I saw someone else post a review for this class for this semester, and I know people are registering for classes now, so I'm going to post my review now since the semester is almost over. First part is about Morrison, second is about the class overall.

Morrison does her best. I agree with the other reviewer that her "help" can feel very dismissive (ex: when the program we were using, Codepost, wasn't working, she refused to take accountability and blamed us all for doing it wrong, despite entirely too many Piazza posts proving otherwise), but she can be helpful at times, and she's definitely much nicer in person. This is her first time teaching the course here, so I'm hoping she'll learn from her mistakes and be better next semester. The way she scheduled the semester was very confusing, with many labs covering content we haven't discussed in lecture, and then our quizzes are on content we haven't talked about in weeks. I'll give more specifics about scheduling below, but I think a big reason we have the scheduling mistakes is because of Morrison's poor planning. I will say, to her credit, she explains the content really well overall in her lectures, and she answers Piazza questions very quickly. My biggest problem is that there are many times I will understand the content but have zero idea how to code it when it comes to the homeworks. For a programming professor, she barely does any programming. If you actually want to learn the coding, you have to go to Stone's lectures in person (he doesn't record the programming parts), but he's terrible at explaining the concepts. I honestly think this class would be great if they taught it together, rather than you having to choose one, but that's not the way it is.

Now for the class content itself. It is... a mess, to say the least. Morrison heads the course this semester, and since she and Stone haven't taught it before, neither of them know what they're doing. Half the time people ask questions about the homework/quizzes in Stone's lectures, he doesn't know the answers because Morrison created them and he didn't really look at them.

I mentioned the scheduling before, so I'll go more into it now. You can turn in homeworks early for extra credit—definitely recommend, it's the only reason I'm getting an A in this class—but they're due on Sundays, the only day basically no TAs have office hours. And Morrison rarely checks Piazza posts on Sundays anyway, when she's the only one who responds to anyone on Piazza. The homeworks can take you a ton of time, and they eat up most of my weekends (AVL trees *and* an online quiz on Easter was absolutely brutal IMO). Whatever you do, start early. You'll need it, especially towards the end of the semester. The quizzes (worth 50% of your overall grade, 25% in class quizzes and 25% online quizzes, 5 of each) are every few weeks. Out of town for a quiz? Too bad, make it up for the optional final, which you only have one day to do. For the final, you can make up four quizzes, but in one day, that's not a lot of time per quiz to study and do the quizzes you need. The online ones are really easy, and they're open note—though I've never really needed my notes for them, anyway—but the in person ones are terrible. They never release the quiz averages, which seems a little shady to me, when the ones they have released are ~60% averages with no curve.

The TAs may be the worst part of this course. They never answer Piazza questions, office hours are always full, and they take forever to grade anything. We're almost done with the semester with less than half of our grades. I say I'm getting an A, but I have no idea. The last few homeworks and quizzes have become completely auto graded because of them. When I did go to office hours, they weren't helpful. They either Googled the answer in front of me or gave me debugging tips I'd already tried. At this point, I think I'm more of a TA than the actual TAs, considering how many times I've had to help my friends with labs and homeworks because the TAs don't do what they get paid to do.

The course content isn't terrible, really. If you pay attention in lecture, study a little before the quizzes, and start your homeworks early, you can manage an A pretty easily. Just don't count on the TAs or professors to help you. I, for one, never plan on taking another class with Morrison or Stone again, and I don't think you should, either.

I can't express how frustrating this class is. Both professors this semester were not teaching in a way that actually helped you learn the content. They flew through the slides and wouldn't cover the important stuff. The assignments were always a mess and the quiz and homework structure overlapped and were inconsistent. Office hours for TAs were always full and if you asked for help the response from the professors felt very dismissive and negative. The actual content is really not that difficult but basically, everyone ended up teaching themselves the content. Would recommend finding another professor to take this with.