Prof. Ferris is such a great person and is beyond helpful during office hours. If you use his office hours, you will succeed in this class. It is a ton of work and the homeworks are super time-consuming, but they do force you to learn. We did not have a final this semester because he cancelled it when he didn't find anyone cheating.

524 is a very challenging class. This can be expected for any 500-level CS. When taking this course with Prof. Ferris Gams Studio will be used. Prof. Ferris explains the concepts well, but you will have to work to fully understand the GAMS software. He gets judged on the rigor of the class and not his ability to teach the material. Work with peers.

I'll start off by saying that I don't dislike Professor Ferris as a person, but this class sucks. The homework is insanely time-consuming, and slightly getting a problem wrong will turn that problem into a 50%. On top of that, grade distributions are hidden. Avoid this class and the stress it brings with it. Worst class through 4 years of college.

HW will ruin your social life and he grades incredibly hard

The topic is interesting and Ferris is obviously very passionate and intelligent but the home works take incredible effort and time each week (like 10-12 hours per week if you don't have prior modeling experience). I've had to blow off other classes and work just to make time for this course. I'm miserable. Avoid at all costs.

This guy is terrible.

Pros: Nice guy Good office hours Exam not 50%+ of grade. Cons: Slides confusing No penalty-free late days/assnmt drops often 14+ hours per HW HW solutions usually not provided Final project requirements not communicated clearly Already know real analysis/341 tier linalg or you're going to have a bad time not joking This class stressed me out.

Very good in office hours and is always willing to help out. He will explain things if you ask and is great making sure that you understand the content. It is very difficult course, but you just have to put the work in.

Very dull lectures. Poor organization after introducing duality (cross-referencing theorems without careful proof). Provide OK intuitions but other professors here can do better. Doesn't mention anything about cutting-edge research.

Lectures were very disorganized. Examples were often explained in complex ways making the problems on the homework very difficult to complete. Seemed less interested in teaching the material to students new to optimization and more interested in showing off his advanced knowledge of the topics.

Seems like a nice guy. But I don't know why he grades so harshly. This course has an average GPA of 3.7 when it is taught by other professors, but it is only 3.2 when he teaches this course.

His lectures and slides are extremely unstructured. Coding examples are rare and when they are given, they are unexplained and without context. The entire class uses the GAMS programming language which has little online documentation. In lecture, it is hard to follow how what he is saying relates to anything on the slides.

Lectures are not very helpful because he just codes in GAMS in front of the class. The course was more focused on GAMS than anything else. Homeworks are needlessly tedious sometimes, and poorly written. You absolutely cannot finish a homework without checking the Canvas discussion page and getting clarifications on what a problem is asking for.

Keep away from him. Unbelievably bad lecture and confusing homework. You will spend much time on understanding what he's saying even if the content is super easy. He has the magical power to make a linear constraint harder than finding an integral of sin(4x)cos(3x). Average 5-10 questions about the problem description in ONE assignment.

really bad lecturer,giving confusing lectures. I learnt all material by myself. The homework was not supposed to be so hard if he could give some information on lecture. Stay Away from him!

Changed the start time of the class from the official one so that he could cancel some lectures and offer us the same amount of instruction. Lectures are relatively clear but can be confusing at times, especially in the middle of a proof. Exams are quite difficult, and the textbook is not well written.

His class is so tough. The homework is long and there are so many proof questions that make it a pure math class. The project is interesting and easy though. The problem is final, because the final is way too hard, and he expects the average to be 50-60. On the bright side, he's easy to talk with and explain problems clearly.

Bad Prof !