CS 4740

This was probably the easiest A in a CS class I've ever gotten. That being said, I didn't get much out of the class. Prof Shen is extremely sweet and she cares about her students a lot; however, the course just sucks in general. The material is uninteresting, the HWs are dumb, and the Programming Assignments (PA) require no programming. (The only cool PA was the Map Reduce one...) If you want the easy A, take it with Shen... but, I strongly advise you take it with Humphrey

If you ever wonder if you should take this course with Humphrey or Shen and you want to actually learn something take it with Humphrey. If you just want to have an easy A, take it with Shen. Her class requires very few brain cells.

I do not recommend taking this with Shen. Shen would usually read right off the slides (though recently she said that she's trying to improve on this), lectures were very disorganized, it was difficult to tell why the concepts in class were important (i.e. how things fit into the bigger picture of cloud computing) so I had no idea why I was learning certain things. Homeworks was reasonable but I have no idea how relevant they were to Cloud today because she never explained this, or she did but I didn't understand because all her explanations are hard to follow. Almost everyone in the class showed up because attendance (taken through in-class quizzes) were require, but over half the class was always on their laptops. Shen did, however express interest in continued improvement in her teaching abilities .Perhaps she'll be a decent teacher in the (very distant) future. Office hours with her was somewhat helpful.

I want to start with this: Professor Shen is incredibly kind and hardworking. She tried her best to make the class fun, and she would give out awards to students (and extra credit) for asking good questions or answering her questions well.
That being said, this class was incredibly frustrating. Lectures consisted of her reading directly off the slides. The homeworks were just quizzes where you could copy and paste directly from the slides and the programming assignments tried to introduce us to cloud technologies like EC2, Docker etc, which would have been helpful if things were explained to us and we did more than mindlessly follow the tutorials. And the midterm/final were so frustrating - both happened during corona season so maybe this isn't how it normally goes, but while they were open note (a blessing) they both included things that were not in the slides and that we were not taught. Overall, the class had potential to be very engaging and useful, but left me frustrated and disappointed that I didn't learn anything (and even then was tested on things we weren't taught...).
I'm still expecting an A/A-, so that's a positive I guess.

Professor Shen is the cutest professor I have ever had. She literally acts like a teacher and mom in one. She is really funny and makes sure no one gets bored in class. She gives 5-10 min breaks in the middle of class where she lets you relax and answers any question you might have, while playing Tom and Jerry clips on the projector, or something else funny. She has pop-quizzes so you need to go to class. These quizzes are super easy though, usually just one question. She gives extra credit points to people for voluntarily answering certain questions. Her homeworks just consist of true/false, fill in the blank, multiple choice questions that are directly from her slides. Her programming assignments were mostly just going through longggg tutorials to understand concepts like getting familiar with AWS EC2, learning about Docker, working with MapReduce, configuring a multi-node Hadoop cluster, etc. We had 2 exams: a midterm and final. Both of them were online and open-notes for our semester due to the covid situation. The exams had too many questions for the amount of time given, especially the midterm. Everyone complained about not finishing, but maybe it was because we wasted time here and there confirming our answers with her slides, which we wouldn't be allowed to do if the exam was in person (she does allow a cheat sheet for in-person exams though). One thing that she did before each exam that no professor ever does is tell you which exact slides from each PowerPoint you need to study for the exam so that you are not studying unecessary slides. This was really helpful. Overall, this class is an easy A-/B+. You don't really learn anything, so don't take this class if that's what you're looking for; take is with Humphrey instead. Reading reviews is necessary before taking a class, so don't get mad if Shen is not teaching like how you would want her to. She is the sweetest person and tries bettering her teaching style every semester, so give her a break!
Here is the Course Breakdown: PA (20%), HW (20%), Midterm (20%), Final (20%), In-Class Quizzes (20%), Extra Credit (5%).

i guess you should take this course if you really just want an easy A, but you will literally learn absolutely nothing. all of the homework assignments are open note and word for word from the slides, and all the assignments are AWS tutorials

