3.0
Quality2.9
Difficulty67%
Would Retake109
Reviews67%
Would Retake
109
Reviews
Rating DistributionOfficial
5
26
4
24
3
17
2
18
1
24
What Students Say
“I hate giving this review, because Bina is a sweetheart, she really is”
CSE321CSE241 - 3.0 rating“Useful class, the projects may take your times but easy”
CSE486 - 4.0 ratingClass Info
Online Classes
100%
Attendance Mandatory
30%
Textbook Required
60%
Grade Predictor
Your expected effort level
Predicted Grade
A-
Grade Distribution
Common Tags
Rating Trend
Stable
+0.11 avg changeRatings by Course
CSE116C
5.0
(1)CSE521
5.0
(1)EAS345
5.0
(1)CSE341
4.0
(1)CSE587
4.0
(4)Difficulty by Course
CS114
5.0
CS116
4.0
CSE489
4.0
CSE113
3.9
CSE116
3.8
Reviews (109)
She does not know a thing, I have no clue how she got hired.
great prof, had her for 2 classes. hard, but is there to help the students.
Hard to understand at time. She helpful during office hours!
Always helpful
very hard to understand her
Impossible to understand. Pointless mumbling lectures.
Helpful, knowledgable, concise. The tests aren't too hard, and she's very fair in her grading.
Gives decent discussions, fairly reasonable projects, a LOT of people sign up for office hours but she is reasonably helpful. Definitely one of the better teachers in the department.
Well she does have a phd...
Not qualified to impart knowledge to others, rare office hours, projects impossible to understand or complete, makes otherwise bright students give up. This class is really a crosslisted 500 level graduate course, its hard.
Not bad, not great.
The course is difficult but she does all she can to help. You can always meet her, but sometimes have to wait in line. If you put the time in she will too. You have to work with her not just take from her. I really like her as a teacher.
No Comments
She is very nice and easy to talk to. I didnt like the way she presented the material. So far i have almost no idea whats going on, but somehow have a 75, i am hoping to drift bye. She does make an effort to provide help to you. The accent is tehre, but easy to understand,
kind of disorganized, not a bad prof though. annoying projects - noone really understands em, code is presented in recitation to copy down. you dont have a choice anyway, so go register for 421 now
Fun class, teaches pretty good. Claims to be most available professor at UB but definitely isn't. A fairly easy A if you pay attention and do the labs.
The most scattered professor I've ever experienced, her lectures are incomprehensible. Thankfully, the labs are simple as hell, the tests are a joke, and it's almost impossible to not do well in this course. She drops the lowest lab grade and lets you cheat on the final exam. I mean, come on! I had no prior programming experience and it was easy.
There isn't a choice for this class, but I'll tell you about here anyway. I alreaddy knew C++, so for me everything was a joke. Even if I didn't know it, I still think it would be a joke. She has no idea how to run an exam, have fun finding you ID when you are done. Uses terrible annalogies, I think we baked about ten cakes. You'll get that soon.
Pretty easy class if you get the concepts of programming. The labs go from easy to hard relativly fast. But if you attend lecture (which most dont) she gives you some lab answers.
Bina is a great professor and very helpful outside of class as well. She's hilarious in-class and makes the information much more fun. She practically hands you the exam questions ahead of time, and projects are lots of fun (as long as you know C ahead of time or can learn very fast). Definitely take with her!
The lectures are tough to get much from, she is a bit scattered. But, she goes over examples which are basically the exam, so as long as you do those, your golden. The projects are not too bad if you can use C.
Dont need to go to class but she is a decent teacher sometimes hard to understand but never that bad. projects are not to hard and good to learn from its a good class to take with her
You learn and get a good grade. Exams are such that you know what to expect and she always throws in a little twist to challenge you. Plus, she's very nice to students.
Easy Class and she makes it easier. Assigns weekly homeworks and can be a challenge but once you get your grade you can talk to the ta and he will change it if you can kinda show you know what your doing. Tests are very easy if you go to class. she tells you exactly what to study
A babbling incoherent mess. It's as if she... when she... doesn't know english... talks in sentence fragments.
Lectures are really helpful to attend, though she is a bit incomprehensible with an accent. But go to class and she will tell you exactly what's on the tests and go over examples really similar to actual test questions. Overall a fair class.
