CS 3330

genuinely my second-favorite class I've taken at UVA. venkat has what seems like encyclopedic knowledge of the field and clearly cares about it, ishika paul is extremely down-to-earth and ridiculously dedicated to the students (literally pulling all-nighters to help us finish up projects), and the TAs were extremely helpful too! it sounds like this was a huge change from the last time Venkat taught it, but i'm not joking or being sarcastic or anything. loved the class and would recommend it to anyone, especially in light of the stuff i've heard about khan's section

upvote if you were shafted by that exam and Venkat.

If you were able to manifest the plague into a class this is probably what you'd get.

Very engaging, noticeably knowledgable about the subject. Understanding, cool, kind, smart. Now read the first letter of every word.

I got diagnosed with clinical depression this school year. I thought I was having a hard time until I heard about the kids taking this class.

Man, I don't know y'all. I'm not even a CS major, and this is too much y'all. I don't know if I can do this. This is stressing me out just by looking through the eyes of my fellow CS friends. If you take this class, make sure you have NOTHING else to do with your life and I mean NOTHING. Like you are just dry as hell in your life and have nothing else going on. I'm only saying this because you will need all the time in the world to do this class. Trust me. I don't even take this class. Like I thought Quantum Mechanics II was hard, but this class makes Quantum seem like Algebra I. The average hours were calculated based off student experiences, so they aren't false. Have fun!

Ashish is a genuinely smart professor, interested in helping his students understand and apply computer architecture concepts. However, the day he arrived he got rid of the textbook, implemented problem sets that not even TA's could solve, and lectured on material at twice the speed as Reiss. When asked to solve past-problems in class, he rarely got them right, and claimed they were too trivial for him. It's hard to convey the difficulty of his problem sets and exams, but here's how I perceived them: [In lecture] cars can drive at up to 80 mph, and bicycles can go up to 20 mph. [Problem set] a car is going down the highway at 100 mph, and an elephant is marching in the opposite direction. How many calories are in a bar of chocolate? [Exam] in a world where bicycles are actually horses and chocolate is 200 calories, synthesize these facts with all your knowledge to calculate the circumference of a rubiks cube.

This is my first time writing a review on Course Forum, and unfortunately, I know that this is gonna become berserk. :))) Ashish is not a bad professor. At least from the materials that he prepared and his lectures, I know he's really passionate about the subject and wants us to know about those concepts. However, it seems that he forgot we are undergraduate students who just need to learn the basic concepts of computer architecture, as many of them won't even come any close to comp arch in the future. His problem sets and exams are well-written in terms of content, to be honest. They truly capture the essence of every concept and finishing them does give us a detailed view. BUT THE COST IS TOO MUCH. The problems on the exam are too hard for this limited time. He said in class that he doesn't want us to be problem-solving robots. BUT, honestly, it's gonna take a problem-solving robot to solve all those problems on the exam in an hour and a half.
AND THEN THERE IS THE FINAL. OMG. I've never seen a professor give an exam that's gonna take the whole class more than 3 hours to finish.

As a student who took the ECE Comp Arch, switch to that instead of Venkat, you'll thank yourself later.

I didn't even take the course, but it was just so bad that it's badness seeped into other CS courses I'm taking. It is so bad that our Piazza forum from Discrete Math from over a YEAR AGO probably has more posts of memes of this course than of Discrete Math content last spring.

So, yeah. It's bad, if you take it your grade will be bad, your mood will be bad, your GPA will be bad -- don't be bad.