CS 3330

if you DON'T have a kink for CS professors f*king your GPA AND torturing your every brain cell: 1) please ignore the spring 2020 reviews that you see here or on reddit. 2) if Khan or Reiss is teaching: take it with them 3) if only Venkat is teaching: take it in a different semester 4) else if you are ABSOLUTELY stuck taking it with him: prepare to work 80 hours a week for a C grade.

I took this class with some of the smartest, most hardworking CS majors I know at UVA. I saw them struggle and breakdown in a truly unprecedented way. The class group chat became a collective cry for help with people having constant breakdowns. More than a single person mentioned depression and inclination for self harm as a result of this class to me (there was even a public mention in the groupchat despite of TAs trying to gatekeep).

There were 8 total hours of OH to accommodate a class of 130 students when almost every HW question required TA help or verification. The TAs constantly gave contradictory information or would have different answer keys. Most of the hws and projects were mind gym and helped nothing with understanding. They actually gave us a broken autograder for one of the projects and blamed it on students for not locally testing enough.

Currently class average is 70.32, with no hope for a curve. The relative grading encouraged people to actively sabotage others. Venkat gives extremely simple examples in lecture but fundamental formulas he uses differ from book formulas or other school's formulas so you have no where to go for the complex homeworks.

Final really required a post-doctorate level knowledge and average was 60.

The students in Khan's section faced none of the problems we did. I would have taken her without the sabotaging spring 2020 reviews. Don't repeat my mistake.

Overall I definitely enjoyed this class. Is it a lot of work? Absolutely. The fact is it's just difficult material, and I think Professor Venkat and the TAs did an excellent job of being available and helping us learn. I also never fully understood the concepts until I did the homework assignments so I think they really contributed to class (as much as people often liked to complain about them). Project 1 was also a ton of work but they gave us a lot of time to work on it and it was a very interesting concept. The exams were admittedly not doable in the allotted time (I'm generally a quick test taker and I always ran out of time), but since the entire grading scheme is relative I don't think that mattered too much. Huge shoutout to the TAs that turned around all our grades almost immediately for every assignment. At the end of the day I came away from this class with a solid understanding of processors so I think it did its job.

Venkat is a nice and knowledgeable person, and the teaching team does indeed want everyone to succeed, that said... I'm not sure whether or not the Spring 2020 reviews were genuinely troll reviews, but I suspect that the much larger class size this time around (130 students this semester compared to 25 last semester) may have affected how much support was actually available and how things turned out this time. This one class basically took over my life and turned my whole semester upside-down. I've had to sacrifice my performance in all my other classes to even pray for a chance to get general credit. I definitely recommend doing a reduced course-load and structuring your schedule around this class if you must take it with Venkat.

Homework consists of problem sets that are released and due every two weeks. Venkat slowed down the lectures a bit in the beginning to accommodate the several content clarification questions flooding in from hundreds of students every lecture, but then this came at the price of us not having the knowledge necessary to complete the problem sets until two days before the deadline because we were consistently behind on the material. Furthermore, as the course progresses, attending office hours in addition to lectures becomes a must if you want to stay successful with the problem sets, which can be difficult if you have work or other classes during those times. The content we cover and the practice problems we do in lecture are actually very simple and doable, but then comes the homework problems where you either really have to spend hours doing mental gymnastics to connect the dots... or you go to office hours.

There are two midterms and a final in this class, and they're honestly hard to prepare for. Take careful notes during lecture, you'll probably have to re-watch them several times anyway. Pay attention and follow closely along with the practice problems during lecture as well.

The two group projects are written in C/C++ and advertised as grade boosters, but that's assuming you have a good group where you are able to quickly complete the homework assignments with high confidence and have time and energy leftover to work on the project. The first project takes a colossal amount of time, so definitely try to start early and attend OH to get help when possible. The second project takes significantly less time in comparison to complete, but it'll still involve a considerable amount of frustration. We also had very limited OH to help us with the second project, since at the same time we were preparing for finals. (Also for these projects, I recommend getting familiar with how to scp folders and ssh-ing into CS department servers and testing your code from there. Running things on VM or locally tends to not work well because of the nature of the projects.)

