Reviews of professor Oguzhan Topsakal

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 2.0/5
Good professor who cares about teaching the material and teaches it well. Can be extremely slow at getting through topics and spend way too much time on them in lectures, but that could be a benefit depending on the type of person you are. In class assignments are always easy and good for boosting your grade.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Very nice to all the students. A bit disorganized. Assignments would pop-up randomly through the week with no notice and little time to work on them. He's just trying to reinforce the learning, but it can be a little difficult to plan around.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Dr. Topsakal tries, but his teaching style is ineffective. I can't speak for his other classes, but Database 1 is just PowerPoint after PowerPoint... 3 months were spent on boring DB theory, and the last month was spent on SQL. If you just want the A, he's okay, but if you want to learn the material I'd avoid Topsakal.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Dr. Topsakal is a very polite and kind person and easily approachable. He provides as much details to help us understand and will slow down and explain further if we have any questions. His slides and reviews are awesome.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Dr. Topsakal knew his material, but he had a hard time conveying it to students. Many students have a background of the C programming language, but for the few that don't he made it difficult to catch on. He speaks very fast and goes over more advanced material rather than the material that was needed to be known for the homework.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Out of all the CS professors who don't explicitly hate students, Topsakal is the worst. Be prepared to have massive homework assignments given to you as you're supposed to be working on a final project. His teaching style is regurgitating PowerPoints that he created half a decade ago. Exams are all memorization based. Take Intro to Python instead.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
He makes the material easy to understand. He is knowledgeable and easy to approach. He is very interested in the topic.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
This professor is very ineffective. He mumbles his way through lectures, does horrible examples that often times don't make any sense to 90% of the class, he reads directly from the slides. He does know the material, but struggles mightly to teach it. For a class that he calls "the most important class in the major", he doesn't really teach it well

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Creating an app from start to finish on Android in a team is this course. The nature of Android requires large amounts of boilerplate (copy+paste) code. The amount of work is dependent on your app's ambitions. There are individual assignments to balance out the grade. Dr. Topsakal is a good mediator when things go south, but is quiet in back rows.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
He cared a lot about the course material and the students. He was approachable. The overall structure and the progression of the course was good.