Marshall, David  

What else is there to say? Fine person, nothing interesting. Class was meh... Blah, blah, blah... Fine person.

He's a good instructor, but he didn't go into as much depth as I would have liked. The lecture seemed good, but then the homework always had questions on things not covered or barely touched on in lecture, which made them very frustrating. There are also four Matlab projects, which were very challenging as he spent only a small amount of time on Matlab during lecture. It seemed as if he expected us to read his mind sometimes, since he required us to do things or know things that he never mentioned, and would dock points if we didn't. I did learn a lot in the class though; it just took a lot of time banging my head against the homeworks and projects.

This class really was pretty difficult as me and my classmates thought. Marshall in my opinion is a very good instructor, he presents the material clearly and usually uses relevant examples to help. If you don't understand, he'll try to clarify. Do your best to understand from the lecture, because the textbook is the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen, it will just confuse you more. The homework is generally easy to do, but it takes time to complete. The projects varied from extremely difficult to just difficult. They took way too much time to complete and his placed too much emphasis on format rather than content and results. The exams were all over the place, a couple were easy to do as the questions were based on common lecture material, others were extremely difficult and had obscure questions that no one studied. Finally, KNOW PROGRAMMING BEFORE COMING INTO THIS CLASS! All of the projects were programming based, as well as some of the homework and select problems on the exams. Much of our class hadn't done programming so the learning curve was enormous. Good luck, and kiss your social life goodbye, but hey, you're an aero, what did you expect!

He's alright hopefully poly gets a new AERO 300 prof

I'm graduating soon and i thought it would be my responsibility to give my two cents on each Aero professor. Dr. Marshal is my least favorite of the professors (sorry don't take it personally if you're reading this). He spend's a lot of time in class chit chatting about himself. I would rather him spend more time the lecture material and giving more examples. Most of the class is usually clueless after his lectures. I would recommend reading through the material before class if you wan't to get something out of them. He does a good job presenting useful material and assigning hw/projects that make you learn it. What i don't like though is that he has a tenancy to leave out key parts and make you figure them out yourself. Maybe it's just my learning style but it confuses the hell out of me and i would rather read a textbook. My experience getting one on one help from marshal hasn't been good. One time i asked him a question and he basically said go back, look over the notes and figure it out. Another time he kept working on his computer as i was asking him questions, answered them with technical jargon in a way to confuse me making no effort in helping me understand the problem, and then gave me the "what are you still doing here stare" as he kept typing on his computer. Overall i would take his classes as they force you to learn alot but he needs to start caring about his students more

Listen chump-os, get over it! What is wrong with being expected to know where what your learning came from? I wouldn't have it any other way. This learn by doing is bullshit...people are learning by copying, sucking up, and doing little work to actually understand the concepts. I'm apalled to talk to some of my peers and see just how much they don't know. Enjoy the rigor, you signed up to learn aero, f'ing learn it...Dr. Marshall is great for this. What you'll learn in 303 or 306 is fundamental aero stuff that you ought to know. Outside of his backward directed curve I don't have any problems with him.

Professor Marshall is descent in lecturing, but is a bit boring and not motivating to learn the material. For the lab section, he is too vague in what he expects in the lab reports, which are tipically 30-40 pages long with at least 10 pages of calculations. For a 2 unit class and 2 people per group, this is an unbelievable amount of work. It is almost rediculous that we are expected to write so much and do extensive calculations. It seems like the longer it is the better grade you get. It should actually be graded on the basics and contents of the report. Also, it seems to me that we are graded on a Master's scale. He is forgetting that we are still undergraduates and still learning. He needs to guide us more on what to write instead of grading us on guessing what he looks for in a report.

304 is the first "real" aero lab you will take. It is not like the BS support labs you have taken earlier. You have to do long, detailed, formal writeups. As for marshall, he runs the labs and collects the reports. He doesn't really tell you what you need to do for the report, so just use your first report as a gage. He transparently presents the stuff from the lab manual and makes some efforts to help students. To be fair, he is still new, give him a year or so to get his bearings.

