He's actually ok. He teaches with many examples and slides were easy to follow. He makes sure to answer every question and come up with solutions until the students figured it out.

I have one issue with this class however. A lot of students cheated on the midterm and final. Professor noticed a very high average on the midterm (93% average), and decided to make the final harder (90% average). Even with that, many students still cheated because students are really afraid of their grades apparently. Midterm was proctored by the way on Zoom, but many students got on Google doc or some messaging app on Chrome and collaborate throughout the exam. Final was held 24hrs, but the timer will start once you click on it. Still, gives a lot of students opportunities to cheat and collaborate with each other, and the average was still relatively high. It really sucks for people who are trying their best like me, but these cheaters in my class set the curve, and the professor cannot do anything about that, because of how COVID limits a lot of options. It's very unfortunate for those honest students.

Homeworks and projects are honestly whatever. For projects, you can definitely learn something out of it and will apply to your future SDE. Make sure you use Google often because you will need to learn a lot by yourself. Homeworks, you can literally write whatever and get full credit.

I'm sure by the time you read this, you will most likely be on campus since it is likely that he will teach this class again next year. If you need a professor who teaches well, this professor is that person. I am not saying this professor is awful when dealing with cheaters. I am saying it is very unfortunate this quarter that many students cheated and that the professor cannot make assumptions to go find those cheaters. I can see the professor is pretty much helpless when it comes to academic dishonesty, and I wish I had a much better experience.

Your grades do not matter, it's your brain that matters.

I took this class during Spring 2020 so it was online. Professor John Cho did a remarkable job by showing plenty of examples, responding to questions in the Zoom chat and on Piazza. I opted to take this P/NP so I did not take the exams. The projects were fair and felt like they addressed useful knowledge. I enjoyed his class and (at least without exams) would recommend it to everyone!

Pretty interesting and useful class. I would say Professor Cho did a great job teaching this class and all the projects are well designed and fun, although some of them are pretty time consuming. (project 3, 4)

Professor Cho is literally the best. I don't know why the other reviews of him are so bad but I had a 10/10 time learning from him. His slides and lectures are super organized and he explains concepts so clearly. He articulates the concepts well and uses a lot of examples to reinforce and explain things further. The projects don't depend on lecture material that much so they can be a lot of work but I learned so much from them. The tests were very similar to the homework. The midterm and final averages were REALLY high (like 85+) and I didn't do so great on the midterm which is why I ended up with a B+. But overall I cannot recommend professor Cho enough. He's got a cool personality and a great sense of humour as well. Take him!!

great class with great professor who gives engaging and funny lectures. workload are pretty manageable, cho replaced the typical hard core cpp project with a simple mapreduce project. other projects were pretty manageable if you have previous web dev experience. php is pretty easy to pickup, so im pretty sure even without much prev web dev exp, you'll be fine.

10000% take this class with cho if you have the chance :)

He must have gotten worse than he was in the past, because class with him has been terrible, despite excellent reviews. CS 3400 is a terrible classroom to understand professors in, but even then I think his lectures aren't the best. Every sentence he says is said in exactly the same way, with the same intonation at the beginning and end of the sentence, which makes it hard to differentiate between pointless digression and useful information. His curriculum is entirely different than *real* databases classes (MIT, Stanford, Berks) because it focuses on specific characteristics of databases and their implementations rather than the concepts governing database design. His tests this year were way harder than every other year for some reason (I checked previous midterms and finals) and the specs are terrible. Often, questions on Piazza will be treated as gospel later on when the TAs are grading the projects, so if you don't read every Piazza post, you may potentially screw something up. Worse yet, everyone gets great grades on everything, but if you happen to be the one person who misread the spec, you often go down 2 letter grades per mistake. All in all, I would recommend taking it with the other professor while simultaneously taking a *real* databases course via MIT OCW, Coursera, or (if you want to focus more on implementation) Berkeley's database systems course site.

His homework and projects are very easy so almost everyone gets full credit. He is more project oriented, so if you just want lots of theory, pick another professor. Finals and midterms were not too difficult.

He is concerned about the students and explains stuff clearly. Please, he speaks good english so dont be concern about his accent. He gives 30% As and 40% Bs. So thats not too bad. If you want to do well, attend his lectures. PS hes in no hurry to leave after lectures, so if you have questions that the best time to ask.

all around good professor. database itself is a very fun class. the projects are fun to do.

in total he gave 4 projects that builds up on one another. the first three are very easy. the last one you usually have to build a mini database website. in spring 05 we did movie database, so basically we were building a site similar to iMDB. i spent about 7 hours on it, and knowing this is a cs class, that isn't too bad at all.

as for the exams, they were pretty tough, but still relatively easy compared to other cs classes. but if you study and do the hw you should be fine.

Great professor. He really cares about student learning. He is also very available for office hours and happy to answer students' questions. His lectures are very valuable, so don't miss them. The examples he does and his explanations are worth it.

As for the grading, it's pretty reasonable. 30% or so get A's and A-'s and 40% get B's. The project is fun and not extremely difficult.

Best Professor in the CS department. Tests are well written and projects are a lot of fun. Very concerned, and awesome lectures.