Reviews of professor Maxwell Libbrecht

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
He doesn't get deep into the material at all and he doesn't teach topics in a logical order! He expects you to learn most of the material by reading the textbook, but the textbook is not intuitive at all and it's so hard to read. I will not take any courses with him again.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Don't take this course from this prof. He is extremely unorganized. No notes will be provided. The main help was the video lecture if you want to know anything. No help for the coding assignment either. He expects a lot but don't teach that good.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Lectures are little to no use for the coding and written assignments. He covers so little that its pretty much a self-taught course. The coding assignments are frustrating at first, but going to see a TA and collabs on piazza helped. He's a nice guy, but a horrible teacher.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
Maxwell is a fine prof who has great potential. He had novel ideas on teaching (online class forum, grading scheme) and most topics were covered well. Disliked that some important/required subtopics were brushed over and the complicated grading scheme (participation, extra credit, bonuses). Good prof and nice guy, would take class again.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
The biggest problem with this course is that the lectures do not prepare you for the assignments, which were all very difficult and time consuming. The midterm and final were surprisingly easy. Lectures were soso. Libbrecht's methods of handing out participation and bonus points were not fair.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Max is one of the best CMPT profs at SFU. He explains topics very clearly and sets the students up to succeed. There were 4 assignments, each taking 20 hours with an included autograder so you basically know what mark you'll get. The first 2 assignments were pretty fun! Bonus marks for answering classmates' questions on Piazza. Tests are very fair

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
Easiest CMPT class I've taken. 4 assignments were a bit time consuming but very doable, midterm was SUPER easy, final was slightly difficult but was scaled a decent amount. Lectures were decent and he'll prob be even better in future semesters. You have access to lecture recordings from a previous sem, anyways, which help a lot.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
This is a GPA booster class. There was up to a 25% bonus on final grade. The lectures are useless: they are vague and contain many mistakes (for anyone who was in the class, recall the pseudocode for filtering and smoothing). The exams can be easily completed if you have already taken MACM101 (logic), STAT270 (probability) and CMPT307 (algorithms).

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
He is not good prof

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
As a professor Libbrecht is ok. He rushes through topics fairly quickly so come to lecture prepared. The 4 assignments in this class are time consuming so it may be wise to start them early. Overall 310 is a must-take for anyone interested in the field of AI!