CS 3710

Personally, I found Prof. Wang's lectures really hard to follow, so I mostly skipped lecture and taught myself from the slides and online videos. From the few interactions I had with him, he's a fairly nice guy and clearly knows a lot about cybersecurity research, so most of my criticisms are about his lecture style, not the content.

That said, I wish we had spent more time on some of the concepts, since it felt like a fly-by of the content instead of a real understanding; the lab and programming assignments are comparatively easy for a 3000-level CS class, so I felt like they barely scratched the surface of what is possible. That said, I do think knowing the basics of cybersecurity is always a good thing, so I would recommend finding a way to take the class or teaching yourself.

tl;dr take it with wang if you just want an easy A, take it with anyone else if you actually want to learn

Tianhao Wang is a nice person, but as a lecturer he leaves a lot to be desired since he's very dry and not engaging. Many of my classmates opted to skip lectures and just read the slides, and they still got A's on everything. The class content is the same regardless of who's lecturing, and I've heard better things about the other professors, but either way, you will absolutely pass this class.

Try to get your cyberchat done as soon as possible so you don't have to worry about it, in practice it's essentially a completion grade. The labs and programming assignments are all extremely easy since all you have to do is follow the instructions and get them done in a single night. The quizzes were all open note so if you take good enough notes on the slides and cyberchats you should be fine.

#tCFF24