Western Kentucky University / B / Ray Blankenship

Is absolutely unwilling to help with any questions whatsoever. If you ask a question, his response is that you are obviously not smart enough to be in college.

this class should be cake and it was. the reason behind my low grade is this teacher is one of the most unhelpful teachers i have had at wku. in cis you only have to come one day a week, and i happened to come on mondays. i work a lot on monday mornings and have to rush as fast as i can with little time to study the computer programs. i actually missed one of the tests b/c of work. before i missed the test i asked him if i could go to wednesday classes b/c i dont work on wednesdays. he simply said no b/c it is too much trouble for him to lift a finger and help a student out. the class is very easy but i made a zero on an exam which obviously hurt.

I ended up dropping this class cuz he is annoying.

Dr. B is a really nice guy. He offers help to anyone that needs it. In this class, you only have to attend on the days of the exams. The rest of the time, you work on assignments at home. I really liked this class. It isn't very difficult if you study the material well.

You almost never have to come to class except for quizzes, tests, and project presentations. The quizzes involve coding webpages, and you usually don't have enough time. Many of the questions on the tests are obscure. The only easy part of the class was the team project.

I have had Dr. Blankenship twice in my time here at WKU and I received a B in both classes. Although he has been the bane of my existence whenever I had him, I will attempt to give a fair evaluation. For all of you about to take 226, let me issue this warning: he will try to weed you out. The CIS dept. currently has more majors/minors than it can handle. 226 is the first class you will have to take and he will make you work. He will make you hate him in the hopes that if you are not dead serious about CIS, you'll drop out. He is a little more relaxed in the upper level courses but he is, and will always be, arrogant and unhelpful. He is very knowledgeable about the courses he teaches but his is an attitude of showing off more than actually wanting to teach. I should also mention that I am one in the minority of females in this major. I continuously got the feeling that Dr. Blankenship felt girls had no business in CIS. Maybe it was only me, but I often felt that he was sexist. One more than one occasion, he seemed to find joy in making my life difficult when I would ask him for help. He often refused to help me if it meant that he would have to walk to his office, no matter how long I was willing to wait. He once said "Do I look like I am in my office?" and then sat there smirking. On more than one occasion, he actually made me cry, from stress and from being so angry with him, although I quickly got out of the building and he never once got the satisfaction of seeing that. I couldn't stand him, but I was determined not to let him beat me. I will give him this much credit. His tests are straightforward and not difficult as long as your attendance is good. He is excellent at structuring exams. It is the projects that are a total mess. One more thing, when incentive grading was introduced into the CIS program, it was a 90/10 split. Whatever you did worse in was 90% of your grade. Since that time, most professors have relaxed down to at least 80/20 split and several don't even do it anymore. But as of Spring '03, Blankenship was still hanging onto that method of your lowest score being the most of your grade. Finally, the best advice that I can offer is to be up for the challenge when you sign up for this guy.

Blankenship is a pompous arrogant excuse for a proffessor. For starters he expects everyone to be below him on a social aspect. He puts himself as the dictator of your life and holds that with such regard that if you even think to reason with him, you might as well forget it. Throughout the class he constantly makes simple mistakes and goofs and then tries to play it off as a purposful example of what not to do. His grading is complete BS: tests and assignments (consist of 16 some programs to do using VB, each costing about 3-5 pts) are broken up into two categories. The two are averaged seperately and then figured into a final grade with the least of the two totaling 80% of the final, while the stronger average is 20% of your final grade. This is what he likes to call "incentive grading". His expectations of handing in assignments is a joke. As the student, you are to do the program assigned, take screen captures of what you are doing, and then present it as a "formal report" with text explaining what it is you did, why you did it, what problems you encountered. Instead he could make it easy on everyone and just have them hand in a working program that he can run using vb and even view the source code from. Lastly, don't even attempt to dispute a grade with him. He basically laughs at you and calls you a fool for trying (even when the grade in question is that of an assignment handed in that HE lost!). If you have a choice, don't choose Dr. Ray Blankenship for ANYTHING. And if you have to, my heaven have mercy on you.

Blankenship is the only prof teaching the class in the CIS department as of summer 2002, so this may not be of any help to anyone. But if they ever hire anyone else to teach the course, take Blankenship. He is a great teacher and he is very down-to-earth. He doesn't expect anything overwealming out of you. As long as you pay attention in class, read, and practice some of the programming on your own(don't just watch him) you should be fine. You can learn a lot from this class and Visual Basics can be a lot of fun if you let be.

Blakenship is kind of vague in his lectures. He expects you to study on your own from the bk. This class is very time consuming.

For this class, you had better know your Visual Basic. He makes you create a series of programs throughout the semester, but overall the programs are not all that bad. There are no exams, but there is a lengthy final project that is worked on during the final half of the semester. Fortunately, class doesn't meet during the final project phase of the class!! Overall though, I would recommend the class, because you learn a great deal about how Visual Basic programming applies to real life business.