So I was kinda skeptical that this class actually took 224598437.6 hours a week based on the current reviews. Doing a little math, I found out that many hours was basically equivalent to 9358268.23 days, which surprised me because I didn't think there could be that many days in a week. Giving it the benefit of the doubt (could be a metaphor), I did one more conversion to check the math: the hours actually add up to around 25,639 years of work. 25,000 years ago, according to Wikipedia, " a hamlet consisting of huts built of rocks and of mammoth bones [was] founded in what is now Dolní Věstonice in Moravia in the Czech Republic. This is the oldest human permanent settlement that has yet been found by archaeologists." That's about right- in the time we went from settlements to smartphones, approximately ~1 Venkat Problem Set can be solved (given that we have TA help). At least the Neolithic Revolution didn't get called out for cheating.

Counting down the hours till this mess is finally over.

It's frustrating enough to have been required to take this course - most of the people in the class are not interested / will not go on to do anything in the computer architectural realm of CS. Switching professors halfway through the semester was clearly a half-baked idea that did not need to happen. There were several other things that could have been done that would have been less of a shock to the students in the class. We went from doing about an hour and a half of reading, an hour and a half of lab, and two hours of homework a week to doing all of that in addition to spending 10+ hours on problem sets. The TA's were left hanging out to dry and were given very little instruction on how to best help students working on problems. They were not familiar with the new course material (which is okay and to be expected), but were not given proper guidance or information on how to solve the problems. They worked incredibly hard and struggled with us to solve trivially hard problems. There were problems on the Problem Sets and Venk

ats midterm that were just trivially hard problems that didn't really measure what you knew about computer architecture and the class, but rather were just a measure of how much time you had to try to read incredibly small font and lines and how well you remembered minute details about lecture. He complained we didn't work hard enough and that was the reason the midterm average was a 40%. He said he wouldn't hold our hands through problem sets and problems and he just wanted to introduce us to the concepts and let us learn outside of the classroom. That is perfectly fine for an upper level / graduate level computer architecture course, but this is an introduction into the field with students that know literally nothing about computer architecture. Venk


at is a smart man, don't get me wrong. He can be condescending at times, but overall he is approachable. He needs to be placed at a higher level course with students that have a higher knowledge base. Given all these things -

1) Don't take the class for fun - it is not
2) Don't take the class with 2 professors listed
3) Don't take the class with Venkat

Save yourself and don't do it.

I haven't taken this course with Venkat, but your cries of despair are leaking into other class's piazzas. If you need help, call 1-800-273-8255.

you guys need to calm down. there are plenty of garbage professors at this school. don't throw a temper tantrum because your precious CS GPA's are going down. there are plenty of people with A's in this class. sorry you need to work hard for the first time in your lives.

it's still a BS class and it was a terrible idea to switch professors halfway through the semester, but you crybabies make it seem like venkat personally wants you to fail the class.

Guys the class isn't as bad is what everyone else is saying. As long as you get 7 PhD's before taking the class you're good to go.

See the teaching of Venkat,
He thinks his students are quite the pratts.

He finds it hard to teach his class
when he speaks like a yellow sea bass.

This class was quite the scam,
there is no way to pass the exam.

After one look at these problems,
I knew I would join the fallen.

I miss Reiss with all my heart;
I have no respect for this Venkat fart.

The famous quote to be saved for last:
YOU SHALL NOT PASS!

To feel so desperately that you're right, yet to fail nonetheless. -Thanos - Ashish Venkat

The comments below are slightly beyond ridiculous. Were his problem sets hard? Yes. Were they harder than the homeworks and labs? No. The difference? TAs just give you homeworks and labs, as is the case for most classes at UVa. I blame other classes for making us all so entitled in thinking we deserve to get 100% on everything because we went to Office Hours. It's not like he doesn't curve it fairly - like someone said in the previous post, 50% curves to a B. He put effort into his slides, and thought into his lectures, taught us what most of this stuff that we're learning, which might sound useless is actually worthwhile. Ask anyone before this semester about Comp Arch and they will openly say nothing I learned was worth learning. Do all of us have to be Computer Architects? No, which is why I blame the University for forcing us to take this class. I'm taking ML concurrently and spend roughly twice as much time on it as on comp arch. So does everyone else. Does anyone complain about ML? Not really. It's not Venkat's fault you had to take this class. If you spent half the time you spend complaining about this class on doing the work, you wouldn't be struggling so hard. People who have seen the bright side of things from the start are doing more than well, because they're just not doing the assignments out of sheer anger. Does your grade really matter so much that you have to call a professor some of the worst curse words on course forum? He's making an effort to make this course worthwhile and none of you seem to care about it beyond the cheating debacle, which in fairness was a load of shit for making everyone feel guilty for asking TAs for help. TAs' job is too literally help you get to the answer, without giving it away directly, and if they gave you answers directly then he's right. Are you really paying 30k - 60k$ just for a piece of paper?