Reviews of professor Thomas Gilray

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
I took Gilray's compiler course last year and found it to be a ton of work. This year but I have a job doing functional programming in Scala mostly and realized how much the functional ideas we learned in CMSC 430 helped. I used a tail-call conversion we talked because otherwise the JVM stack is dumb. Was one of my two favorite classes at UMD.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
One of the best classes at UAB. I learned so much. The auto grader let's submit repeatedly as I improve my work to track progress and improve score. So much extra credit that I can skip the last project if I did the early ones? I don't know why this is the only class using the auto grader.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
This class is known to change people's degrees from a BS to BA in CS. Your grade comes from homework assignments, tests that are every two weeks, and three programming assignments, all of which are hard. If at all possible, take Johnstone for this course as he doesn't do programming. Gilray usually scales at the end of the year though.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
For me, this class was an easy A. Yes, there is tons of homework, but c'mon, you literally get to submit your homework multiple times before the due date, and get live feedback on your grade. There's no reason not to get an A on them. The homework is heavily based of lectures, and he even explains how to do them in class. So, go to class

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
Gilray is known as tough, but in our class he gave out lots of extra credit, and let us resubmit projects repeatedly to earn full points. He also released tutorial videos to watch at home that explain exactly how to get started on projects. Lectures were clear, and tests include some exact problems he covered in lecture! I hit ~95%, easily imo...

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Gilray knows his subject well but his lectures are vocab dense and can be difficult to follow. Likewise the projects are difficult and time consuming. There are plenty of opportunity to pass the class, and grading/ scaling is generous. I would think about taking another professor for 350 if you are not ready to keep in weekly contact with the TAs.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Hard but nice prof. Gives very "traditional" lectures that can be hard/dry. It's ok for the best students, but leaves some of us behind. I took his 350 class last semester and we didn't have any feedback on assignments before turning them in. Really like that autograder gives your grade before the deadline. Not my favorite course, but it's fine.