Oh come on you dumbasses. Marshall is difficult, presents difficult material, and does derivations that are -OMG- DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND!@@@1!! Some of his HW was hard, maybe even -WTF- CHALLENGING! People bitched because the class was so much theory and math, but that's what aerodynamics is. Aerodynamics problems are largely solved with difficult computational methods that come from his derivations. There are no simple analytical solutions like there are in structures or thermo. I just can't believe how little people understood about the material he presented. His final was a fucking giveaway - a copy and paste from previous exams/HW, and I'll be amazed how many people flunked it. My complain with Marshall is that his tests aren't difficult enough. They are more of a race against time to do many easy problems, rather than a test of who can put together concepts to solve difficult problems. Overall, a good prof who in my opinion did well explaining very obscure and hard to understand material. To hell with those of you who don't like theory just because it's beyond your comprehension.

Coming into Marshall's class I had heard some pretty bad things about him. By the end of the quarter I had found that Marshall isn't a bad teacher although his tests are ridiculously long even though they aren't difficult. His homeworks can be time-consuming and I did go to multiple TA office hours in a week to get help but they were fair representations of the test material. Overall, the class was well-taught and fair (even the tests were fair because everyone was as screwed as you were)

this guy is the man. take him (not that you have a choice).

Marshall is the man! He's kinda reserved here and there but when he really gets into the subject he's actually a good story teller and can make the material pretty interesting. The class was a bit of a jump since we're getting into the mathy side of things for aero but he's really helpful and is down to go over stuff in office hours. Some times in class he's actually ridicuously funny while pulling a joke here and there in class. Few times we were stuck laughing at each other for a solid 5 minutes or so.

CFD and Georgia Tech are the two things you need to know about this professor. In other words, "learn by doing" does not apply to this guy. He is all about the long, painful derivation so you can see "where your results came from." This translates into thousands of greek symbols which dance around for several pages, inevitably leading to a relatively simple solution which, in my opinion, could have been presented from the start with the derivation "left as an exercise for the student." However, if he wants to explain the concept instead of the math, he does a good job. If I took the class over again I would look only at his online notes (which are very clear) and only come to class to turn in the homework...if I came at all.

This teacher put alot of thought into his homework, and sometimes they weren't worked out well but that was ok since it was his first quarter. However, he did not grade his own tests, he handed them to a TA which is not ok. Coming from a guy who has a PhD in psychology (not in aerospace as you might at first believe) this is a very poor way to try and earn the respect of your students. Also, this guy is crazy about turning you HW in at the exact right second. One student couldn't make the bus because it was full, took the next bus, and still only got the HW in 3 min. late. He took 10% off despite the loud protests of the class. I believe he may come from a military background...this is very characterstic of that. He follows rules like no other, to the point of absurdity. Follows through on bad ideas, even though he knows he is wrong (method of charactersitics project comes to mind). So many other things to say...maybe someone else may elaborate.

Marshall is not the type of professor that the Aero's at Cal Poly have come to know and love. He doesn't even sit in the same ball park as DeTurris and Tso. I'd take a class with Dr. K before I took another with this guy, even though I would get better grades with Marshall. That is how much I dislike his class. He is all theory, and no "learn by doing" so Cal Poly made a mistake in getting him. He does derivation after derivation in class, so you better buy the big engineering comp pad. His homework problems are reasonable, but the grading is not. Students at this level deserve to have their professor grade their homework, not a TA who, in many cases, in our other classes. Too much personal conflict comes into play when that of situation comes into play. Marshall's tests are fair, I have to give him that. He won't throw something at you that you haven't seen before. His major flaw: His inability to admit when he is wrong. The Method of Characteristics project was way over the top for this class, and when he learned about our true programming knowledge he wasn't willing cut it back or help us out at all.

You will probably have to take this guy if you are not a space twinkie and you will have to do BS CFD work that nobody really wants to do. His grading scale is screwy for sure-noby else will tell you that 90% is a B in a CFD class. My real complaint is that I don't think this guy has even ever flown on an airplane and has no idea how to relate anything to real life.

Marshall is a moderately difficult aero professor. His homework is straight forward, and his projects are only challenging if you don't have basic programming skills. He's one of the only aero professors that will teach you (and expect you to understand) the physics and math behind the equations that many aeros use blindly. His exams are difficult, but generally fair. Overall, he's one of the few aero professors that honestly seems to know what he's talking about most of the time.

Dr. Marshall is an excellent professor. His CFD class is very hard - but if you work hard you'll learn a ton from him. The class is a great example of 'learn by doing.' Nearly the whole grade is from the three projects, which are difficult though very interesting.