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What did you like the most about the professor/instructor? Trobaugh is great.

I hate that both he and I had to bring ourselves through this painful material. How could this course improve?

Focus less on the mechanics of the algorithms and more on the theory or real application. My biggest disappointment with the course was that essentially what tests and quizzes boiled down to was applying by hand what computers are used to do. I think this course has a lot of potential (I find OR to be a very interesting topic), but the efforts of this course were focused in all of the wrong places. The course was not a mathematically rigorous view of convex optimization, nor was it a rigorous from an applied perspective (which I hope to gain in the applied OR course). Rather, the course straddled an awkward middle ground where we brush over much of the theory and essentially say "ignore this hard stuff so we can apply this algorithm", at which point you memorize a specific instance of a problem for a test or quiz and promptly forget what you learn right afterwards until the next assessment. Which is quite disappointing, because this is essentially what we teach computers to learn, not students. I can't even begin to convey my frustration that, as a junior in college, I am turning in pages and pages worth of assignments that really come down to whether or not you can successfully add rows of a matrix. I understand that Professor Trobaugh is clearly cognizant of the tedious and frustrating nature of this, so my question is...why not fix it? How about putting this class in a more applied setting? How are we getting the parameters that we are using to plug and chug in our various algorithms? When is it okay to assume linearity? How can we linearize this specific instance of a non-linear problem etc. ? These are the kinds of questions that I had hoped to see covered in the class. This course really shines in the problem formulation and the presentations. Excel formulations are both interesting and employable, and the group presentations offer a nice change of pace. The variations of simplex method (which is basically the entire course) are disposable and easily forgotten. This was the first time that I've felt it necessary to rant on a course evaluation, and I apologize if I came off as rude. OR needs to decide what it wants to be, and it should NOT, as it is today, be a required course for Systems Engineers. It seems like the applied option is already taken with ESE 404, so I guess that means that this course should steer more towards the theory of simplex etc. As it stands though, there is no value in awkwardly straddling that middle line, and it is really something that should be fixed.

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