Hisham, Assal  

BEST PROFESSOR AT CAL POLY!!! TAKE HIM FOR CPE 101!!

PROS: Assal is really chill bro. He is very relaxed in his labs and lectures. He has no real "due dates" for any programs and will pretty much give you an A for effort on all homework and labs. He grades midterms very generously as well. His office hours are a godsend too, he will hold your little hand through any program/code and make sure it works! CONS: He tends to move surprisingly fast in the material and if you don't keep up, you WILL get lost. TLDR; Easy A/B. TAKE ASSAL

This guy is a baller. While he's not busy being a boss, he teaches at Cal Poly. He has no due dates on his programs or labs which can be a good thing but it is self-punishing if you try to abuse it as you will be screwed at quarters end. When you go to his office hours he basically does the work for you. What's weird about it is that I expected to just breeze by and not learn anything but somehow I learned a ton from him and I wasn't stressed about the class at all. He is a really funny guy to talk to and his reactions when you don't understand code make it that much more worth it to go to his office hours. He's basically a God.

Really laid back and easy grading, but expect to teach yourself for the common final.

Quiet but super nice guy. Very knowledgeable and flexible with due dates. Very helpful but difficult to communicate effectively. Look to the tutoring sessions for anything beyond basic help. Easy exams but assignments require significant time so be ready to give suitable time.

Hisham makes the class clear on what he wants you to learn. His assignments and tests are reasonable.

Professor Assal seems quite knowledgeable in the subject matter, but his delivery of the material to students is lacking. I found his lectures incredibly dull and often lost focus even when I fought to maintain it. I'm not sure if he realized that many of the students in my class already knew the vast majority of the material he was covering since we took AP CS in high school. If he did, he certainly did not adjust his teaching to accommodate these students. Lectures were always half-empty and a number of students skipped every day except for exam sessions. The class was exceedingly easy throughout the entire quarter with a minimal workload. Definitely recommend against this section though because, even though it's an easy A, there was a lot of material on the common final I'd never seen before. I didn't learn anything at all and I certainly don't feel prepared for next quarter.

Don't take Assal to learn the material. Take Assal to get a good grade and pray you taught yourself enough to survive CSC 103

Overall 102 with Assal is a breeze, but you won't learn anything. It's a series of powerpoint lectures that are generally coherant but completely uninspired, followed by lab assignments. I knew 3/4 of the material which was nice, so I didn't go to class and turned in assignments online. For the last 1/4 I went to class once and learned very little so I just stopped going to class and learned the material on my own. I got 100%s on both midterms and a B+ on the final. All in all I didn't learn anything from this class but it was an easy A and now I can move on to 103. Hopefully I've been prepared well enough.

Baller

Dr. Assal is pretty good at explaining the difficult material in Discrete Structures, and is more than fair on tests and exams. He's helpful and is a nice person. However, I think this class would have been a bit better if it were more organized. Too often due dates were vague and assignments that were supposed to be posted by a specific date weren't. If a bit of disorganization doesn't bother you, then I'd probably go ahead and take his class, but if you need a more structured class, it might not work as well for you.

I loved having Assal this quarter and will definitely try to take him again for a more interesting class. The class material itself is pretty boring but he is super relaxed and the stuff I didn't know already was presented clearly. He posts all his powerpoints which is helpful. He is always willing to help on labs and assignments and even will push back the deadline if you really need it. He wants all his students to succeed and get a decent grade in the class.

Fuck this guy. Id like to stick my tounge up his ass.

Not the most intense tech elective out there, but Assal is a super chill dude who won't stress you out. I enjoyed the class despite it having hardly any structure.

This is a laid back class that has no midterms and no hw. Just a quiz and a lab every week. Quizes online 1hr and labs take 3-4hrs at the most. There is a project for the entire quarter that you present for the final. Professor Assal is a very nice and polite professor, who is a bright guy himself. I feel that he presented the material well, but is soft spoken at times so very easy to fall asleep. Fun class overall and he is a very good Professor and seems to really care about you as a student and as a human being.

Assal is probably the worst experience I've ever had with a professor. Every class consists of, explaining six or seven algorithms, and nothing else. If you enjoy listening to people verbally explain what an algorithm does with no example code over and over you'll love this class. Often the algorithms have no discernible difference except for the naming of different components. I've actually had this conversation: Me: What's the difference between these two algorithms? Assal: This one uses a heuristic function, and that one uses an evaluation function. Me: So what's the difference between a heuristic function and an evaluation function? Assal: A heuristic function is used by this algorithm, evaluation functions are used by that one. Weekly online quizzes are appreciated, at least they would be. Except at times the quizzes have information we never talked about in class, leaving you to google random facts to see if it's true or not, and sometimes have trick questions were one answer is technically correct, but are arbitrarily marked incorrect. (One quiz asked which algorithm had the worst time complexity, but the correct answer was wrong because the title of the quiz was, "Informed Search" and the option with the highest time complexity was an uninformed search.)

Not bad if you want an easy A. However, the class is absolutely useless and doesn't teach you anything useful.

Assal is a nice guy. I took Knowledge based systems with him and the class was SUPER BORING. I'd say I learned close to nothing. On that note though, the class was almost no work and was probably the easiest class i've taken at cal poly. Need an upper div tech elective and don't have time to do something difficult this is a decent filler class.