CS 3330

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.

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.

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.

Save yourself and don't do it.

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

Counting down the hours till this mess is finally over.

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.

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.

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

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.