CS 2100

I came into this course having already taken AP CS A, so take this with that bias in mind. With that background, this class was INCREDIBLY EASY.

Every homework assignment can be submitted early for extra credit (37/34) and makes up a huge chunk of your grade. Labs are extremely easy, quizzes are generally straightforward, and there is no final exam. There were also extra-credit labs. With all of this combined, getting an A+ in the class felt very attainable. I personally did not attend lectures and instead watched the recordings at 2x speed.

That being said, if you are not already familiar with Java and basic data structures, I can see how this course would be much more challenging. Morrison is a solid professor, but lectures sometimes felt disjointed and I had to learn a few topics independently. Quizzes also go slightly beyond what is explicitly covered in class, making it easy to lose points even if you felt prepared.

Additionally, lecture recordings were often missing or incomplete. If you don’t already know the content, I would strongly recommend attending lectures in person.

TL;DR: Extremely easy if you’ve taken AP CS A, potentially rough if you haven’t.

Oh boy, what a class.

On the one hand, you learn a lot. I genuinely feel I will use what I learned about Java for the rest of my time programming as a hobby and academic pursuit. Learning about stacks, heaps, queues, trees etc. changed the way I view computers, especially since this was the first CS class I've taken at UVA. The coding assignments and questions also work to improve your skills with technical questions in the Leetcode style. You are also given plenty of opportunities for retakes (the final is 2 retakes) and extra credit (up to 0.3% course-wide bonus per homework turned in early really adds up over 15+ assignments). Overall an A is extremely attainable if you're proactive.

Everything else kinda sucks. Morrison is incredibly antagonizing to her own students for no particular reason. She regularly changed rules about the course when she felt we were taking advantage of certain features she literally designed. Exhibit A: office hour checkoff. What human being decides to make students with busy schedules go to office hours to sit in line and get their homework checked off at 8pm? Then students were discovered to be waiting until Sunday night (when they are free), so Morrison added a rule that you must check off your homework within 48 hours of your submission. This makes the scheduling for hours even tighter, especially if you are trying to turn the work in early for extra credit. I understand the rampant use of LLMs in these courses makes some measure like this necessary, but this solution wastes student time and siphons money to pay for even more TAs. Why not just ban LLMs in lieu of more lenient (but cited) student collaboration? Her rules make no sense in this regard, where you are explicitly allowed to use LLMs for help if they are cited, but are allowed zero collaboration with students. But if you're in lab, you can collaborate as much as you want! For some reason collaboration on homework is allowed in lab, because that somehow prevents plagiarism. Except her plagiarism enforcement is awful as well. I was falsely accused of plagiarism by her when my HashMap implementation was auto-matched another student's submission by 50%. Of course, I had never met the student in my life, and Morrison was incredibly slow on correspondence with this issue during peak finals season when I had other things to be worried about. She waited until the day of the final to respond and say that I was in the clear. Add that with her handling of the lockdown scare and her telling students to go to lab when there was possibly an armed intruder on grounds, her calling our section lazy because of our quiz retake performance (some of us did not perform well on coding questions), and her convenient forgetfulness to record lectures half the time, and you have a real mess of a semester. All of this, and her lectures are not even good!

Seriously, by all means take this course, but please do yourself a favor and take it with Yi.

Some really bad questions on the quizzes in my opinion, and some coding questions can be a little confusing but generally pretty easy. Her grading scheme of allowing you to retake two of the five quizzes is very forgiving, and her policies on late hw, labs, etc are all very lenient.
I learned a lot from this class, the pacing was good, and the course content was satisfying. I do remember that I was mad at her when her response to an active shooter alert was delaying our lab by fifteen minutes, but she apologized for that.
As a professor, Morrison cares about her students and the content, which I think automatically makes her at least a *good* professor. She can also be a little funny sometimes, enough to make her lectures entertaining.
Some of the homework assignments can be really hard though, but I really recommend not using AI and trying to do it yourself, you're future self will thank you I promise.