Historical 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

No teaching recorded in Fall 2026.

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Recorded teaching history

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

Instructor identity & provenance
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