Dr. Bina is a very helpful professor. She does make some mistakes in class, which can cause confusion. Her project description are vague and confusing, but if you talk to her, she usually explains things sufficiently. Tests are easy if you go to lecture and give at least 50% of your attention. TAs are usually pretty good as well.
This class was average. The projects were vague and did not always follow the progression of the class material. We ended up having only 2 homework assignments, even though they were supposed to be weekly. Tests are fairly easy if you go to class and pay attention. If you can, I would pick Schindler, but Dr. Bina did a pretty good job.
She gives easy assignments and her quizzes are very straight forward. She is very understanding and will help you out whenever she can.
You don't need to attend her class everyday, but you must go to her review session, she will explain all the questions that are 98% similar to the test/final. You just need to know all the key terms on the last page of every Chapter. Her labs are super easy, you can always get 100, the lab TA is really helpful. Overall, her class is super easy =)
Very easy class if you are a decent C programmer. Class material was a little too shallow for me; I would have liked to have learned a little more. Projects are slightly challenging, but doable. TAs are usually very good, and Dr. Bina gives a lot of help if you go to her office hours. No homework, 3 projects, 1 midterm, and the final.
worst professor I ever had! She doesn't know how to teach
This teacher is really not good at all. She doesn't teach anything. She just talks. Its either you understand it or don't. Even the labs the TA just tells me what code to copy and I get a 100. Not complaining about that but when it comes to tests, I know nothing.
It is very difficult to follow her lectures as she tends to babble and/or talk in circles. All of the labs are very easy to figure out by yourself (most of the TAs will actually just give you the necessary codes), but retaining and understanding information for exams is incredibly difficult.
She is a nice professor, she chose to drop one of our exam because everyone in the class had low grade.
She doesn't seem that she knows something she teaches. She tries to explain but it is very hard to get it. She keeps making mistakes by herself and doesn't know how to fix it.
she doesn't look like knowing something she teaches. She tries to explain but it is very hard to get it. She keeps making mistakes by herself and doesn't know how to fix it. and how can I know?
She is late for class and skips class sometimes. Even she has review classes, that doesn't help. She makes so many errors during class and it confuses students. She should study first to teach this class.
She is late to class everyday. She rambles on in lectures - sometimes it sounds as if she's just talking to herself. She makes HUGE mistakes all the time and, in turn, confuses the heck out of her students. The labs are easy but you don't retain any information because you just copy code from her or the TA. Worst class I've ever taken.
I found her difficult to understand. She mumbles and makes lots of errors. Although we were urged to go to class it was very difficult to learn and retain the information she presented. Labs weren't hard with the TA's help but had little to do with exams, which are worth the majority of our grade.
You will do some really cool stuff in this class, but be prepared to learn on your own. Projects are pretty easy, tests are fair, curve is generous. Just be prepared to learn some stuff yourself
Dint learn much. Class material becomes very complicated very fast,was tough for most beginners to keep up. The professor seems to be very forgetful and prone to mistakes. Very poor exam reviews because she can't cover everything in a 50 min session. 95% of textbook is ignored. I would learn Java at home first if this class is a requirement for you
Professor Ramamurthy is a horrible professor. If you don't know any computer programming or java stuff, you will have an impossible time in this class. The TA's do all the labs for you because most students can't do on their own. Tests are ridiculous short answer. She rambles and makes mistakes all the time and explains nothing. Good luck
Good professor..
The class can be very frustrating because she makes mistakes while programming frequently. However, the labs are very easy thanks to the help of the TAs, and the grading curve is so lenient that there's really no way you could get a bad grade. Definitely a good choice for fulfilling the math requirement.
Friendly and funny lady, mediocre teacher. Processing is the language taught in class, and she always made mistakes at least twice during lecture. Managed to get an A by practicing all the programming on my own, and it also helps that I took a Java class in HS. However, as an MIS major, learning this language felt so useless. Who uses Processing?!
Terrible professor overall, programming skills are horrible, knowledge and professionalism clearly lacking. Do not take this class if you are not required to. Class projects are a joke to the world of computer engineering, and if you have any self respect as a programmer you will not take this course.
How to say? good professor but don't know how to teach. lectures are not clear. Exams are easy. three projects very tough ..
