Dana, Chuck  

This guy is the definition of techno-stress. His lectures are boring and his test are hard to follow because he tests on stuff that he doesn't lecture on. He has a hard time dealing with students and he got in the face of another student one time and yelled at him for not knowing what to do. He has bad people skills and I don't recommend him.

Returning grades on programs was never done during the quarter. The tests were quite easy and the load was mellow. Presented the material just fine, but lacked in helping students with their problems, got sort of mad and frustrated right away when helping students, needs to relax when dealing with students. But other than that he is cool.

Prof cried today.... What a weirdo hahahah get a grip of your life.

This class is pretty boring for anyone who has ever thought about ethics related to the computer industry before. Dana is a good instructor. He tends to sort of ramble a bit sometimes in a low voice, so sit near the front. If you just attend class regularly you'll do fine.

Dana is a nerd! He claims to like teaching, but his performances in the classes he teaches do not reflect that belief. Dana is an extremely boring lecturer. He knows his stuff, but is unable to convey them to the students in an understandable way. Avoid him if possible.

He is very boring and mundane for this class--I would reccommend taking another professor because this class can be cool.

Basically an average class, average professor. I can understand why CSC 300 is required (it gives people a good fuzzy feeling knowing that ethics are being taught to future programmers), but overall it is a waste of time.

Chuck Dana seemed to me like a very lazy man. He did about half of one lecture for the whole quarter, and he always forgot to post homework and reading. On my 10 minute talk Dana said that I talked slow and was boring, so he marked me down. But he talks even slower and more boring than me so watch out. I don't really appreciate the B I got in this class. Maybe I didn't work hard enough, but Dana's lazyness and poor speeking skills didn't really inspire me to work any harder. If I got a B in this class I would give Dana a C or a D because he didn't do anything. More could have been accomplished if 30 students were locked in a classroom for an hour with no teacher.

Dana is a fairly poor professor. His lecturing abilities are highly lacking. He speaks in incomplete sentences fairly often, he mumbles just about all the time, and his lectures contain very little useful information. Infact, he seems like one of the most inefficient professors I've had. He is also a nerd. The class is very easy if you discipline yourself; there is a notebook in which you must do weekly assignments (review questions from the book, journal entry, and reading reactions). Everything in this notebook ends up being a bit more than 40% of your grade, which is bad if you don't like busywork (I failed this course once before cause of the stupid notebook). The group projects are cake. Beware, Some kind of visual aid is required for the final presentation (Powerpoint slides or overheads). Clark Turner guest lectured one day, he is roughly %1,000 better at lecturing, though I've heard he has a 20 page paper at the end of his CSC 300 class.

I agree with most of the other evaluators. Dana is a really boring guy, and the class is a waste of time. I heard that CSC 300 with Turner is like 100% more efficient. Dana is very unorganized, and his grading is sorta random. He is very lazy, and grades journals and talks very late (towards the end of the course) that he makes random judgements about your talks. Like somebody else mentioned, he mumbles a lot. He wears the same clothes all week, and they usually are dirty - sometimes he smells! Come on, if you have a PhD, at least have the common sense to wear clean clothes. Labs are pretty worthless, and I didn't learn much from them. Overall, I would rate the professor a C or a D. Dana is one of the worst CSc professors at Cal Poly.

Yes, "boring", "lazy", "waste of time", "worst professor", "monotonous", "avoid Dana", "take Turner", ...

What a fucking joke. This man slept, showed up late, let off class early, and never taught us a single thing the entire quarter. The only time the class was slightly interested was when other students were presenting '2 minute talks' or other presentations. This class is an extremely easy workload. Why? Every other week, he'd assign us reading from the textbook, and make us summarize what we read and answer some review questions. This textbook can be found online, don't spend $100, and it's written on the level of a middle school class. Very easy to summarize and the review questions can be answered directly from the text. There was one test, the final, and it was a breeze. This is because there was nothing to test us on because he didn't teach a single thing. So the test was literally about the presentations us students had given the 2 weeks before. It took about 15 minutes. So why did I get a C in this class? For my final paper, which I think I did a pretty good job on and actually found interest in writing, he told me that because I didn't follow the exact style as the sample paper he had posted online. His exact words were that I should have taken the sample paper and "All you really needed to do was fill in the blanks with your subject matter." The worst part is that this could have been a really interesting class. The course subject is basically discuss technology and it's implications on society- ie. drones, hacking. security, etc. We had Kearns as a substitute one day and I loved it. Learned more that one day than all quarter with this joke. Teachers like this make me question why I'm paying for a degree.

