CS 2102

I definitely recommend Tychonievich for 2102. He is a pretty good teacher and lecturer, especially considered discrete math is a hard class to teach. Unlike Sullivan, he does not use LEAN and teaches it more like a math class rather than a cs class. You never do any actual coding. There are also no exams. Just weekly in-class and take-home quizzes that were pretty doable if you did the practice quizzes and paid attention. Anyway, Prof Tychonievich is a really smart guy and he does a good job of explaining concepts so I would recommend him.

LT is a great professor. Kind of passive aggressive sometimes and is the type of genius to come off as condescending when answering questions, but is really knowledgeable and an extremely reasonable and good teacher. If you're taking discrete w/ CS, take it with this guy - workload is really not that bad (weekly in-class quiz fridays, weekly online open note quiz over the weekend). The way he structures it was super nice - all lectures recorded, quizzes each week to make sure you really understand the cumulative concepts, and then no midterms. The final exam is optional (it can replace one of your category grades if you didn't do too well). Would highly recommend - even over Zoom I learned a lot.

I was still able to end the semester with an A without having to take the final as the final is not mandatory but instead gives you the opportunity to replace a grade in a particular category that you did not do well on. I did not spend much time outside of the class working on this class with the exception of doing the labs the night before the in-class quiz to prepare. There are no exams (with the exception of the optional final exam) and homework for the class as your grades are solely dependent on how well you do on the in-class and online quizzes. The in-class quizzes while still at the university were extremely easy as long as you understood and did the labs ahead of time which were similar to the quiz except for a few changes. However they became more difficult with the shift to remote learning as he had made them more difficult as they were now open note. The online quizzes which were open note due every Monday were more difficult in my opinion than the in-class quizzes. Professor Tychonievich's discrete class was easy to do well in because of the format of the class and the fact that you had two chances at the end with the last in-class quiz and final exam to improve your grade and if you already did well before the last in-class quiz you did not have to take either. I would recommend this class!

This course pre-COVID was great - minimal work just practice problems before the weekly quizzes. However, since we moved online, the class got exponentially harder. The online quizzes were also kind of challenging for me. I think I learned a fair amount, but I ended up taking this class for credit because the grading scale is most based on averages. I wish the grade scale was better; my overall average was an A-, but with his scale I ended with a B- .

Tycho is a great teacher and made learning discrete mathematics pretty easy and enjoyable. There are quizzes every Friday based on the content learned from that week. The best way to prepare for the quizzes are to do the labs assigned for that week, as some quiz questions are quite similar to the lab questions. Overall, this was a great class.

If you have to take discrete math, I would 110% recommend taking it with Tycho. It was his first semester teaching DM so some things may change in the semesters going forward, but overall it was a very enjoyable class. The class was separated into 5-6 topics and given a grade in each one. Each section had its own weight depending on how important it was going forward. If you weren't happy with your grade in any topic by the end of the semester, you were able to take that section's final exam and replace that section's grade. That said, the TAs in the class weren't exactly helpful. On Fridays, we had a brief period of time to study and ask TAs and Tycho questions about the content, followed by a quiz. Hopefully there are TAs who actually took his class going forward, because quite a few of them were very confused with the content. It wasn't too difficult to figure out if you read the writeup thoroughly and do a little bit of Googling though.

Between Tycho and Sullivan, I would definitely recommend Tycho as well. He is a bit eccentric and very engaging. The class has a clear structure, and I feel like each week's work was predictable after I fell into the rhythm. There is typically a weekly quiz in class and then a weekly online, not-timed homework sort-of quiz. Each Monday he would review the quiz and homework and answer any questions. We would cover new topics on Monday and Wednesday, and then Friday would be a review and a quiz. The online assignment would be due Sunday evening. If you take notes and come to class (or watch the lecture recordings before the quiz) then you should be set. The short readings were helpful sometimes, but not necessary to my learning. He is precise, and you can always find the break down of your grade (which his grading policy emphasizes "Logic" over "numbers" etc. which is a little confusing at first), your quizzes with remarks, where you are in the schedule-- essentially everything you could need-- on his website. He even makes the final exam optional, and it is used primarily for replacing grades that you weren't content with. Overall, an incredible professor, and one who cares about you learning, and will make everything as clear as possible. Also, he draws random pictures of animals doing human things (like boxing or playing chess) on the board as students come in, which was random, but whimsical.

Tycho responds to emails very quickly and is generally pretty fair. He is strict about the grade cutoffs (no rounding up...even if you're at a 92.9!!), but there are lots of opportunities for retakes that make up for this. Honestly, my lecture attendance was not fantastic, but you only need to go to classes on Friday. I had to take a couple of retakes for the modules but I still finished with an A. There was a whole section on logs/combinations/permutations that I just relied on knowledge from HS alg 2.

This was Tychon's first semester teaching the course, so I'll grant him some leeway. I must say, this was one of the most poorly run classes I feel that I've taken in college so far. I received an A in the course, and yet I feel like I've taken little to nothing from it (reasonably easy to do well in the course though). Mistakes are understandable, but Tychon would constantly make mistakes on assignments (particularly the online quizzes) that you essentially had to account for when taking the quiz; "am I being a dummy or did he make another mistake again?" It doesn't really seem like the other discrete teachers are all that great either and perhaps Tychon has gotten better in teaching the course, but if you can, I'd recommend taking it with someone else.