Professor Ramamurthy is one of the nicest people ever and she is someone that is enjoyable to talk to, however she teaches with no exact direction where the class is going. She says we are going to do one thing then she stops and changes her mind multiple times. All I can say is hope your ta knows whats going on.
I hate giving this review, because Bina is a sweetheart, she really is. Her lectures are entertaining, if not a bit difficult to understand. If you're this far at UB, you've gotten used to accents, so I won't bother with that, but what she really suffers from is a lack of structure. You won't know what's due when, or even what you're studying.
Bina was easily the best teacher I had when I took classes this semester. She went over problems in class instead of giving us a useless lecture, so the homework was easy when we got to it. Can be tough towards the end, but a little bit of studying will land you an A in the course.
I think she's just as lost in the course as I am. It seems as if she just makes up things on the spot during lecture. Very disorganized curriculum, homework questions looks nothing like the lecture material. Very frequently makes mistakes in coding and notes. First test was 50 minutes which is way too short to complete. Generally unclear teacher.
Very hard to understand. The lectures really do not help much. You really have to already understand some stuff to understand what's going on. 5 labs, 5 Quizzes and 3 exams, drops the lowest of each. Labs are a guaranteed 100 if you go to lab. Overall, this class is horrible. I would avoid it at all costs.
Very unorganized. We did not receive a full syllabus with the dates and times for exams, quizzes, and due dates. The lectures seem improvised with no structure. The TA's were helpful though. If you want to do good in this class then going to TA's is a must.
Ah, Bina. Tough to reach sometimes? Check. A bit scatter-brained at times? Yup. (Aren't we all?) But she does something most professors don't: she responds to the progress of the class as a whole. She'll postpone or even cancel assignments if she feels the class is struggling. That's a remarkable trait, and certainly one of a good teacher.
She is really nice and I like her as a person, but her power points don't prepare me for the quizzes. Just copying down code every lecture doesn't help me learn anything. Her class stresses me the hell out. When I go back to study to prepare for the exams and quizzes, what i have to reference is garbage. I wish she would just follow the book.
I am a senior and have taking many college courses in three different colleges and i sinserly tell you that Bina Ramamurthy is the absolute worst professor i have ever had. She is disorganised and expects you to do thiings in processing that she never teaches. This is suppost to be a class for people with no experience in programming. DO NOT TAKE!
She has no idea what she is doing, very nice lady but during lecture she stops and asks students if she has the right answer. Go to class, she posts her notes online but they are impossible to read. Doesn't explain verilog very well, especially for the state diagram part of it.
Highly disorganized. Often corrects herself on problems done in class and asks students/TAs to double check her answers. Her final review is basically just a list of topics with no examples making it difficult to study and check answers accurately. Barely goes over Verilog (only 2 short assignments) and expects us to reproduce it on her final.
In her own words, if you go to all the lectures, you're going to get an A. The class is easy, Bina is nice, remembers your name in a HUGE lecture hall, and is clear about the material.
She is super nice, practically spoon feads the material to you, always does several examples and takes upwards of a weeks lectures to review for the exams
Bina as a person is absolutely great. She is very helpful, friendly, and remembers the vast majority of students names. She is a little disorganized and slightly confusing at times, but nothing really to fret over, CSE241 is an easy class that you can learn on your own without having to go to class. So dont worry when shes incorrect in class.
She might appear confusing at times in class, but theres much to learn if you pay attention. Maybe she has too much on her hands. Anyways, one of the nicest and humble professors around at CSE in UB . Would suggest medium programming background for non-CSE majors interested in the course.
You have 2 exams worth 55% of your grade and the rest is homework. Bina is extremely nice and truly wants you to succeed especially if you develop a relationship with her. Sometimes can be difficult to understand in lecture. attendance not mandatory. Cramming for final alone sucked. She gives you sample test quetions in class. Take advantage of it.
Wonderful teacher
She's a wonderful professor. Do homework. use her review sheet to prepare for exams and you'll do great. She remembers names which is a wonderful trait. She is very helpful outside of class as well.
Her 241 class won't prepare you well for 341. It'll be super easy, but you won't get a lot out of it.
Great and caring professor. Even though attendance isn't mandatory you should still go since its 5% of your grade and before exams she gives goes over practice problems for the exam which are super helpful. Very easy class to pass but you'll have to put in effort if you want B+ or higher.
