CS 4740

Please, please, just do not take this "class". I am a 4th year, and in all of my time at UVA, I have never had a class that comes remotely close to the level of disaster that is Cloud Computing. Haiying Shen seems to have a loose grasp on teaching in general, never deviating from slides that she no doubt took from another university's course materials. Every single in-class quiz we have had, Professor Shen has struggled to figure out how to post the quiz to Collab, with several instances of her genuinely just giving up and going on teaching as if nothing happened. If that wasn't bad enough, Professor Shen and her TAs are also barely willing to help with any questions on the homeworks or "programming assignments". The instructions for these programming assignments are frequently vague and sometimes just flat out inaccurate, so students on piazza are really your only hope of any clear instruction. Although I'm writing this at the end of March, I can confidently say that I have learned nothing, and almost certainly will learn nothing in this class for the rest of this semester. The only reason I'd recommend taking this class is if you enjoy laughing at how utterly disorganized every aspect of the course is. I wish I'd read a review like this before enrolling. Disappointed in the CS department for allowing Professor Shen to continue to "teach" this course in its current state.

I got an A+ in this class and it was the least enjoyable experience I've had in any CS class in the department. Lectures weren't engaging, assignments were annoying (labs are designed to follow a tutorial most of the time, and every single one was out of date, or required outside tutorials that weren't provided). Homeworks and "exams" were just copy pasting from slides. The only reason to go to lecture was to do the participation quizzes-- you don't have to listen to 90% of the material. The final project is optional for some reason. There's no mechanism to provide anonymous feedback for the course, which was very frustrating. In order to do grade corrections, you need to put your computing id along with the question(s) and your argument in a public google sheet, which is just kind of weird that you can basically see other people's info (and I'd hope is against the school's policy somehow about privacy? I'm not really sure.). The syllabus is rather confusing with regards to working as a group and the professor seemed to think people were dumb when they asked about it (it really made no sense but hopefully it'll change in the future).

Overall very bad class I learned nothing and got an A+. My time would have been better spent watching youtube videos about cloud computing or something else which is actually a decent portion of the lectures. I don't know how this instructor gets away with it.