CS 3120

Professor Wei Kai Lin is by far the most clueless professor I have ever had. He clearly copied his slides from a previous year without even removing the animations that blocked key information. His lectures are borderline incomprehensible, both because of his thick accent and the fact that he clearly doesn't understand the material he's teaching. He makes already challenging content needlessly more difficult, and his exams, especially the midterm, were brutal and completely unrealistic in terms of time. This review isn’t out of spite; I had a decent grade in the class. I’m writing this to warn others. If you find yourself stuck in this course, search for David Evans on YouTube. He teaches the same material and actually knows what he’s talking about. He also created the original slides Professor Lin butchered. Do yourself a favor and don’t rely on Lin if you want to actually learn anything.

**Lectures**
Lectures are pretty standard but good Lord does he need to learn how to use the erase tool. He draws on the powerpoint like most professors but doesn't ever erase anything when he makes mistakes, just tries to scribble over it or something so the posted online notes are sometimes unreadable. Taking your own notes in class is advised since his work is fairly clear during lecture.

**Homeworks**
Problem sets are pretty easy. They're open everything as long as you cite it (other people, textbooks, websites, AI, etc.). Honestly the hardest part of problem sets is just formalizing everything using the appropriate definitions and writing it up in LaTeX, the problems themselves don't take too much thought. I averaged maybe 3 hours on each PS.

**Exams**
He said the midterm would be comparable in difficulty to problem set questions but fewer questions to account for the time limit. Yeah, no. The typical problem set was ~4 proof style questions and the midterm was ~9 of these in 70 minutes. I usually finish my exams in ~1/2 the time on average across all the classes I've taken, but I was writing til pencils down on the midterm. Average was a 59%. The final was much better time-wise and the problems felt reasonable. Average was a 68%. To account for this, he bumped everyone's final grades by 2% at the end.

Fun and knowledgeable professor who gives out extra credit on most problem sets and for finding bugs/errors, but the tests are hard.