CS 3100

Everything that I could say about this course has already been harped on in previous Fall 2024 reviews. Poor, if any, communication from professors and bogus autograders that impacted a majority of students' final grades by 3+% on three of the five PAs were the two downfalls of this semester. I, along with many others, experienced unnecessary stress due to these factors and it made it difficult to really appreciate the content being taught.

Similar to other reviews, I didn't think the lectures were too bad. Pettit and Bloomfield both record lectures which is helpful for reviewing for quizzes, and I think Pettit in particular was a good professor to go to OH for.

I won't drag on and on about this class, but I hope for the sake of my friends, others taking it next semester, and even you reading this that this class is vastly improved over the next few semesters. I created a tCF account just to write this review as a warning for future students and to cope with the fact that Christmas is in five days and I still don't know my final grade in this class.

Good luck to you and good riddance to CS 3100.

The material covered in this course is extremely interesting, going over interesting concepts involving graph theory and traversal (Dijkstra's Algorithm, Breath First Search, Depth First Search), Divide and Conquer algorithms (ex: Merge sort), Greedy algorithms, dynamic programming, and network flow (Ford Fulkerson, Edmonds-Karp). On top of that, Professor Pettit is a good lecturer, being able to describe the concepts pretty well.

However, despite how interesting the material was and even though this class isn't the hardest CS class I've taken at UVA so far (CSO2), this class has been the most miserable experience I've had in a CS class.

Grading is abysmally slow in this class, making it so that assignments and quizzes are returned in an extremely untimely manner. On top of that, grading was extremely inconsistent in this class, causing a lot of unnecessary headaches and stress, with students having to constantly submit regrade requests to get credit for the work they did. The class is divided into Quizzes, Programming Assignments, and Problem Sets, and out of the 5 Programming Assignments assigned, 2-3 of them had major issues with their autograders, resulting in headaches when it came to getting proper credit for the work you did.

On top of that, the way the programming assignments were handled was incredibly frustrating, with hidden test cases deducting points disproportionately, with one out of the five test cases for a programming assignment being worth half the points for it. If the instructors wanted to use hidden test cases, a better way to handle them would be to show how many test cases you passed on submission without giving too many details so that students can fix their assignments and get a better idea of what they did wrong before the due date.

Quizzes are also somewhat difficult, and even though the course offers retakes for them, they only let you gain back 10% for each quiz instead of the previous semesters which let you gain back 20% per quiz. Be prepared to also send out regrade requests for quizzes, as sometimes you will lose points for something you gained credit for.

Overall this class was extremely frustrating and unnecessarily stressful. I hope that the instructors take the feedback the students provided this semester to structure the class in a better way, as the course content itself was pretty interesting, but the way it was handled was unorganized.

CS 3100 was probably one of the poorest course experiences for me, and I thought CS 2100 had its issues.

First of all positives:
Pettit was a fine lecturer and he alongside Bloomfield were helpful during their office hours. The course material was honestly fairly interesting, and it is very applicable for CS job interviews as the strategies you learn here are widely used for interview questions. I would like to give a huge amount of credit to the TA's for making this an amazing course experience, as they were immensely helpful for tackling the homework assignments, so I would highly recommend going to them.

Now for my issues:
The grades are broken down into the following: 25% problem sets, 25% programming assignments, 50% quizzes (exams).
The problem sets were honestly fine. They could be tricky at times, but they were very helpful for understanding the lecture content and preparing for the quizzes.
The programming assignments on the other hand, were VERY bad. There were 5 total, so each were 5% of the final grade, and were filled with a lot of inconsistencies and confusions with the autograders. For example, one of the PA's had a solution that nearly everybody went for, that ended up giving nearly everyone under a 5/10 because it was not completely accurate despite the actual solution being much less intuitive. The professors showed no willingness to do anything about this.
The exams were weird and seemed to have many grading issues, so regrade requests had to be made frequently. Additionally, several people got a huge chunk of their grade gone in one of the quizzes due to a type that was not communicated properly in one of the sections.

And the thing that I disliked the most about this class was the changes from the semester before to make the class more difficult:
- New rule that final grade can only be 10% above quiz average cuz quizzes are more representative of our knowledge
- Final exam retakes gave originally up to 20% back, but changed to 10% for this semester
- Autograder for PA's with many test cases given originally, but now autograder only shows a single test case with the rest being hidden
- Extra credit for attending lecture was removed
- Bonus points for submitting homework assignments early was removed

Overall, if you do not need this class and the course structure is still like this, then I would not recommend taking this class. But I really hope the professors do make the necessary changes to eliminate all the issues that students expressed unhappiness with and gave feedback for.

You learn a lot in this course, but, at least for my class, it was structured for more harsh grading. (I was a part of Petit, but attended a mix of both Bloomfield and Pettit lectures throughout the sem). Here's one example. A single small mistake on the programming assignment docked off 40% of my grade on the assignment. You might say that this programming assignment might be small in the bigger picture, but it's not. Programming assignments as a whole are worth 25% of your grade, and there are only 5 programming assignments.

Before listing out some of the poor structural parts below, I'd like to mention that I'm not simply coping because I was screwed. In fact, I was curved from an A- to an A in the course, which I am extremely thankful for. However, that doesn't take away some of the big issues I saw in this course.
- Quiz grading and solutions had numerous errors. Even though quizzes took so long to grade (an untimely manner), I would have to argue for a ton of points back. If I hadn't spoken up a single time in this course, I believe I would've ended with a B+
- Like mentioned earlier, programming assignments were very unstructured. Firstly, there were hidden test cases. This would be fine if we could see our performance on them. However, our scores on them weren't shown. Instead of being able to spend time to refine our solutions and figure out where it went wrong, we were stuck guessing and almost gambling with our programming solutions
- I went to office hours every. single. week. If I didn't, I don't think I would've gotten as high scores as I did on the practice sheets (not programming assignments). The general lack of organization was pretty unforgiving. There were several times the questions were incredibly unclear, and the TAs had to elaborate. And a few times I believe last-minute clarifications were made on Piazza. If you missed these, there was a good chance you'd have a good amount of points docked.
- Similar to the practice sheets, I also distinctly remember a time when the programming assignments had a last minute clarification on Piazza, and I remodeled my entire solution.

I certainly hope in the next semesters that the organization of this course improves. And despite my criticisms, I genuinely believe there is a lot to learn in this class. Also, the only reason I earned such a high grade was from doing well on the quizzes and on the retakes that were available at the end + the curve.
#tcf2025 dev

Genuinely the worst class ever made. Everything about this course is antagonistic to students, actively tries to screw you over, and the absolute insanity is that this is a REQUIRED COURSE for the major. Bloomfield/Pettit have done nothing but make students suffer for no apparent reason but difficulty for the sake of difficulty. This class makes CSO2 look like a joke. If you are able to take this without either, please do so immediately. This course is awful at being timely on grading, questions never get answered, the professor actively ignores criticism, and has zero sympathy for students, and the resources given to you to learn the class are passable at best. Overall, if you want your semester to be a living hell, take this course. You'll quickly reconsider having majored in Computer Science at all.