2.2
Quality4.2
Difficulty20%
Would Retake101
Reviews20%
Would Retake
101
Reviews
Rating DistributionOfficial
5
12
4
12
3
12
2
18
1
47
What Students Say
“Like if you don't know what is going on in the class”
CSE396 - 1.0 rating“but not in a good way”
CSE396 - 1.0 ratingClass Info
Online Classes
100%
Attendance Mandatory
50%
Textbook Required
71%
Grade Predictor
Your expected effort level
Predicted Grade
B
Grade Distribution
Common Tags
Rating Trend
Declining
-0.28 avg changeRatings by Course
CSE250
2.8
(24)CSE596
2.7
(7)CSE491
2.7
(3)CSE199
2.3
(6)CSE396
2.3
(25)Difficulty by Course
CSE379
5.0
COMPUTERS
5.0
CS456
5.0
CSE491
5.0
CSE191
4.8
Reviews (101)
No Comments
That guy was a freekin looney, and he sucked as a teacher too
No Comments
Called our class stupid many times, had trouble conveying ideas across.
Tests for IQ, not subject mastery. Weeds out all students with IQs below 180.
very bad teaching
He pushes difficult matterial at you at a unbelievable pace, then tells you how dumb you are. He is very smart but doesn't understand everyone is not like him. Always meets w/ you but still very difficult to get the point most of the time. Stay away.
Aviod like the plauge
he's a jerk, don't take his class, he's evil i'll tell ya
Easy material made impossible to comprehend.
Do not take 596 for fun, but it is extremely useful and informative material. Dr. Regan is an excellent professor who knows the material completely and is capable of expressing it in a conscise form.
VERY disorganized, does not proofread assignments before distributing (EVERY assignment had numerous corrections to both wording and often REQUIREMENTS), acts like this is the only course you're taking (assigned HW during the last week of classes to be due during finals). No, he's not a genius--he adds lots of pomp to otherwise simple concepts.
If you have to take 305, do it with someone else. Other people have enjoyed this class, to me it was a nightmare. We covered 4 programming languages, 8 weeks was spent on java 1.5... avoid this class with Dr. Regan
The most pompous person, let alone professor, I have ever met. Acts as if we are wasting his valuable time. He would skip grading assignments to write chess articles. Constantly had errors on his assignments and tests. Avoid him at all costs.
This guy is a mad scientist. Reminds of Professor Fink (eigan glaven), but crazier. Has an unhealthy obsession with chess-playing computers. Is rather pompous. Once remarked that he first met Sipser (author of the textbk) on a train in Denmark. Claims to know the inventor of the B prog. language. Tests are RIDICULOUSLY DIFFICULT. otherwise,OK
Truly enjoys his field, CSE. Intentionally exploits stupidity from students (makes fake erroneous programs to waste class time). Curves by adjusting question points afterwards but expect classes to be harder than they need to be.
He is an alien teaching to himself. Cannot comprehend him.Always confsed
Avoid at all costs! Terrible professor, just goes up front and talks about whatever he wants and doesn't care if you understand or not. Less than half the class was able to even Compile their homeworks, much less have it actually work. Assignments are just huge blocks of text. Expects students to read hundreds of pages in very short time periods.
this guy is obsessed with chess and programming... inappropriately rubs his belly during class and talks about his outside life and things with no correlation to his class... worst teacher i've every had... will frustrate you to your breaking point and possibly beyond... dont take him!!
He is a nice guy if you go to his office hours. However, as a teacher he won't stood down to your level and some of the stuff said in class is incomprehensible. You will do well if you do his projects and homeworks (lots of effort), the exams are based on hws and projects. All in all not a terrible professor but not an easy going one either.
Projects will dominate over all other classes. Hw's are easy, but tests are hard. His wording in notes and project descriptions make no sense. Teaches at a high level, and really knows his stuff. This is not an easy class. Paying attention to projects and homeworks will help you on the tests, otherwise good luck.
