Review:
Excellent teacher; incredibly bright.

[NOTE: While I don't know if Couch is still teaching COMP15, this review is NOT course-specific.]

Prof. Couch is, overall, an absolutely excellent teacher. The one warning I'd give is that he does have a very strong personality -- while 95% of the students I've talked to really like him as a teacher, the remaining 5% tend to have extreme personality conflicts & end up loathing him. This is the only reason I give him an A-.

He's an amazing lecturer, with energy, verve, and wit. There is an occasional exception: sometimes he'll lecture while he's at a computer, typing notes & examples as he goes along (displayed on an overhead projector). I feel that his otherwise incredible lecturing style suffers greatly when he's using this approach; however, it is undeniable that the notes & examples produced are very useful to have online as a reference.

He's extremely bright, and could probably be earning a truckload of cash in industry if he wanted to, but he's teaching instead.

He works hard on classes, and acted as unpaid sysadmin for the departmental computers for several years. [I'm glad he doesn't still have to do that; the extra work was visibly stressful to him & probably impacted his teaching during that time....I had him as a teacher before those couple-of-years. I've been told by other students that he's back to his old self, now. :]

You can learn a lot from him, and have a good time doing it. Workload in his courses tends to be a bit above university average, but also tends to be much more interesting (assuming you like Comp Sci, that is).

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How I know Prof. Couch: I took several courses from him, TAed for several of his classes, had him as my graduate advisor, and worked under him for a while after graduating.

It's been a while since I was in a course of his, which is why I don't give grades in the various categories - my recollections of such specific things may be inaccurate after this much time.

Workload:
N/A

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