Selected Student Expectations and Instructor's Response


 

Expectation: Case study of any large organization database.
Response: Will not be possible to cover in the class. You can take it up as a project.

Expectation: Exploring open source DBMS.
Response: We will focus on basics. Product specific matters, you should learn on your own.

Expectation: Good grades and useful for job.
Response: I promise neither. But there is a good chance that you can get both from this course if you work hard.

Expectation: Course should be hands on.
Response: More than 70% evaluation is based on project.

Expectation: Cover data warehousing.
Response: I will cover if time permits.

Expectation: Cover applications to natural language processing.
Response: Will not be possible to cover in the class. You can take it up as a project.

Expectation: Illustrative and self explanatory slides.
Response: I rarely use slides in the class. Most of the course will be discussion oriented.

Expectation: Allow students to attend class without registering or auditing.
Response: Yes, I will.

Expectation: Allow bigger groups for bigger projects.
Response: I will allow at the most group size of three.

Expectation: In depth evaluation of project.
Response: We will have three meetings, three home works, one presentation, one demo and one report to evaluate your project.

Expectation: To be able to publish a paper out of my project.
Response: Depends on your efforts.

Expectation: Help for project.
Response: Instructor and teaching assistants will help you. However, do not expect spoon feeding.

Expectation: Better programming skills.
Response: This is not the focus of the course.

Expectation: Better understanding of academic research field.
Response: Yes, I will take care of that.

Expectation: Course should be interesting and teach us new things.
Response: I will try my best.

Expectation: We should be able to choose project of our interest.
Response: Yes.

Expectation: Relative grading.
Response: This course will have absolute grading. Your grade depends only on your performance.

Expectation: Want to know more about search engines.
Response: You can take it up as a project.

Expectation: Exams should not encourage mugging up.
Response: Yes.

Expectation: Cover more examples in class.
Response: Yes, I will.

Expectation: Also cover pattern recognition and machine learning.
Response: We do not have enough time for that,

Expectation: Start teaching from basics.
Response: Yes, I will. However, good understanding of data structures and algorithms is a prerequisite.

Expectation: Do not expect much efforts in writing report.
Response: You will have to put in efforts to write a good report. Developing good writing skills will help you in your career.

Expectation: Ask questions only on topics taught in class.
Response: Yes.

Expectation: An enjoyable course.
Response: I will try my best.

Expectation: Lab or tutorial classes.
Response: I will try to arrange a few such classes.

Expectation: Exams should have more weight.
Response: Most of you have done exam oriented courses for last fifteen years. This course will be project oriented.

Expectation: Instructor should make project groups.
Response: There is no point in instructor forcing the group. Talk to your classmates and decide for yourself.