Tries very hard to makes things clear, receptive to suggestions from students. Cares very much about students' comprehension and success.
Hard working teacher. He response email after mid night too, which is great help. It's funny that he rubs his stomach most of the time and look at his cell phone to for time management purpose. He loves teaching, its fun to take his class, Theory of Computation (CSC 396) SP 2010
A nice teacher, very intelligent. Often goes above the heads of the students and is absorbed in the world of proofs and computers, but he is kind and helpful. The students here are just frustrated because his classes seem to be pretty difficult.
Make no mistake, this man is an utter genius. Not only that, but he is insanely helpful. He answers emails almost 24/7 and really truly wants you to understand the material. He loves his work. He overestimates the intellect of the students sometimes.
He was extremely helpful and willing to answer questions during office hours and through e-mail. I'm glad I was able to take this class with Regan. He tried to make it entertaining and would talk about things like Dungeons & Dragons during class.
Really good when you go into office hours, and very helpful in any 1 on 1 interaction. Go to office hours and use the book, because honestly, it's really hard to stay focused and fully understand what's going on in lecture.
It took a while understand his assignment, and his teaching in class is very messy. Be prepared to read the whole book. If you go to office hour, you'll benefit a LOT! And for the project, get compile your code at Timberlake before submitting using some old-fashioned way.I cannot believe this course is not using Visual studio which makes it easier
Regan is obviously a genius, but that sometimes does not translate well to teaching. Assignments were not extremely hard(minus the last few), and they provided a nice way to boost your grade. Tests were very hard, more because you could not understand what the questions were asking. No correlation to lecture and book. Office hours are helpful.
Dr. Regan is a tough professor for this class. Main reason is, he hasn't taught the class in 10 years. His lectures were very confusing, and the assignments were near impossible without external help. The class is challenging if logic isn't your thing. Take the class if you need to, but try to avoid if you can.
Good guy, and tries to be helpful. However moves too fast for 90% of the class, and doesn't present the material in clear ways. Projects also very time consuming.
He is the best teacher in this whole University, possibly world! Super Easy! Very Understandable! Brings a beach ball to class all the time and the last ten minutes of class is just amazing!!
Lectures don't make any sense and he gets off topic a lot. Have avoided him in office hours due to the horror stories older students have told me. Assignments are time consuming and are near-impossible without the internet/external help.
Not sure why so many people on here are complaining, very clear lectures. Material is hard but Regan makes it really easy. Homeworks take like 25 minutes max. Really likes chess.
He's the best professor I've ever had, I'm lucky to have taken classes under such a brilliant man. :D. His homeworks are extremely easy and he's very helpful and detailed with his assignments. Clear assignments, you'll definitely know what he wants you to do. A chess god reppin' UB, the real Big Blue.
Awesome course, decently easy.
omg he's super hot!!!! and a great professor.. i hated programming until i took his class.. now i wanna be the next martha stewarts of c++ =]
Took him for data structures (CSE250) and Discrete Math (191). Really really good professor, gives straight forward examples, doesn't complicate things, and wants his whole class to get an A.
Super weird guy. Very smart, which makes him hard to comprehend. Doesn't give clear directions for weekly assignments that take up all of your free time. Lectures and Textbook unhelpful.
Absolutely the worst professor I have ever had. Can't teach to save his life. His home work will take up all your time, leaving no time for other courses. As a result you will not do well in your other classes either. Absolutely avoid if possible.
Regan adheres the school of literally Discrete Math, manifest in his transposing of scribbled notes onto the blackboard in such a manner, that the audience may marvel in his infinitely unconnected scribbles: It is also remarkable that regan manages to avoid testing on any of the scribbles from his lectures. (see professor; in the urban dictionary)
Do you enjoy walking into a class completely confused from last lecture, hoping to God that today might be the day that the professor clears things up, but never does? I know I do. If you do too, I recommend this class. You get to work on strenuous homework for weeks on end. If you have any shred of hope entering this course, leave it at the door
Protip: If you're going to make a test mind-numbingly difficult, at least have the decency to refrain from saying that the practice exam is similar to the actual test as to not get our hopes up about doing well. Just sayin'.
