CS 2100

I can't express how frustrating this class is. Both professors this semester were not teaching in a way that actually helped you learn the content. They flew through the slides and wouldn't cover the important stuff. The assignments were always a mess and the quiz and homework structure overlapped and were inconsistent. Office hours for TAs were always full and if you asked for help the response from the professors felt very dismissive and negative. The actual content is really not that difficult but basically, everyone ended up teaching themselves the content. Would recommend finding another professor to take this with.

I saw someone else post a review for this class for this semester, and I know people are registering for classes now, so I'm going to post my review now since the semester is almost over. First part is about Morrison, second is about the class overall.

Morrison does her best. I agree with the other reviewer that her "help" can feel very dismissive (ex: when the program we were using, Codepost, wasn't working, she refused to take accountability and blamed us all for doing it wrong, despite entirely too many Piazza posts proving otherwise), but she can be helpful at times, and she's definitely much nicer in person. This is her first time teaching the course here, so I'm hoping she'll learn from her mistakes and be better next semester. The way she scheduled the semester was very confusing, with many labs covering content we haven't discussed in lecture, and then our quizzes are on content we haven't talked about in weeks. I'll give more specifics about scheduling below, but I think a big reason we have the scheduling mistakes is because of Morrison's poor planning. I will say, to her credit, she explains the content really well overall in her lectures, and she answers Piazza questions very quickly. My biggest problem is that there are many times I will understand the content but have zero idea how to code it when it comes to the homeworks. For a programming professor, she barely does any programming. If you actually want to learn the coding, you have to go to Stone's lectures in person (he doesn't record the programming parts), but he's terrible at explaining the concepts. I honestly think this class would be great if they taught it together, rather than you having to choose one, but that's not the way it is.

Now for the class content itself. It is... a mess, to say the least. Morrison heads the course this semester, and since she and Stone haven't taught it before, neither of them know what they're doing. Half the time people ask questions about the homework/quizzes in Stone's lectures, he doesn't know the answers because Morrison created them and he didn't really look at them.

I mentioned the scheduling before, so I'll go more into it now. You can turn in homeworks early for extra credit—definitely recommend, it's the only reason I'm getting an A in this class—but they're due on Sundays, the only day basically no TAs have office hours. And Morrison rarely checks Piazza posts on Sundays anyway, when she's the only one who responds to anyone on Piazza. The homeworks can take you a ton of time, and they eat up most of my weekends (AVL trees *and* an online quiz on Easter was absolutely brutal IMO). Whatever you do, start early. You'll need it, especially towards the end of the semester. The quizzes (worth 50% of your overall grade, 25% in class quizzes and 25% online quizzes, 5 of each) are every few weeks. Out of town for a quiz? Too bad, make it up for the optional final, which you only have one day to do. For the final, you can make up four quizzes, but in one day, that's not a lot of time per quiz to study and do the quizzes you need. The online ones are really easy, and they're open note—though I've never really needed my notes for them, anyway—but the in person ones are terrible. They never release the quiz averages, which seems a little shady to me, when the ones they have released are ~60% averages with no curve.

The TAs may be the worst part of this course. They never answer Piazza questions, office hours are always full, and they take forever to grade anything. We're almost done with the semester with less than half of our grades. I say I'm getting an A, but I have no idea. The last few homeworks and quizzes have become completely auto graded because of them. When I did go to office hours, they weren't helpful. They either Googled the answer in front of me or gave me debugging tips I'd already tried. At this point, I think I'm more of a TA than the actual TAs, considering how many times I've had to help my friends with labs and homeworks because the TAs don't do what they get paid to do.

The course content isn't terrible, really. If you pay attention in lecture, study a little before the quizzes, and start your homeworks early, you can manage an A pretty easily. Just don't count on the TAs or professors to help you. I, for one, never plan on taking another class with Morrison or Stone again, and I don't think you should, either.

The course covers a lot of ground and moves quite quickly, especially at the beginning. If you're coming from 1110/don't have experience with a C-like object oriented language, I don't think it would hurt to get some basic experience with Java prior to taking the class, since they really blast through teaching the language in the first couple of weeks order to get to the more abstract concepts. I found the data structures and sorts genuinely interesting, and they're particularly applicable to technical interviews/any programming really.

As a lecturer/teacher, I found Morrison pretty effective. I eventually found that I learned best when I didn't attend class and instead watched the recordings so I could pause to digest and think through the concepts, since I think she tends to jump from A to B a little quickly at times, but her explanations were sound and my follow-up questions were always addressed with care. She was clearly aware of the complaints about the amount of slides and lack of live coding from last semester since she made a point of cutting down her presentation slides and spending lecture time doing demos (though she basically stopped the demos when we got to the more abstract concepts, but I think that's valid when the homeworks have you doing all the implementation of those concepts anyway).
As a person, when she's not one-on-one I would describe her as either sassy or snarky depending on how generous I'm feeling, but when interacting personally in office hours or after class she was really lovely - she was interested in me as a person and was genuinely excited to talk/nerd out about the content. She also was quite receptive to any feedback I had, and I think ran a fairly smooth ship this semester. She's still figuring some stuff out, and having a quiz the week of Thanksgiving was not great, but she went back to Gradescope at least and was able to adjust on the fly when she missed a week (due to illness).

