CS 2110

I came into this class really well versed in Java, so this class was really easy for me. If you take some time before the semester starts to transition from Python to Java and review some basic Object Oriented Programming concepts before starting the class, then you'll be more than prepared enough to take this class. Hott's a great professor and a really nice guy, and he definitely wants you to succeed.

Professor Hott was a great professor to take 2110 with. He really makes an effort to make himself approachable and is just overall a nice guy. This class is definitely a solid jump from 1000 level CS courses as it is Java and you learn Python before. However, you can get up to speed quick (I had never taken CS before UVA and had no experience with Java). The homeworks (there are about 7) can take up a solid amount of time and often require visits to office hours. Try to start them early and go to office hours earlier in the week, if not the office hours queue fills up and you might not be able to get help. With TA help the homeworks are doable. The homeworks build on each other so it is important to get homework 1 correct before trying to do homework 2, etc. Exams are fine if you study and do the practice exams. Labs are pretty useless but just going to all of them (you are allowed a skip) gets you full credit for the lab grade. In class assignments are just graded for completion. There are many different places that your grade comes from and so tanking one thing doesn't set you up for a bad grade. I ended up with an A and I had no CS knowledge from before UVA and I am not even a CS major, just cognitive science. I really recommend Professor Hott for this class.

I'll be straight up, this class was pretty bad. I'm not sure if this was just because of covid and all that, but the class, and specifically the professor(s), was bad. Again, not sure if this is different than normal, but we had all 3 professors teaching the course essentially working together, and that meant that each professor had their own office hours, but it also meant that each one had lectures, and it would change seemingly at random. Not only that but they straight up used lectures from the semester before pretty often, didn't even put the effort to make new lectures based on previous feedback or anything. The multiple lecturers might have been a good thing though, considering how bad 2 of the 3 professors were at lecturing. Like seriously, prof Stone is the worst lecturer I've had, no offense to him, but seriously not good at teaching. I'm sure they're all very passionate about CS, but the lectures often felt so unbelievably stale and meaningless. Also, maybe it was just me, but the tests were absolutely terribly written, at the end of the semester, I had basically guaranteed my grade and would have needed a fantastic score on the final to go up at all and would've needed to do so terribly for it to go down, so I didn't bother learning any of the material at the end of the semester, and ended up educationally guessing over half the questions completely. I ended up with a better grade on that exam than I did for the 2nd exam in the class which I prepared a lot for. Overall though, the class is pretty easy, as long as you did well in CS 111x, you'll be 100% fine in this class, the home works aren't hard at all and are tedious at worst, however, this class killed any interest I had in CS coming from CS 111x, unfortunately.

This class was fine -- not great, but not terrible. During Spring 2021, the lectures were prerecorded with the three professors taking turns. All three are interesting people who care about teaching, but the lectures varied it quality. Professor Hott's were usually the best. Professor Stone's... they were fine but he didn't do a good job coding and talking at the seamer time, so sometimes concepts were left unexplained. Professor Graham was a little dry, but his video quality wasn't good so math that was it. The work level of the class was fair -- a two hour lab each week that was manageable, a weekly homework that took 1-4 hours, and optional readings for each class. Three exams, but they only counted for 8% each. The class was somewhat divided into three sections: basics of Java, object-oriented programming, and more abstract CS concepts. Overall, it was a manageable and sometimes fun second programming class.