I wish I could give him lower than a 1
Regan seems like he wants his students to do good but they can't when all he does is confuse you. He goes to fast and his assignments are really hard. AT first they werent bad but then they got really difficult and you TA wont have enough time to go over everything in the homework.
Zone out for a few seconds and you'll be so lost. Even when youre paying full attention to him and the board you will be so confused. Most kids stopped going to lecture because it was just a waste of 50 minutes
It's a grad class. Only expands beyond text in lecture-- doesn't teach material. Tests are NOT predictable, likely written the week of the exam. Oblivious to students' progress. Unhelpful O.H. Enjoys fooling students deliberately. No pre-reqs, but don't let that fool you: w/o Calc 1/2, CSE115/116, and some knowledge of CSE250, you're screwed. AVOID
Ken Regan is a very intelligent person. He unfortunately has no clue how to convey his knowledge to his students, nor does he care about his students. His office hours leave you more confused than when you went in and his lectures are so scrambled that it's a wonder anyone receives a passing grade. AVOID HIM FOR ANY CLASS.
This guy is the worst professor I've ever had. Avoid at all costs.
This man is officially the worst professor I've had through over 150 credit hours. He will expect a graduate level understanding of mathematical concepts with no elaboration or actual "teaching" of the textbook subject matter. Gives 90 minute exams with 48 minutes to complete, talks in circles, poor blackboard organization. Avoid at all costs.
Worst Professor avoid him if you can. You will learn nothing. I thought Alphonce was bad but after taking this guy Alphonce is pretty decent cause at least you can understand things in his class. I wish Regan wasn't teaching 250 next semester I really dont want to be stuck with him again. No one does but the class is a prereq for like everything :(
I heard enough horror stories about Kenny and thought I was only taking CSE191 and he couldn't be THAT bad... Yeah, WRONG! Kenny boy is just all-around terrible at teaching. He's in his own little computer/number-theory oriented world and has a SEVERELY clouded mind when it comes to understanding students. Stay far, far, far away at all costs.
Super intelligent professor, that's why he is not too good at explaining things. Very fast pace and expect you to have at least cal 1 knowledge(even though it's not a requirement). Very passionate, if you understand what he is talking about. Awesome professor if you like advanced math and discrete structure.
Awesome. You will definitely get A if you attend class.
The material is hard. However, Regan is a easy grader so that he makes the hard material easy.
This professor is very confusing after a certain point in the course and you will end up getting a bad grade because his whole class works like that. Also he will make his homework difficulty level goes up every week.
The first few assignments are simple. Make sure that you ace these, and do not fall behind in class even for a moment. For the rest of the assignments, you will find yourself spending anywhere from 5-20 hours per assignment. This is THE weed out class for our department. He is great in office hours. Gain his favor, and you are golden. Godspeed.
It's a hard class, but if you're willing to do what he says and read the textbook ahead of time you will learn more than you realize. Computer science is hard. You need to know a lot of discrete math, and this is the only class where they expose you to it. Sorry! He's a great guy otherwise, and remarkably intelligent. Ask him about chess!
Regan does not understand that students are there to learn because they dont know the material. He assumes everyone is proficient in the course even before he starts teaching. Do not take this class unless you like being confused and lost.
He might not be well suited to teach 250191, but for Theory of Computation, he is the best you can get. This is his specialty and he's darn good at providing clear and concise explanations. Doing homework's to the best of your ability is the ticket to an A. Not easy, you get what you put in. One of the more interesting CS classes I have taken.
he is the kind of professor that will write down a very specific response in details on piazza, if students read into it carefully they can learn a lot from it. a wise and veryyyyyyyy clever professor, and some students may hate him bcoz he takes the case of someone's cheating on his hw seriously, but i think he is doing correct thing.
