Professor
Robert M'Closkey
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2020 - Professor M’Closkey is extremely knowledgeable on the subject and seems like he enjoys teaching. He transitioned to remote teaching pretty well and he definitely improved the quality of his instruction as the quarter went on. At first it was a little confusing because he teaches you concepts that you don’t see being applied, but these are applied in the second half of the class. I would say the labs are pretty easy but the homeworks were quite hard. He doesn’t curve his class, but he’s very helpful during office hours. He also records his lectures (during virtual instruction) but I would recommend actually attending them because he does make mistakes that he corrects during the live lectures. During live lectures he plays his recordings and makes comments here and there. The midterm was pretty easy (median was ~85%) but his final had a lower median (I think it was around ~70%) and since the class wasn’t curved I imagine his grade distribution wasn’t wonderful. But overall, taking 107 with MCloskey was a good experience.
Spring 2020 - Professor M’Closkey is extremely knowledgeable on the subject and seems like he enjoys teaching. He transitioned to remote teaching pretty well and he definitely improved the quality of his instruction as the quarter went on. At first it was a little confusing because he teaches you concepts that you don’t see being applied, but these are applied in the second half of the class. I would say the labs are pretty easy but the homeworks were quite hard. He doesn’t curve his class, but he’s very helpful during office hours. He also records his lectures (during virtual instruction) but I would recommend actually attending them because he does make mistakes that he corrects during the live lectures. During live lectures he plays his recordings and makes comments here and there. The midterm was pretty easy (median was ~85%) but his final had a lower median (I think it was around ~70%) and since the class wasn’t curved I imagine his grade distribution wasn’t wonderful. But overall, taking 107 with MCloskey was a good experience.
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2019 - Obviously the workload and difficulty are relative to the student. The only work we did was doing the lab and writing up the lab reports. You have to answer some questions in your report that are in the lab instructions. So I felt the workload to be really light. The coursework isn't that hard to be honest. In the 1st half of the course, he lectures about the synthesis and analysis equations of the Fourier transform and its inverse; for continuous time and discrete time. Reviews nyquist plots and throws out whatever you learned in 171A out the window. You learn how to do controller design in the frequency domain, very handy tool. What was awesome was reconstructing plant models from random signals, as well as from white noise; very powerful. You learn about cross-correlations and auto-correlations. Since a lot of grad students were also in the class, he introduced material towards the end of class that were at the "grad" level. Honestly it wasn't that hard, I just wish I had a better linear algebra instructor so that I can remember singular value decomposition and etc. But it wasn't hard to follow.
Winter 2019 - Obviously the workload and difficulty are relative to the student. The only work we did was doing the lab and writing up the lab reports. You have to answer some questions in your report that are in the lab instructions. So I felt the workload to be really light. The coursework isn't that hard to be honest. In the 1st half of the course, he lectures about the synthesis and analysis equations of the Fourier transform and its inverse; for continuous time and discrete time. Reviews nyquist plots and throws out whatever you learned in 171A out the window. You learn how to do controller design in the frequency domain, very handy tool. What was awesome was reconstructing plant models from random signals, as well as from white noise; very powerful. You learn about cross-correlations and auto-correlations. Since a lot of grad students were also in the class, he introduced material towards the end of class that were at the "grad" level. Honestly it wasn't that hard, I just wish I had a better linear algebra instructor so that I can remember singular value decomposition and etc. But it wasn't hard to follow.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2020 - I definitely learned a lot in Prof. M'Closkey's class. My current mastery of linear algebra and linear dynamical system is more than ten times better than before taking this class. I will recommend this course to those people who really want to learn something in the field of controls and systems. The lecture notes, homework, and final project are well-designed and supplement the materials covered in the lectures. However, I must say that if you only want to easily get an A or A+, this course is not suitable for you. Many students who can get A+ in MAE263A and 271A only got A- in this course. The mean grade of the midterm is about 80%. The homework and project are difficult and have a heavy workload. Only the description of the final project is up to 18 pages that also contains many materials you need to study by yourself. But again, this course is really a good course. Prof. M'Closkey is rigorous and professional. He is an expert in dynamical systems. I was very surprised I can get A lol.
Fall 2020 - I definitely learned a lot in Prof. M'Closkey's class. My current mastery of linear algebra and linear dynamical system is more than ten times better than before taking this class. I will recommend this course to those people who really want to learn something in the field of controls and systems. The lecture notes, homework, and final project are well-designed and supplement the materials covered in the lectures. However, I must say that if you only want to easily get an A or A+, this course is not suitable for you. Many students who can get A+ in MAE263A and 271A only got A- in this course. The mean grade of the midterm is about 80%. The homework and project are difficult and have a heavy workload. Only the description of the final project is up to 18 pages that also contains many materials you need to study by yourself. But again, this course is really a good course. Prof. M'Closkey is rigorous and professional. He is an expert in dynamical systems. I was very surprised I can get A lol.
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