For Bina's cse 241 class, you'll feel lost on the course material sometime, but as long as you do the homework and sample question and make sure you understand them, you should get a decent grade in this class, no need to panic.
She's pretty good at explaining things and does multiple examples. Sometimes makes minor mistakes but really isn't that unorganized. Cares for her students and wants them to do well. Test questions usually are the same as the material. The workload is also pretty reasonable and prepares you for tests.
This class is so mismanaged. The Lab requirements are vague and even TA's are unaware of exactly what we need to submit. Many students struggled throughout the labs without learning anything. Professor doesn't teach anything useful in class and she is always confused asking questions to the TAs. I would strongly discourage enrolling in DIC587.
Labs are easy, but can be time consuming. The only issue I had with this class are the exams. There are no practice tests so you have no idea how the questions will be structured. Also, it seems the questions are on specific things that we did not spend much time going over in class. This would not be a big deal but tests are worth 60% of the grade
In the second half, it needs technical detail, which Bina lacks. She does not frequently make mistake, but when she do, you gonna have a hard time figuring out what is wrong with your work. Class is disorganized, and exams are long. What this prof lacks is neat and clear organize of course material. Self study is a better than going to class.
The worst class I have ever taken. Grading criteria was unclear. Did not learn anything from the professor. She kept rambling about Brad Pitt, The Martian, and the Airplane of Science.
Bina is a very boring teacher, but she is great. I strongly recommend going to her classes, why? Because she assigns important projects for homework, but she always solves the projects in class. The homeworks are "easy", if you know coding. If they're hard for you, they will be doable is you ask for help. She is a great person.
You got to take this course if data science is of any interest to you. Great projects. Despite the negative feedback, I can surely say that I learnt a lot in this course. Didn't attend many classes but worked a lot on assignments. The projects are not hard but they will take time and they might irritate you at some point. But I had fun.
She is very helpful. Her projects are very useful.
ok teacher but will take off 20% of lab if you submit the lab last minute but the server crashed and it didn't go through, even if you email the lab to her on time or have proves that you try to submit the assignment. She won't care and put the fault on the students for submitting the work last minute, What a nice teacher.
Don't listen to other people's ratings of this class. Bina is a fantastic professor, very personable, EXTREMELY transparent about what will be on exams. Goes over examples in class, lectures are all recorded. The projects are a little abstract in terms of what's expected but the grading is extremely lenient. Bina's awesome.
Bina is awesome and cares for her students. The projects are fun to work on. Overall would recommend 10/10.
Dr Bina is awesome, really. She's more focused on real applications than theory. If you come to her with a fun side project she'll go nuts and love you forever and probably give you a free A. Literally hands you exam answers during lecture. Very fun class. Good sense of humor. No complaints.
Bina's the best! One of the few gems left in UB's CSE department. She tries her hardest to remember everyone's names, which just goes to show how caring she is for her students. She also tells you exactly how to solve every course topic step by step. Class has a steep learning curve at first but becomes really enjoyable throughout the semester.
Bina teaches the content well and provides very coherent demonstrations in class. Makes it a point to learn students, so while attendance isn't mandatory she knows if you do or don't. Either way lectures are extremely useful, you'd be remiss if you don't. Willing to help outside of class hours. Strict late work policy, don't procrastinate!
Great professor. A little scattered, but she goes out of her way to help. She clearly cares that you walk out of the course having learned something.
Bina is straight up fantastic, not sure how her rating is so low here. Can she be a little scattered sometimes? Sure, but she's an incredible lecturer and will not leave anyone behind. She lays out everything on homeworks and exams. Ask any question you have and put in the effort to keep up, youll get a fun and interesting class in return.
Take CSE 241 with her if you want a easy A
This class was great, never had fun doing work before up until this class.
I've never had a professor that makes so many mistakes in lecture. The worst part is that she always realizes her mistakes with 10 min to go and then tries to go back and correct everything, only effectively confusing everyone. Also she made a mistake ordering lab equipment for my class so we didn't have to do any labs. Other than that super easy
The lectures dont do much to prepare you for exams and labs and there arent too many resources to learn the material online. The TAs dont always know whats going on either. Whatever you do, dont use AWS for the labs if she doesnt require it.
