CS 3330

Ashish is a genuinely smart professor, interested in helping his students understand and apply computer architecture concepts. However, the day he arrived he got rid of the textbook, implemented problem sets that not even TA's could solve, and lectured on material at twice the speed as Reiss. When asked to solve past-problems in class, he rarely got them right, and claimed they were too trivial for him. It's hard to convey the difficulty of his problem sets and exams, but here's how I perceived them: [In lecture] cars can drive at up to 80 mph, and bicycles can go up to 20 mph. [Problem set] a car is going down the highway at 100 mph, and an elephant is marching in the opposite direction. How many calories are in a bar of chocolate? [Exam] in a world where bicycles are actually horses and chocolate is 200 calories, synthesize these facts with all your knowledge to calculate the circumference of a rubiks cube.

Man, I don't know y'all. I'm not even a CS major, and this is too much y'all. I don't know if I can do this. This is stressing me out just by looking through the eyes of my fellow CS friends. If you take this class, make sure you have NOTHING else to do with your life and I mean NOTHING. Like you are just dry as hell in your life and have nothing else going on. I'm only saying this because you will need all the time in the world to do this class. Trust me. I don't even take this class. Like I thought Quantum Mechanics II was hard, but this class makes Quantum seem like Algebra I. The average hours were calculated based off student experiences, so they aren't false. Have fun!

I got diagnosed with clinical depression this school year. I thought I was having a hard time until I heard about the kids taking this class.

Very engaging, noticeably knowledgable about the subject. Understanding, cool, kind, smart. Now read the first letter of every word.

If you were able to manifest the plague into a class this is probably what you'd get.

upvote if you were shafted by that exam and Venkat.

genuinely my second-favorite class I've taken at UVA. venkat has what seems like encyclopedic knowledge of the field and clearly cares about it, ishika paul is extremely down-to-earth and ridiculously dedicated to the students (literally pulling all-nighters to help us finish up projects), and the TAs were extremely helpful too! it sounds like this was a huge change from the last time Venkat taught it, but i'm not joking or being sarcastic or anything. loved the class and would recommend it to anyone, especially in light of the stuff i've heard about khan's section

I really enjoyed this class, in spite of everything I heard about past semesters - Venkat and Ishika were really supportive with regards to assignments and grading, and actually care about the quality of the course / success of the students. Their passion for the field is really apparent. The homework could be completed in a reasonable amount of time, the exams were challenging but fair, and the projects were actually really cool (I recommend pacing yourself well on the processor project, you have most of the semester so it's easy to push off).

I definitely learned more than I would have in the other section, and it wasn't a GPA killer like I've heard it described - the class was structured so you can only curve up from your raw score, and I think it was really well-organized overall. TBH was worried about this course initially, and stayed because my schedule didn't fit the other section, but I'm glad I did. Highly recommend

This is one of the best classes taught by a great team of staff. Venkat, Ishika and the TAs are all very knowledgeable about the subject and very very supportive. I highly recommend taking this class with Venkat.

Venkat must've done a 180 on this class cus it was pretty awesome and a super reasonable workload. Both him and Ishika were always accessible in case you need help with homework or the projects, so nothing ever took too long. Feel like we learned a lot about comp arch and could always get him to elaborate when we didn't know what was going on. For sure recommend the class with Venkat.