Bottom line is, this class was not a fun learning experience... take Reiss's or Khan's section if you can help it.

Other reviews already speak to how bad this professor is, and I don't have the energy to expand on that. Just don't follow the reviews from Spring 2020, because they are the exact opposite of my experience this semester. I have never experienced a deeper depression or feeling of constant anxiety because of a class, and I'm going to seek therapy this summer. I hope Venkat stops teaching this course and focuses on his research because this class was unreasonably horrible with unrealistic expectations, and I believe that the same cannot be said for Khan or Reiss's sections.

Whoever wrote previously that this course got better, they are trolling (AND I ABSOLUTE HATE THOSE FAKE REVIEWS IN THE GUTS). I was baited into taking this course and oh dear what a mistake I have made. The course is insane, material is extremely difficult with a lot of them being not necessary for a regular CS career (seems like Venkat likes to go above and beyond for no reason). Lectures are mostly conceptual with very little practice, and homework are impossible to do without either re-reading textbook or going to Office hour cuz lecture knowledge does not translate to problem solving. Worst part is the exams and the projects. Most problems on exams are so hard to the point it makes no sense, looks nothing like homeworks and we are always short on time. The projects, especially project 1, is the most cancerous assignment I have ever done at UVA. It's just endless debugging nightmare to simulate MIPs ISA with C. I learned absolutely nothing from the project. I already had in-depth understanding of MIPS, Pipelining and Superscalar before the project. Implementing them is not hard but tedious work and the frustration comes from writing thousands of lines in C which essentially gives you no useful debugging information. I spend hundreds of hours of debugging with my team just to get it to work. The homeworks and projects combined are pretty much gonna take away 80 hours per week if you really wanna get a good grade on those (yes, I had straight weeks where I woke up, get into a call with my group for the entire day, skipping other classes just to get work done). And oh did I mention that Venkat is always behind on lecture? Usually he finishes the chapter 1 or 2 days before due date, yet the whole homework is supposed to give us 2 weeks to do. And when he's behind, he just pushes back homework by a few hours or sometimes a day. Then finals week come, we got everything stacked during finals cuz Venkat keeps pushing everything back bits by bits but refuses to cancel any unnecessary content/assignment. We have a homework, a project AND a final exam all during the finals week. AMAZING organization skills.
TL;DR: Do NOT take this class, it's cancer. Venkat has unrealistic expectations for students and has terrible course organization.

This class was definitely an experience. I'll start out by saying that Venkat is extremely knowledgeable and a nice guy, but this class was not easy. At times it's hard to find the connect between the course content and the assignments; they are often way too difficult compared to what is taught in class so that many people have to flock to office hours to even get an understanding of what the question is even asking. This may be due to the nature of the topic of computer architecture, but this class is hard. The exams are also extremely difficult and hard to prepare for. Venkat is a good guy but this class was definitely not my favorite class at UVA. #tCFSpring2021

I know this class has been historically bad but Venkat has done an amazing job turning things around. If you have to take this in the spring, take it with Venkat! The teaching staff was a huge help and they really wanted everyone to succeed.

Venkat must've done a 180 on this class cus it was pretty awesome and a super reasonable workload. Both him and Ishika were always accessible in case you need help with homework or the projects, so nothing ever took too long. Feel like we learned a lot about comp arch and could always get him to elaborate when we didn't know what was going on. For sure recommend the class with Venkat.

This is one of the best classes taught by a great team of staff. Venkat, Ishika and the TAs are all very knowledgeable about the subject and very very supportive. I highly recommend taking this class with Venkat.

I really enjoyed this class, in spite of everything I heard about past semesters - Venkat and Ishika were really supportive with regards to assignments and grading, and actually care about the quality of the course / success of the students. Their passion for the field is really apparent. The homework could be completed in a reasonable amount of time, the exams were challenging but fair, and the projects were actually really cool (I recommend pacing yourself well on the processor project, you have most of the semester so it's easy to push off).

I definitely learned more than I would have in the other section, and it wasn't a GPA killer like I've heard it described - the class was structured so you can only curve up from your raw score, and I think it was really well-organized overall. TBH was worried about this course initially, and stayed because my schedule didn't fit the other section, but I'm glad I did. Highly recommend