Current instructor

Eftychios Sifakis

Adjusted rating
RMP difficulty
captured reviews
About this rating

Raw average: 3.59/5 from 27 quality ratings. The adjusted rating blends this with the UW review average (3.66/5), weighted as 20 additional ratings. Smaller samples stay closer to that average. Each captured review is counted once in the prior; this does not correct who chooses to leave a review.

RMP profile ↗ · All captured review dates; profile matched by name.

What students say

Original student reviews · all captured dates

COMPSCI 557
Quality 5/5Difficulty 3/5
Very knowledgeable and chill. Lectures and projects are interesting; most lectures will be a case study go-through with code. Grading structure is clear and lenient, and he will give out practice exams for review. Highly recommend!
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COMPSCI 559
Quality 5/5Difficulty 2/5
Efty's lectures are engaging and full of content, and he shows great decorum when interacting with student questions. He clearly knows his stuff on a deep, technical level. The course is designed well, and projects build off one another. The projects themselves are straightforward, so long as you've been attending lecture. A class act.
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COMPSCI 559
Quality 4/5Difficulty 4/5
Prof. Sifakis is knowledgeable on the subject matter and explains the contents clearly. He's also accessible outside of class. My greatest complaint is with his unclear "contract grading" policy, which grants the top 30% of satisfactory work full credits without a rubric. This makes it harder to gauge the amount of effort needed for a full score.
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COMPSCI 559
Quality 4/5Difficulty 1/5
Sifakis clearly knows a ton about computer graphics and is passionate for the field, but teaches the content far too slowly in my opinion. That doesn't change that the content is great and the projects encourage you to experiment and be creative! Also, fantastic TAs and course staff that were willing to answer simple to very advanced questions.
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COMPSCI 559
Quality 1/5Difficulty 4/5
Horrible competitive grading system that makes it very difficult to earn an A. Compete with students who will write 500 - 1000 lines of code per weekly project, and in the end your grade will be based on subjective opinion. Lectures are boring and weirdly paced, with tons of material overlap and no recordings. Tests fine but barely affect grade.
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COMPSCI 559
Quality 5/5Difficulty 2/5
I don't understand why he has a low rating. I took this class Fall 2022, and the class has changed a lot from when it first started (the class was originally in C++ but moved to Javascript based on student feedback). For both the midterm and final, we were allowed to have a note sheet and received practice exams. No required readings.
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Personal experiences, not a representative survey. Profile matching and captured coverage are shown in the source details.

Classes with Eftychios Sifakis

Introduction to high-performance computing focusing on shared-memory systems, multithreaded programming, vectorization, and memory hierarchy using numerical algorithms as case studies.

Offering recorded · Spring 2027 · Sources

Past student reviews · Eftychios Sifakis

Eftychios Sifakis taught the course with a chill, knowledgeable approach, focusing lectures on case studies and code. Students found the grading structure clear and lenient, noting that he provided practice exams for review. The instructor was described as highly recommendable due to these engaging and supportive teaching methods.

historical GPA · grades

Spring 2025–Spring 2026

Senior Honors Thesis is an individual study for seniors completing theses for honors in the Computer Sciences major, arranged with a faculty member.

Offering recorded · Spring 2027 · Sources

No recorded grade history

Directed study projects for Computer Science juniors and seniors, arranged with a faculty member.

Offering recorded · Spring 2027 · Sources

historical GPA · grades

Fall 2022–Spring 2026 · limited sample

Pre-dissertator independent research supervised by a faculty member for students who have completed a master's degree but have not reached dissertator status.

Offering recorded · Spring 2027 · Sources

No recorded grade history

Recorded teaching history

Distinct courses recorded per term

Explore courses taught by this instructor →
Browse recorded courses
TermCourseTitle
Spring 2027COMPSCI 557Parallel & Throughput- Optimized Programming
Spring 2027COMPSCI 681Senior Honors Thesis
Spring 2027COMPSCI 699Directed Study
Spring 2027COMPSCI 790Master's Thesis
Spring 2027COMPSCI 799Master's Research
Spring 2027COMPSCI 899Pre-dissertator Research
Spring 2027COMPSCI 990Dissertation
Fall 2026COMPSCI 682Senior Honors Thesis
Fall 2026COMPSCI 699Directed Study
Fall 2026COMPSCI 702Graduate Cooperative Education
Fall 2026COMPSCI 790Master's Thesis
Fall 2026COMPSCI 799Master's Research
Fall 2026COMPSCI 899Pre-dissertator Research
Fall 2026COMPSCI 990Dissertation

Teaching history may be incomplete. Course pages contain course-specific feedback and citations.

Instructor identity & provenance
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