By far the most comically mismanaged class I've ever taken. The content itself isn't particularly compelling — compared to other instructors, who I've been told give more hands-on experience with the assignments, Shen's material focuses on more computer-architecturey concepts that don't really have any relevance to you if you're not into that kind of stuff. The lectures themselves are boring (I stopped going after the first week), but the content doesn't really matter because the course is incredibly easy. The written homeworks are 90% just copying verbatim from the provided slides and are autograded, meaning you are actively incentivized to NOT use your own words in your answers. The programming assignments are mostly just instruction-following and don't really give any meaningful level of experience with something like AWS. (Also one of them requires you to make *two* 80GB VMs on your machine because lmao)
The worst part, however, is the exams. For some reason, and I have literally never had a class before where this was the case, the instructional staff thinks it's a good idea to deliberately not release announcements about exam logistics via email. Multiple people posted Piazza questions asking days before the midterm, and either received non-answers or were completely ghosted. Quote from the professor explaining this policy: "It was explained in at least two classes. It is not fair to other students if we write it in Piazza. The best way is to ask another student...We do not put all information in slides, documents or piazza since it is a lecture class and we need to keep fairness for students." I'm not really sure how simply making sure everyone knows what the exam is going to be could possibly be interpreted as unfairness, but I guess that's the policy.
Only take this class if you want to fill space in your schedule; you'll get next-to-nothing out of it.

Professor Shen insists that all questions go on Piazza and that they won't respond to any that they deem to be "unfair". Unfortunately, this includes basic details about assignment issues and overall formatting and timing questions for the exam. Along with this, the "solution" for an assignment that required 160 GB of hard drive space was to either rent a loaner computer (most didn't have the required hard drive space), purchase a 160 GB SSD off of Amazon ($180 for a tutorial assignment that would never be used again), or find a group with somebody who had the hard drive space (groups were made at the beginning of the semester). Neither the TA's or professor who made the homework could not answer a baseline "crucially important" arithmetic question from the homework when asked about it in the review session and only said, "you should have notes on this from an earlier class." This is the first review I have written on this website because I feel like it is important to share the awareness so nobody ends up making the same mistake that I did in choosing an elective with a teaching staff that does not care about you or your learning.

This class is actually terrible. I wanted a class where you don't do a lot of work and this class is that because 95% of the class assignments is copying and pasting words verbatim from the notes or directly following directions from some online guide or worksheet. The notes are not extensive and barely dive into the information that the course is supposed to cover. In a nutshell, the notes are basically basic definitions with clipart. The programming assignments are simple amazon tutorials that will not give you knowledge of how to use AWS. The professors care absolutely zero about the class and spend more time creating problems than anything else. Class communication is horrendous as information is given over email, collab, piazza, or verbally in lecture without warning, and you are constantly playing a guessing game to find out where information comes from. When you do miss a piece of info and have a question the professor either ignores your question or tells you to go on piazza to find an answer in which you go look at piazza only to see that the professor will not answer your question and shame you for asking about a piece of information that was not given in the first place but is essential to completing some assignment. Other comical or rude examples include when the professor does not want to answer a question or doesn't know the answer and hands it over to her TA Tanmoy who does not know the answer himself and will stall and then give you a vague answer that is impossible to interpret. The exam was not reflective of the material in the slides and the assignments and many students who studied extensively for the assignment were left in the dark. On top of this, before the exam students asked about the format of the exam so they could prepare and learn material from the course but were shot down by the professor on piazza who was adamant about not providing this info. Then on the day of the exam many faced network issues which were not addressed by the course staff. Another example of why this class is a dumpster fire is available in the other course forum posts and I found I did not need to repeat what was already said. You will not learn valuable information in this class and on top of that you will be frustrated by unfair and unpredictable administrative actions by the professor.

If you're looking for an easy CS elective, this is the one. You can literally not go to class and still end with an A most likely. The HWs are just fill-in-the-blank or multiple choice collab quizzes that have questions literally ripped off from the slides. The programming assignments are basically just AWS tutorials (although they can take pretty long and you will probably run into annoying errors along the way). But she gives ample time to complete the assignments and has a generous drop policy (one drop of an assignment in each category). The midterm was a little fast-paced, but since it was open note you can just find the info on the slides. In all, I'd highly reccommend this class. #tCFspring2022