The class was easy and she was amazing. She wants everyone to succeed and really makes sure you do. She's also real easy on the eyes <3
Bina is really easy going teacher, you don't need to attend the class because she will take the recording. For the project, it's really easy if you have any developing experience in web development. However, she actually won't give you far deep knowledge. If you hope to find a course which can give you a lot of hand-on experience. Don't choose.
Useful class, the projects may take your times but easy. The exam is pain, she does not give the sample exam that no idea about what will be in the exam.
She's a fun person. Makes classes interactive. Her lectures are recorded and available online. Her projects will make you get real good hands on experience coding, which is great. For exams she does give some tips and pointers. But it won't be very easy to crack. Overall it's a good experience.
It is up to you to decide how much you want to learn. Attend lectures to get 100 on the exams as she gives major hints. Very caring about her students. Got an internship at a major company because of her lecture contents and interview question relevance.
Bina is a great professor, very accommodating with online classes and makes assignments easy to complete. Great office hours and great choice in TAs! Genuinely learned a lot about data science and felt accomplished after completing the term project.
The overall course was fantastic. You will do some amazing projects and learn a lot. I'm not sure about the grading criteria of the course, seems way more random to me. A great course overall, but not happy with the grading scale.
I don't know on what basis the TAs graded the students. They graded 8 phases of the project in the last week of the semester and didn't release individual grades of each of the phases despite students repeatedly asking for the same. Professor didn't get involved in anything. Pop Quiz was quite difficult.
The course is incredibly disorganized, the effort by the professor seems minimal, the actual content is very outdated, we are using a book that references myspace as "new and revolutionary," the projects have no guidance and are very vague, the wording on the midterm was bad, and I've learned nothing in the class. The class needs structure.
Great class and great professor! The course was a bit chaotic and disorganized at times, but if you attend all the lectures and follow along you should be fine. Make sure you have a working dapp for the project and be sure to review the chapters on the exams and you will do fine!
This course won't worth your effort. It's disorganized. The quizzes are all random questions which are irrelevant to what you have been taught. The projects are boring, just some meaningless smart contracts, and some node projects. You can learn those in a week by teaching yourself. Choose this course only if you don't care about the GPA.
This class was awesome and Professor Ramamurthy is a great professor! As long as you have a working web application for your project and you study the chapters she tells you to for the tests, you should do fine! Make sure you show up to every class and participate as well.
Lectures are her speedrunning through slides and going on random rants or talks about herself half the time. Her explanations are unclear. The course is extremely disorganized and you'll have to teach yourself everything. TAs are unhelpful and the project handouts were full of errors. Quizzes/exams are just all memorization based. Disappointing.
Goes off topic during every single lecture and gives anecdotes of irrelevant experiences instead of teaching the required material. She teaches what the end product should look like without teaching HOW to reach that end product, leading students to not know what they're doing and constantly ask for help. Unhelpful reviews and inefficient pace.
Very knowledgeable about blockchain but does not know how to teach it despite writing a whole textbook on it. Irrelevant stories told during lecture time and renders it useless. Unclear guidelines and grading criteria. TA's are taking the class at the same time as students but are told to grade assignments, leading to unfair grading. Exams are hard
Extremely disorganized course due to random topics presented from the book. Lecture slides are all over the place and even worse is the lecture itself where she will go off on tangents only slightly related to the material. The semester project handouts were confusing and full of errors and you're not taught how to even start it. Take someone else.
DO NOT TAKE this course for this professor. Has final and midterms essay types and most of the grades depend on these two. No feedback on the tests you write. No reconsideration. The project takes a lot of time to be done but is very disorganized and has less weightage on the project and the quizzes. Total time waste, not much learning in this.
Disorganized class. She rambles on about random nonsense and doesn't teach. Her projects are vague and quizzes are full of typos and errors. I came out of that class learning barely anything.
Bad organization, boring lecture. TA grade tough on unimportant part. This course is 70% waste of time.
great professor
Class Info
Online Classes
100%
Attendance Mandatory
30%
Textbook Required
60%
Grade Predictor
Your expected effort level
Predicted Grade
A-
Grade Distribution
Common Tags
Rating Trend
Stable
+0.11 avg changeRatings by Course
CSE116C
5.0
(1)CSE521
5.0
(1)EAS345
5.0
(1)CSE341
4.0
(1)CSE587
4.0
(4)Difficulty by Course
CS114
5.0
CS116
4.0
CSE489
4.0
CSE113
3.9
CSE116
3.8