CS 2100

Oh where to start. I'm a CS major btw and I say this as it is important.

I did in the end enjoy this class. I found it to be relatively low stress and almost easy but despite this, I still very much hated certain parts.

The quizzes. My god these sucked. 4 questions 8 pts; Q1 1 pt, Q2 1 pt, Q3, 2 pts, Q4 4 pts. Originally a score strictly greater than 7 would round to 8 but they relaxed it to be that a 7 and up rounded up. Quizzes every monday. They were not very good. There would be mistakes every quiz. Q4 a short coding question, was usually an unnecessarily complicated situation that was more often than not poorly explained. There are a few retakes so that's nice.

Homeworks were usually okay. Trees and Hash Tables were the hardest; each taking me >10 hrs whereas a normal homework would take 1-2. Same situation, you learn a data structure for the week then next week is a coding homework on it and usually a report. The coding homework had a common theme of making an unnecessarily difficult situation that barely utilized the data structure. Example: Hash Tables. First we wrote the code for a hash table. Then, we had to write a word search program. Guess how the hash table was used in this part of the homework? We were given a text file of a dictionary and were to make a hash table of this. That's it. The rest of the homework was to write code that would find every word in a given grid and see if it was in the dictionary hash table. This might not sound that bad but let me spoil. ~5% of the time doing the homework was spent making the hash table structure and also making the dictionary hash table and ~95% was spent making code that could accurately and in a reasonable amount of time, find every word in the grid. Oh and guess what hash table functions were used for this? Add to the table, and check if the table contains a given string. That's it.

There's no exams or final. The final is a chance to retake every quiz however, the final is only 2 hrs and the normal time given for a quiz is 30 minutes so you could only reasonably do maybe 6 quizzes, possibly more if you're really fast. (There were either 11 or 12 total quizzes). I ended up not taking the final as my grade was high enough but still, with the quizzes being as rough as they were, ymmv.

HWs 40% Quizzes 60% of your grade.

As for Floryan, I liked him. He was a good prof and funny (altho the class didn't have a sense of humor or any emotions for that matter). I would say try to get him if he teaches this class again. It should be noted though, it was always Prof. Basit who was advocating for things to be easier for us (the rounding to be more lenient, deadlines for difficult hws to be pushed, etc). He never proposed those first.

Despite all this, I enjoyed the course a lot and found it fun and interesting (this is why my note of being a CS major is important as non majors may find their experience much different).