Li Xiao

School: George Washington University
Department: Business
Location: Washington, DC
Overall Rating
rated by 14 students
Helpfulness
Clarity
Easiness
Rating Comment
Overall
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Easiness
Pros: -TA's were very helpful
Cons: -She did nothing...
Overall
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Easiness
Pros: She is nice
Cons: That's about it
The first few projects are decently easy, then get a little time consuming. Her lecture slides teach you proofs, but not really coding. The exams are straight from the in class assignments. This class is actually pretty cool, but don't procrastinate with the projects.
Overall
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Pros: Nice, approachable. Available right after class for office hours. Encouraged students to come talk to her or Skype her.
Questions from exams are old worksheet questions.
She gives you a heads up what you can expect on the exams & final.
Cheat sheets on test, two for final.
Cons: I don't think many people actually truly learned how to prove running times.
Time consuming projects, our TA was extremely strict, often given out zeros for simple errors or partially correct solutions. Very frustrating
If you had a bad teacher for CSE260 (and I won't name anyone...) and skipped the algorithm section, the class might start off a little foreign to you. A lot of things can start off being really confusing if you don't take the time to practice the worksheet questions again and read the book from time to time to clear some things up. Overall, this class was helpful but I feel like lectures were often only beneficial to get worksheets. Go to all classes, and make sure your worksheets are fully filled out and correct. They will be your guide throughout the semester!
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she is a very good professor. she cared about students' understanding. her exams were very easy; the questions were exactly from the worksheets. however, she gave projects which was a lot of work. the last two projects were too hard and required experience in programming.
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Pros: She is very nice. That's about it.
Cons: She reads straight off the poorly made power points. You had to stare at the pseudo-code on the slide for 10 minutes just to make sense of what's going on. While doing this, you have to try to understand her accent AND take notes.
The projects start out very easy, and then grow in difficult. And I mean it. The last 2 projects are almost impossible, as there are stuff on there that she maybe spent 2 minutes on in lecture, or she didn't even cover. She is one of those professors who seems to think we are graduate students with years of experience.
Each project has written portion to it. These written portions are extremely difficult. They are worth at least half of the grade on the project.
But most importantly, she can't teach. And she has no idea what's going on half the time in regards to the projects.
She's a nice lady. She pushes her students, which is a good thing. But she tends to push them too hard, and beyond what we are capable of at this point. Overall, if you have to take this class with this lady, don't take any other time consuming class with it.
Overall
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Easiness
Pros: Very well organized
Reasonable exam/quiz difficulty
Responsive to student complaints/concerns
Cons: Slight difficulty imbalance in lecture (may spend a lot of time going on about simple and intuitive concepts and too little time on the harder stuff)
Accent
She is a great professor. Her lecture slides are all available online and have enough thorough and well-explained content that you could probably learn the entire course with only lecture slides. She goes further in-depth with the slides by doing more examples on the board, though they can be a little hard to follow.
She does take attendance through daily in-class exercises. The exercises are really useful for understanding the material though, and if you don't get all the questions, they aren't actually graded and they are mostly just there to help you learn and make sure you were in class and not sleeping the entire time.
Exams and quizzes are fair. You can bring one sheet of notes on the exam, and they typically go for breadth rather than depth. It will cover just about everything, but the questions are easy-medium difficulty compared to the homework/lecture examples on the same topics. Quizzes are very easy and most people get 90%+ on them, but each one is 5% of your grade for a little 20 minute quiz so you'd better make sure you know it.
Homework was fair. It was graded strangely, but I imagine that would change with the TA and most people got 100% on every one. She used to assign too many problems, but people complained that it felt like busywork so she started to cut down the number of problems, which was really cool of her.
The only real problem is her accent, but as far as Chinese professors go, she's the best I've had. She enunciates well and I never had a problem understanding her. If you sit in the back you may have some trouble as some people complain she's too quiet, which she tried to adjust, but unlike the homework, she didn't keep up with it. Either way, considering some of the other foreign professors I've had, her voice isn't worth complaining about.
Overall
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Easiness
Pros: Exams are DIRECTLY from the worksheets... verbatim.
Cons: She's not a very good teacher and the projects are difficult.
Going to class is worthless in terms of actually learning anything. Just get a copy of the worksheets that she passes out in class -- they are the exams. You get a cheat sheet on all her tests so just scrunch EVERYTHING on EVERY worksheet down.
The projects can be kind of hard and time consuming. Work with someone else and it's easier. They all require standard linux system calls, so I would recommend programming them in the CSE lab on one of the linux boxes with Eclipse. If you hit ctrl+space it pulls an index of all system calls.
In short: Make a good cheat sheet and don't wait until the last second for the projects and you'll get at least a 3.5
Overall
Helpfulness
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Easiness
Pros: Exams are straight from the worksheets.
Sometimes she can be hard to understand, but the lectures pretty much come from the book, so if you didn't understand something, you can always look it up. The exams come straight from the worksheets. The most difficult part of the class is the projects, but this depends entirely on the TA.
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Pros: Will give extra credit on random days if you're present.
Cons: I don't think I learned anything in this class. But I was a business major who needed this to finish my minor, so it was a pretty easy 4.0.
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Easiness
Pros: Nice lady who gives a lot of extra credit. The tests are straight from the work sheets.
Cons: The projects are nigh impossible without searching on google for answers. The TA was completely horrible for this course. The lectures are also very boring.
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Easiness
Pros: The tests are easy since they are directly from the worksheets. The course is graded fairly
Cons: This class is EXTREMELY boring. The teacher reads from slides that are word from word for the book. She is a nice lady but she is terrible at making the class engaging. I went to class each day and did not pay attention at all. The tests are directly from the worksheets so make sure you put in the effort to make your cheat sheets include every word from those worksheets. The only things I learned in this class came from the projects. They can be time consuming and difficult but not impossible.
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Easiness
Pros: Knows the subject
Cons: Accent
Good prof
Overall
Helpfulness
Clarity
Easiness
Pros: Exams are entirely based on worksheets
Answers to all worksheets are given in class
Cons: Projects are difficult, there is no prep lab for them, and the TA is awful at grading.
Not too bad. Very nice lady who is pretty flexible.
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Easiness
the easiest class you will ever take. Just go the lectures and do the worksheets and quizzes. Then on the exams, she allows you to use a cheat sheet that you can print off. Just shrink all the quizzes and worksheets and you're golden, no studying! she copies the questions word for word, and maybe changes one or two of the numbers.

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