorporate labs throughout the semester. I felt like I really didn't understand the material because I wasn't actually applying it. Dr. Butler, please work out all your examples before class. It is confusing when you make mistakes; I only learn the wrong way.
24	Professor could have better powerpoint slides. The work load was uneven, and it wasn't always very clear what was expected. Sometimes, the professor would spend too much time on something not too important, or did not have the appropriate knowledge. Labs/homeworks could be better.
	What would you tell another student who asked you to describe this course?
00	A broad introduction to databases
02	I think it's worthwhile, but the lectures are very hard to follow. It also was a challenging course to seem engaged during lectures.
03	This is a useful course and very practical.
09	good to learn theory but not to learn applications of using in the real world
11	Its fine
12	I would say that the class was a little boring, although I think the professor did a decent job with lectures. I would tell them that the course seemed a bit disorganized, which made things more difficult than they really should have been.
14	Challenging and a lot of information. Useful for real world applications and knowledge. Very beneficial for future work in companies.
16	Material was well taught but the timing and over all organization was poor
18	Yes.
23	The conceptual understanding of databases, database design, the relational model. Not too much hands-on work or coding.
24	good course. not overly difficult, but challenging
	Was the text useful? Was it understandable? Why or why not?
00	The text was very good.
02	Yes, useful and understandable.
03	Yes, very easy to understand.
04	Text was a fairly good reference.
05	Yes. The book was often more concrete and easy to follow than the lectures, though not everything was in the book.
09	so-so, lots of reading material, course covers about 1500 pages of the book
10	yes; yes
11	Yes, indeed
12	Yes the text was useful. Most of it was understandable, although I really didn't like the way it read. Also the FD parts were much more confusing than other books I've seen, so I relied on lectures for that information.
14	Yes, the book clarified much of what was discussed in class.
15	The textbook was terrible. The example SQL is not MS SQL compliant a good amount of the time, which makes it very difficult to figure out how to execute them
16	yes, the text was useful.
17	Yes it was useful and understandable
18	Yes.
20	Yes. Yes.
22	The class material didn't really seem to correspond to the book.
23	I didn't really use the text much, although for some people I know, it clarified some ideas in lecture. I thought at times it was too dense or too abstract, with poorly explained examples
24	Yes, the book was very good and useful. Very clear with many examples, and complemented the lecture nicely.
	Were the assigned homework or problem sets helpful and relevant to the course? Why or why not?
00	The labs and homeworks were very useful.
02	Yes.
03	Yes.
04	Homework was useful.
05	The sql and relational algebra homeworks were helpful, but the other labs weren't always useful. They seemed like they involved fairly simple procedures that would have been easier if someone had just told us how to do them, and it would have been more useful if they had given us a chance to actually do the concepts that we were learning in class and that we needed to prepare for the tests and the project.
09	some were and some were not
10	no, first we didn't receive them back promptly enough to learn anything from our mistakes. second, much of the homework was far beyond what we saw in class and beyond what was in the book, which made it difficult to learn -- almost had to make up answers some time, which doesn't really contribute to learning... and we didn't get them back OR receive solutions, so who knows what the answers were supposed to be?
11	Yeah, for the most part
12	Some of them were, some were not. I found most of them helpful, although the SQL labs got repetitive and jumped from simple to quite difficult for what we had learned. The ASP lab was ridiculous, as it required people to have ASP knowledge that quite a few of us did not have. If that had been gone over in class, it might've been ok. But as it stood that was not a helpful assignment at all.
14	Yes. The projects allowed you to really work with SQL and try things out, not just learn about it in a book.
16	it was helpful but not helpful on the exams. Instructions for the lab, hw and exams could of written clearly.
17	Yes they were
18	Yes. It would be helpful if it could be returned earlier.
20	Sometimes. Project involved a lot of work which was not of any real benefit. Use of real-world data may actually be less effective than using contrived data (or some combination) designed to expose students to all concepts explored in class.
22	No I do not feel they were helpful. We had homework, that took a lot of time to complete, that did not help with the material covered on the exams or the final project.
23	Sometimes, the assignments were repetitive or ambiguous as to what the assignment was.
24	varies...usually the assignments were relevent to the course, but often the workload was uneven and the assignments themselves were unclear. Usually, they were a bit frusterating, but useful in the end.
	Please use this space to comment on any other aspect of the course. (i.e., help sessions, teaching assistants, etc.)
00	Besides the length of the exams, the class should have a better idea of what to expect content-wise. Writing SQL was at least 70% of the first exam and yet was not listed as a subject to prepare.
04	TAs were bad.
10	teaching assistants seemed unfamiliar w/ materials/specific homework/lab details
17	The exams and the homeworks need to be returned a little more quickly, By the time I got the exams back I had forgotten most of the questions and when I did get it back I could really relate it to my thought process at that time. Also the professor spent a lot of time explaining SQL queries, well the syntax wasnt as important to me as compared to the logic behind the syntax. The exams for this course should be allowed cheat sheets especially since remebering the syntax of a SELECT statement isnt as important as getting the statement right itself. Instead of doing three different ways of ER modelling, it would have been better for me to be taught just one convention and concentrate on the design of the database.
20	The group presentation format is severly flawed. Groups were presenting, not teaching, and effectively 8 very important topics were in one ear and out the other. This is most evident by the lack of questions from the class after presentations (and the fact that the questions which were asked were topical, not conceptual).
22	cut out some of the work. There is a reason why we haven't gotten grades for homework we were assigned in October..its because there is just too much and neither the student nor the TA's can keep up.
23	The teaching assistants were extremely slow to grade and didn't seem to do much at all for the class. They never seemed to get their act together.
24	the class was enjoyable.