He may be a genius but he's definitely not a great teacher. Try your best to score well on the homeworks as the tests will be hard and you'll most probably run out of time to think.
Very knowledgeable/ Interesting course
I managed to skip most of his class and do better than most. His lectures weren't super helpful. You're better off teaching yourself the material. The homeworks are okay, but hard if you've only used class material. The tests are fair, but still a little hard. He does care a lot about the students.
Dr. Regan is a genius . People have a tough time with this class because they don't go to lecture and don't take advantage of office hours where he can be very helpful. Put in the effort, this is a tough class. Two exams are tough but doable though time is always an issue. Final exam was really long and arguably hardest CS final I've taken to date
Nice guy but the worst professor I had in my entire life, I mean the worst. The weekly homework is extremely and you need to attend every single office hour for "hint". If you have to take him then make sure you spend endless hours on his class and hope for a passing grade. Respect him as a researcher but avoid him as a professor at all cost!!!!
Smart guy but horrible choice for professor. If you have a choice take this class in the summer and save yourself trouble.
Avoid unless you have to take this class. He's a smart guy but his handwriting (which is how he does all his lectures) is horrible and lectures are also impossible to follow. We had 2 in semester exams (which were tough but doable) and one final exam which was unbelievably difficult.
His way of explaining things is alright and he cares for his students. Most of the homeworks and the first 2 exams are fairly doable. The graders can be extremely harsh though. Course gets more complicated after the 2nd exam and the final exam is rough. Not all the TAs are very helpful and they just say that everything is "straightforward."
"Genuis" doesnt mean good prof. This was the worst class I ever took by far. Lectures were useless and made things far more confusing as he just rambles on and scribbles literally unreadable notes on a piece of paper. Seems to care more about showing how smart he is rather than teaching the material. Very condescending and rude in person too.
the course went above my head from day 1. Dont know how i passed it.
Ken Regan is a god... but not in a good way. Get ready for random french sayings, chess jokes, Dungeons and Dragons references, and plenty of stuff you wont understand. If you need one video to describe Regan, look up Zoeyzol's duel arena ownage vid #1
Lecture consists of writing illegible proofs on pieces of paper, then assigning homework on these papers. Likes to reinvent the wheel by doing things differently than in the text. I think he forces his TAs to totally destroy our homework grades, which is worth 36% overall. He can be understanding and funny, but he really needs to use print.
Straight up chicken scratch lecture notes (That's all the notes you'll be getting) and likes teaching how to do things his own way, which doesn't work because he can't teach. Have to admit he's very smart. He'd make sure you know that.
Straight up unreadable lecture notes, with the lectures being pretty impossible to follow. Learned everything for this class from youtube tutorials and various googling. I have no idea where he got the idea that he teaches well, because he clearly doesn't. He may be smart, but a good professor he is very much not.
Regan is clearly a very smart man. This unfortunately does not make him a great professor. His lectures are very disorganized and his notes, which he posts online, are next to unreadable. Expect to spend many late nights on homework. Regan somehow manages to take very interesting material and make it unbearable.
Like if you don't know what is going on in the class
If you have high GPA then this guy will destroy it. Don't understand his lecture at all. Class is hard and he made it overly difficult. If you can take with someone else.
Avoid him if you can. The homework will take up most of your time and you won't have time to do other things. The exam is VERY hard. Even the multiple questions requires you to think a lot. The course is hard and he made it even more difficult. Getting ready for the final and just hope I can get a passing grade...
Make a friend group in the class and "discuss" your HW's or you'll end up spending hours and not even getting it done. His lectures were torture . Barely made it out.
The course is great and the professor is very nice. He will respond quickly if u ask a question. The only downside is that the final part of this course is really difficult.
What everyone else says is true, or at least what I skimmed. Real knowledgeable and intelligent. Content is taught pretty nicely, but it is "thick and dense" in the way that's more abstract.
