Reviews of professor Marco Serafini

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
I'll be honest Professor Serafini may have a nice personality. However, he cannot teach at all. His lectures are boring, lacking in flow, and hard to understand; he talks way too slow. Expect to find office hours unhelpful and have no clue how to do the homeworks as there is very little coverage of practical examples for each topic in the lectures.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
Marco Serafini has by FAR been the least helpful professor I've had in my college years. Workload for 445 is fine but the two most annoying things are he is slow with Piazza response times despite being accessible outside class, and he almost always gives non-answers. I had to teach myself for concepts like storage and transactions. Do not take.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Professor Serafini may have a nice personality, but his lectures were honestly a waste of time. While the good part is that there were practice exams, no extra resources were available for the homeworks other than the slides, so you had to self-teach everything. Lectures are insanely hard to understand even if you watch the videos religiously.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Do yourself a favor and do not choose Marco Serafini as your thesis advisor. He embodies the uninspiring orator and ruined my motivation to conduct research in the meetings I had with him. I used to love database design and now I hate it because Serafini did a poor job presenting information, leaving me clueless on how to start the methods section.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
I learned a lot from this course. I felt lost sometimes during lectures but there are a lot of resources to go back to. Going to class is super important and as long as you do well in the labs, homework is usually a breeze. There are two exams that are 15% each-- not too bad. Also, I did not have any problems getting responses outside of class..?

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
If you have a choice for a thesis advisor, don't pick Serafini. He's a nice guy who knows his stuff and I'll give him credit for that. However his English is poor so it's sometimes difficult to understand him. TBH I also found him uninspiring, not to mention his explanations don't make sense but rather resemble something he made up from his brain.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Marco is an ok professor. His lectures are a bit dry and he tends to teach more formally rather than intuitively. He's patient in office hours but responds to Piazza posts sporadically and doesn't provide thorough explanations. Make sure to go to lectures and pay careful attention because there is no curve for this class.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Biggest tip to get on Marco's good side: Practice active listening in lectures. If you have any questions, prepare for a follow up from him or make sure you've put full effort in your work before you contact him. Not hard to get a decent grade as long as you do well on the homeworks. Lectures can be dry but database design is still interesting.