There was not much structure to this class. Basically, the first hour was allotted for students to bring in articles relating to computers and society, followed by discussion from the students as well. I didn't stay for the second hour very often, but from what I can gather it consisted of Dana sharing his own articles and maybe playing a few video clips. The breaks were always far too long, giving more incentive to leave, and it was never very clear what we were supposed to be learning. The first five or six weeks we had to do these notebooks which more or less were summaries of chapters along with responses to questions from the book, but they were not too difficult. There was a group presentation which did not take much time to prepare for. There was a min. 750 word paper in the end, which was a topic of your choice, and then a final, which is open book. Easy class, not much to learn. To Dana's credit though, this was his first time doing this course, and he was very nice throughout the quarter.

Whoah BABY is this man boring. It's truly staggering. If you're unfortunate enough to have to take the class from him, I strongly recommend you bring something to class to read so you don't have to listen to him. If you copy down what he writes on the board, you'll be okay. His programming assignments are not overly time-intensive, but be ready to give the ML ones three to four hours just because it's a weird language. His tests are really intense in terms of time -- you're writing constantly. The material is not overly difficult. Avoid Dana like the plague.

I got an A, but not because of Dana...boy, talk about boring and a waste of my time. I would try to avoid him at all costs (unless you are graduating and need his class)

He seems like a pretty nice guy, and appears to like the material he's teaching, but lets face it - the guy is boring. He talks slowly, and though not quite in a monotone, it's enough to be soporific. His occasional outbursts of activity would be nice to break the monotony if they seemed appropriate and predictable - as is, they're just a little frightening. As for the material: you'll learn it, even if it seems pretty useless and picky. Specifically to CSC-330: ML seems to be his favorite language, expect a lot of time spent learning this undeniably odd language.

Dana's class was pretty boring but I felt I learned a lot. Things kind of come together at the end which is nice and the programs aren't too difficult. He gives one midterm, one final, 5 programming assingments and like 2 written ones. All his exams are open notes and open book. If you can get a hold of the old test from previous quarters you should be albe to do fine on them. He's the only professor who teaches it so I guess you don't really have a choice but he was a better professor than I was expecting.

Prof. Dana is one of the worst (if not THE worst) lecturer in the CSC department at CalPoly. This course could have been very interesting and worthwhile, but his total lack of voice-inflection as well as a complete absence of social adeptness ruin this class beyond all repair. Unfortunately, if you are a CSC major you probably don't have any other choice than to take this class with him, so all you can do is make sure to get all of the handouts and read up on ML early. ML is a pretty easy language to learn, but only if you look at examples online and read the book yourself. Pay attention to Dana's examples as they are a lot like what you'll see on the test, but ignore all of his other half-assed attempts at teaching because they'll only confuse you. This is not a difficult class to pass, but you won't enjoy yourself while suffering through it. The workload is just below a moderate level and the test's aren't too difficult as long as you spend a little time studying, preferrably looking at old tests for examples of what type of questions to expect.

I read the other reviews of Dr. Dana and was frightened to enter this class. However, I was pleasantly surprised. I had a lot of fun in this class. If you are a Computer Science major because you like programming, you will love this class. The assignments are not that hard once you figure out what he is asking. Sometimes they may take some time but you really feel like you accomplished something when you are done. It usually took me longer to read the program assignment than to actually code the program. Dr. Dana is indeed a character, but he is generally very clear about what he expects and although he sometimes trails off, if you ask him a question he actually answers it, which not all CSC professors do too well. Anyway, this class was a real eye-opener. All the Java freaks will see that there is a lot more out there...

Dana is an interesting character and 330 is a relatively interesting course. The secret is learning how to stay awake and catch the important parts of Dana's lecture while figuring out when you can skip class and when you can go back to reading your newspaper. Dana makes it hard to really care about the class... he has a droning voice (through no fault of his own) that makes you just want to bring a pillow and stuffed animal to class each day. If you can stay awake enough to scribble down a few notes, do the projects and understand them, you'll do fine. I mean, how can you NOT with open note/open book tests?! (The secret to that, I think, is Dana knows that you're going to fall asleep, so open-note tests don't really help because you didn't take notes... but knowing where stuff in the book is is a good idea).

dana was one of the more boring and monotonous teachers i know. i think he grades fairly, but his tests are hard, i was lucky that i had some of his previous midterms to study for because without them, i would have had no idea what and how to study for the tests. we went over a few programming languages such as ml, csh, prolog and java, which gave a pretty good introduction to the different types of programming languages. his luctures weren't really that helpful, a lot of the topics need to be self taught, especially through doing his programming assignments.

This guy is the laziest professor i ever seen. We didn't get any feedback on the any of the programs until a week after finals. Besides, he only thought our 1 class this quarter, hell only 1 section to be precise. People like him don't deserve to teach.

Chuck Dana sucks rocks. He tested us on material that came directly from the book. That would be fine, except that he never lectured on it, nor did he test us on lecture material. That's probably for the better, because I never understood a thing he was trying to teach. If he stopped making and laughing at his own lame jokes, I could have learned something. Come on, the PDP-11 is old school.