Probably the most difficult CS class I've taken at UB, and not in a good way. The lectures get extremely convoluted into semester and its hard to catch up when nothing makes sense. Professor Regan seemed super interested in the course material. I should've taken the hint when he said there were many familiar faces in the room from last semester.
This class is rough. As many others have written, Prof. Regan expects you to already know many things that are just unreasonable to expect a sophomore Comp. Sci. student to know, like specifics about languages not covered at UB. He spends a majority of the lecture time fumbling around with his own arcane code rather than teaching class content.
Professor Regan is a handful. I really only understand his convoluted lectures after I go through the course textbook(much clearer) and the sections that parallel the lectures. This worked until it didn't with the lovely ISR interface he is forcing us to use. You'll spend more time learning language semantics in this class than DS&A.
Regan doesn't seem to know what he's doing in this class. It is his first time teaching it in over a decade, and it shows. Live coding is done on a minimal black and white text editor, making it very hard to follow code. I genuinely couldn't tell you what this class is about. All we've done in 11 weeks is work with poorly formatted text files.
I honestly cannot say I walked out of any of the lectures having learned anything. Half the lectures were him fumbling with technology (zoom screen sharing etc.) and the other half was him debugging his own code that wouldn't run or going on tangents. Is it my fault? Maybe, but I doubt it. Really smart guy, but his class really hurt my soul.
not good teacher
Very bad professor
If you have him, run
Doesn't know how to operate a computer.
If you have a good GPA and would want to reduce it, go for it. No relatable material can be found online and whole grading is based on written assignments and exams. This subject was a nightmare.
Ken Regan is clearly very experienced in CS principles, but often overdoes it when trying to explain simple concepts in freshman seminars. His homework assignments require a good deal of research out of class, thanks to him often explaining irrelevant topics in lecture or going on chess tangents. By the way, he really likes chess.
Really a mixed bag when it comes to teaching. His lectures are fairly good, and he clearly cares about CS as a whole. Homework's and other assignments are very easy in this class. Although, they are worded so horribly that it takes longer to read them then to do them.
He is the worst professor I had at UB. He literally released a final project and Homework during the last week of class. He constantly makes changes to the assignments. His exams are horrible.
This course will probably be the most difficult course you would take while pursuing CS degree. He puts so much efforts on this course. You will never find any solution online nor get to use chatGPT for any of your assignments but do your own. You will learn something in the end if you manage to pass this course.
I had him for the Internet and Data module in CSE199. Really cool guy, and the content was very interesting. It was explained in a clear, concise way, with a lot of interesting tangents. He also is a chess IM, which I found super cool. Overall, great prof, take him if you can.
Clearly cares a lot about what he's teaching, but he just doesn't teach it very well. Homework is overly difficult and we're meant to infer how to do most of it ourselves rather than direct examples in class. Exams are much fairer, and a very good amount of study materials are given.
It's the chess guy. Besides that, find yourself do outside research when trying to do hw assignment 1 & 2, b/c I don't think any freshmen taking 199 would understand this stuff.
Cool chess guy who you can tell is very intelligent and most likely respected in UB's Computer Science department, but his teaching style's very boring and has little to do with the actual topic and assignments we're working on during his teaching period of 2-3 weeks. Not a horrible guy & CSE199's a easy course, but don't rely on his notes.
This guy is so smart that his lectures are impossible to comprehend.
Class Info
Online Classes
100%
Attendance Mandatory
50%
Textbook Required
71%
Grade Predictor
Your expected effort level
Predicted Grade
B
Grade Distribution
Common Tags
Rating Trend
Declining
-0.28 avg changeRatings by Course
CSE250
2.8
(24)CSE596
2.7
(7)CSE491
2.7
(3)CSE199
2.3
(6)CSE396
2.3
(25)Difficulty by Course
CSE379
5.0
COMPUTERS
5.0
CS456
5.0
CSE491
5.0
CSE191
4.8