Most undergrad TAs are uninterested and/or clueless, but a couple are good (shout out to Nathaniel the Piazza goat and Jacob). I only went to office hours a couple times and there was always 10+ people in the queue since there's only usually 2 TAs on one shift, so I wouldn't rely on TA office hours too heavily if you can help it. The graduate TAs were also up and down throughout the semester in terms of turnaround time for grading, but it wasn't too awful. I think the worst it got was 4 weeks to grade one of the homeworks.

The grading breakdown this semester was 36% for 12 homeworks, 13% for 9 labs, 12.5% for 5 quiz As (at home, mostly open note), 37.5% for 5 quiz Bs (in-person, closed book) and 1% for a syllabus quiz. No curve, but homeworks can be turned in 2 days early for 0.3% extra credit (which adds up to 3.6% over the semester), plus another 1% for course evals, so you can easily bump your grade from an A- to an A through that. Quiz Bs were the hardest to do well in, everything else was chill if I stayed on top of it all, but I found most questions on quiz Bs manageable if I studied the slides closely and practiced applying concepts (a few questions tested completely useless or tangential knowledge though).

This wasn't communicated clearly, but I got the impression that we were expected to be putting effort into learning on our own time (through tinkering with code and/or reviewing other resources) in order to really succeed. I think it's a valid approach to teaching, particularly for computer science/programming where the real world expects you to learn on the fly with varying quality of documentation as your only resource, but whether that works for you is your call - my advice would be to try embrace it regardless.

Everything that has been said about Professor Morrison, from her condescending attitude to how she races through lecture slides, are all true. I personally don’t resonate with her teaching style (if you can even call it that). She goes through the powerpoints at lightning speed, then does some in-class programming examples. I’ve basically had to teach myself the content, which is extremely annoying. Honestly, I would choose Morrison over Stone, but be prepared to do a lot of outside work for this class.

Tl;dr be proactive about questions and getting help and you'll easily get at least a B without trying too much

If you have prior coding experience (like an AP class or even a CS 111x section), the first third provides an opportunity to ease in since it's an expedited summary of the Java language. While some of the syntax is different, most of the concepts remain the same, so it will give you a good opportunity to figure out what you need to do to adapt to Morrison's improved but admittedly fast and somewhat surface-level teaching. Because of this, make it a habit to ask questions in lectures and attend office hours often. In labs, find a good TA or experienced student to ask questions. Complex data structures like AVL Trees, Priority Queues, and HashMaps can cause you to slip up near the end, but because the final was just an opportunity to retake 4 of the 10 quizzes, you definitely have opportunities to catch up. It's still an intro course relative to the rest of the CS department's offerings, but it's definitely easier than classes like CS 2130.

Professor Morrison sets up the class really well, there is ample room to boost your grade and the final is a chance to fix your quiz grades. She's a great lecturer too. The quiz Bs are unnecessarily difficult (trick questions, ambiguous code) but ideally everything else will bring your grade up.

Definitely recommend going to office hours, there's plenty of TAs who are super willing to help.

Experience with the class depends A LOT on how much prior knowledge you have of 1) Java and 2) data structures.

While the profs cover Java in the first month, the class still moves REALLY quickly through all the Java concepts. Next year, they're planning on additional Java-teaching courses, so hopefully they can bridge that gap.

Structure of the class is fair. There's 1 lab and 1 HW due per week, and a quiz every 2-3 weeks. The quiz component consists of a multi-choice test and a coding test. The final is just retaking the quizzes, so the quizzes themselves are relatively 'low stakes.'

I think Prof Morrison does her best with the content. I think learning code via lectures isn't very helpful (regardless of the prof), so I don't know if another prof could've done better with the material. Then again, I stopped attending lecture and just read the slides and did fine. #tCFS24

Great content that is foundational for all your future endeavors in computer science. To be honest, I had a background in Java so the class was somewhat a review, and so I literally skipped all the lectures but 2. However, I did watch the videos and read the slides for each quiz. Also, someone who does not have experience in Java may struggle to adapt, especially if they are coming straight from the Python class.
I did pretty well on the quizzes, but from my experience sometimes it can be luck because the questions are random for each student. Sometimes, the quiz would be pretty straightforward, but other times, I would have multiple tricky questions where I was stuck between two answers.
But outside of the quizzes, there's so much extra credit, and you should do it. It gives you so much leeway to bomb a few quizzes and still get an A. Also, you get two tries for each quiz. Plus, I think I heard that they added extra credit for doing some notes worksheet, but honestly that's overkill.

I took the class with absolutely no Java experience and it was an absolute nightmare for the first half of the semester. The class is extremely difficult initially if the only programming experience you have is CS 1110 or the equivalents, and I recommend studying with other students. It is possible to do well in the class even if you suck at the beginning of the semester, it just takes a lot of time and hard work. Morrison is an alright teacher, but she does not really teach the Java, and the tests have material that you will never have gone over in class or find in any of the lectures. It is a very interesting class, but definitely a butt kicker.

This course isn't recommended unless absolutely necessary due to its lackluster execution. Despite the interesting and useful content, the lectures were vague and hard to interpret. The professor's use of numerous examples and analogies made in-person lectures challenging to understand. Skipping lectures and watching them at my own pace proved more productive.

Assignments, while not terrible, required self-learning from slides and online resources. Homeworks offered an easy 100%, with extra credit for early submission. Labs, though not a great experience with dismissive teaching assistants, were a free 100% if completed promptly. Achieving perfect scores on assignments and labs is crucial, as quizzes, especially Part B, are challenging and demand knowledge of obscure details, resulting in average scores around 60%.