• I could have learned more if I would have just read the course book on my own time. Hanson taught directly out of the book and most of the time didn't understand the materials himself. Also the labs that were assigned had little to do with the course itself it was more oriented around network security. They were also poorly translated from Spanish and had unreadable screen shots which made it impossible to complete some of the labs without extensive trial and error. Overall this was the worst course I have had at GW and feel that it was a waste of $3000.
• No teaching nor learning took place in this graduate level computer security course. If a representative of the regional accrediting agency, the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, observed this class then GWU Engineering School's accreditation would be immediately put into a probationary status. This instructor and the course content was unplanned, disorganized and substandard. This instructor has gotten away with sub-par performance for many years, without tenure, that it is now at a point where the decision making process to hire him each semester for the past ten years needs to be evaluated. The name of the course is "Computer Security". This should be the bread-and-butter profit center of the computer science department. Instead a great opportunity has been lost and the reputation of the CS Dept reduced in the region. The first hint of a problem with this professor happened in the first two minutes of the course when he opened the book and went to the board and started copying w
• All projects are scarcely related to the class.
• The OPNET Projects were very interesting to do, the only problem were the blurry images that made some of the projects almost impossible to do. At times I felt very frustrated working on these projects because I couldn't get the right results.
• In my opinion, the professor's knowledge on the topic is questionable. Neither the lectures, nor the homework assignments help learning the topic. This is the most disappointing course I've taken so far.
• Hanson is by far the worst professor I have ever had in my entire academic career. His organizational skills are sorely lacking, and his laziness in regards to preparing lessons and labs for the class show no equal. He has been using the same PDF document labs for at least three years (I know this from other students who have taken this course in years past). Not only that, but he uses the same PDF labs for when he teaches the Network Security course. Basically, he milks the same course material for two courses, not only cheating the students, but the university itself. These PDF documents are poorly translated into English, and rely on the low resolution pictures to convey how the labs should be set up in the OptiNet software. The same OptiNet software from the same company for which he consults... is this subliminal advertising, or or does he get kickbacks? Almost every student in the class has conveyed their problems with these PDF documents, and yet he has persisted to use them for at least thr
• Attending Dr. Hanson's class was an exceptional experience. Dr. Hanson would lecture from prepared notes or slides, and copy those notes to the blackboard -- but at times visibly struggle to comprehend and explain them. Exams were euphemistically referred to as "parties", but these were neither challenging nor demonstrative of real understanding. Largely, they consisted exercises in regurgitation of definitions and acronyms. Homework assignments involved hopeless attempts to extract network configurations from images that were compressed and pixellated. After numerous requests from the class, Dr. Hanson deigned to email out screenshots that were necessary to complete the assigned tasks -- but only after his students spent countless hours working futilely on their own. It is rare to encounter a university professor with so minimal a regard for his students' intellect and time -- and so poor a command of the course matter he hopes to instruct.