Nariman Farsad

Even though CPS721 is a useless course that is too outdated, Farsad really tried to make this course as student-friendly as possible. He was always available in office hours and his lecture content was great too. He genuinely cared about how the students do in the course and made it as fair as he possibly could (even though he wasn't coordinator).

Honestly, the prof is good BUTTT he is not the course instructor. The midterm was hard due to the fact that there was no back-tracking and each question had like 20 different options. This made it impossible to get a good mark even after he gave partial marks. I was completely prepared for this midterm but It just wasn't a fair exam.

The midterm was really hard and most of the class failed, he asked to drop the course who failed the exam. NEVER TAKING THIS PROF AGAIN

A seemingly good prof at the start, but the midterm came and it was unnecessarily difficult. There are 2 profs managing the course at the moment and the other prof also agreed it was overly hard. There were questions that we hadn't learned yet and we received an email telling us to drop out of the course if we didn't perform well enough.

Dr. Farsad was a great professor. I feel like the current rating does not accurately reflect that. The material he taught is incredibly complicated and difficult (CPS 824 Reinforcement Learning), as such the lectures are math heavy and can be tough to follow. He did a good job teaching it nonetheless, and was always available to answer questions!

Professor Farsad is one of the most chill profs I've had. He organizes the course in a modern way, ongoing project and assignment-based as opposed to just tests. The best thing about taking his course is the amount of effort and feedback both he and the TA's give for your project - which is a lot. The material is cutting edge and relevant.

Had Nariman teach CPS803: Machine Learning. It is a demanding course, you may be quite naïve if you think differently or are surprised by this. One double-edge sword about the course is it's a split graduate/undergraduate course. This means some of the content will be above the ugrad level but that won't transfer to evaluations. Overall great!