CS 3330

Ashish Venkat is a dishonor to the whole CS department

I hope he never comes back from his conference.

i just gave up on the problem set.

Dude sucks. Not much else to say

EDIT:
Mr. Ashish Venkat, as Assistant Professor of Computer Science, for the period August 7, 2018 through May 24, 2021, at an annual salary of $153,300. Citations 177

Mr. Charles Reiss, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, effective December 25, 2017, at an academic year salary of $90,000. Citations 1350

HOW THE FUCK IS THIS POSSIBLE, AND THIS GUY IS GOING TO BE HERE FOR ANOTHER TWO YEARS????

This guy is the most cocky-ass-dontGiveAShit professor I have ever met/heard in my four years of college. I assume he knows the material since he is a Ph.D. (though making tons of mistakes in lecture and problem set), but the way he treats his students is abhorrent. All the comments below fully address how he taught this class accurately. The main reason I choose UVA over other schools is that the professors genuinely care about their students and motivate us to learn. I don't think this dude even qualifies a single bit of it.

The average for midterm 2 is 48/100, tells a lot about what you will learn in this class. And he mentioned the final will even be harder :) Hope the course evaluation will stop the CS department giving him any contract in the future.

I'm gonna be honest. I haven't even taken this course, and Venkat is still somehow the worst teacher I've ever heard of. I've watched some of his lecture intros per recommendations from friends, and honestly heard him say that he doesn't believe in teaching students how to solve problems. Instead, he wants to tell them the question statement and final answer, and that any other instruction would be a waste of class time...so the way to teach people...is by making them learn it on their own...but if they learn it with any help that's cheating and the entire class will be threatened with honor violations. Hell, even the TAs could get in trouble too, because clearly helping students somehow goes against their job description. FYI for anyone reading these reviews, make sure to subtract one from his overall score since we can't go any lower than one.

Venkat is the most condescending professor to ever turn up at the CS department. As the other reviews have already mentioned, 1) he assigns the worst problem sets 2) he VICTIM SHAMED every student into believing that he/she cheated on one of the problem sets for asking help from the TAs, all because he gave a faulty answer key to the TAs. As a result, everybody who asked for TA help all had problem set answers that "reflected" the errors in the answer key, and 3) his exams are almost nothing like his problem sets (even though he says they are), and much less his powerpoints. As if this class couldn't get any worse, he legit rubbed (a Pacific Ocean's worth of) salt into injury by bragging about how little his powerpoints and lectures will actually help us in solving the problem sets and the exams, saying that "we're supposed to understand how a computer works" and not have our "hands held" in the process. First of all, how on god's green Earth are we supposed understand how a computer works if you can't even teach us how a computer works. Am I supposed to learn this stuff online or from other sources? I (and my family) are not paying thousands of dollars in tuition just so I can end up learning everything from better Indian teachers on YouTube and Google (for free I should mention). I have to be honest, I never bother writing reviews for course, but my god, you have to be a certain level of Satan spawn to drive me to actually rant on CourseForum. Needless to say, I wish Reiss could come back; unlike Venkat, he tries to set his best to set his students up for success in the class, not failure. While Reiss's quizzes were somewhat annoying, they were manageable (wtf, they were a BLESSING compared to Venkat's psets). I wish now more than ever that I could have taken this class in another semester (Venkat isn't even teaching next semester). At this point, I just hope I can at least somewhat pass this class with a digestable grade of some sort. Literally I would recommend anyone else in the CS department (even Upsorn) to teach this class instead of Venkat. If you are taking any class with this dude, good fucking luck.

Easiest final ever. Assuming we're tryna get a 0

i'm gonna keep it so real with you guys, never have i ever hated a class more than this. i genuinely do not think i'm gonna pass and that is a 100% because of venkat and the cs department as a whole for deciding that it was a good idea to switch professors in the middle of a course.
let's start with my mans venkat. as other reviews have mentioned, we had a super fun cheating scandal! i love when professors threaten you with honor code violations that you didn't commit :) <3 he literally teaches us nothing in lecture and assigns some wack problem sets to do (bring back the reading quizzes plz). i put in a lot of effort trying to get the hw done and honestly i'm running out energy and tolerance for this class. his slides are essentially useless and the practice problems we do, don't even help with problem sets.
i've had many ragrets in my time as a uva student, but none of them are as big as taking comp arch this semester and having venkat as a professor.
@ the cs dept pls never again switch up a course halfway through the semester. I enrolled specifically in the 11 am lecture to have reiss as my professor because that is who was listed on sis. i didn't take this class to have a new and condescending professor. stick with what works.

TL;DR: save your soul and don't take a class with him lol

What I always tell people about this course is that although the material is difficult to make interesting, exciting, etc. for many students, it was always evident that Professor Reiss did the best he could with the course. Now, that being said, let's get into Venkat...

When I took this class, Reiss stopped teaching after the first exam to allow Venkat to take over. In his first lecture, he claimed he would be changing the course somewhat by introducing problem sets, in addition to the labs and homeworks already assigned by Reiss' schedule. He also claimed he would provide a bigger incentive to go to lecture by doing problems which would have similar variants on future problem sets and the exam.

----- With regards to Venkat's "incentives," here is what I gathered: a) he quickly runs through problems without explaining the steps he is using to get there or the methodology behind those steps; b) the problems are complete jokes compared to the ones which appeared on the second exam and in problem sets he has assigned; c) knowing how to the problems in lecture is no bearing on how well you will do on the exam or problem sets.

----- With regards to the problem sets: they are difficult, but not impossible. They often require several hours of looking back through the material which Venkat "covered" during lecture, however this typically provides little benefit since his so-called annotations on the slides are illegible (and in the event you do spend 10 minutes to decipher something he write, they aren't usually helpful). Also, need I mention the cheating accusations? It's almost like Venkat is paid based on the number of students which he is able to accuse of cheating. Don't even bother going to TAs for help on the problem sets because a) they usually can't do the problems at all because Venkat has introduced new material without explaining it to his teaching assistants; b) if a TA gives up and just tells you the answer, you have to either unhear it or face the penalty of cheating (according to Venkat, from lecture).

----- With regards to the exam: prior to the exam, a student asked Venkat if he would be producing a practice exam with solutions, as Reiss had available for the first exam (Reiss actually makes all previous exams available, with the answer keys as well). Venkat abruptly said no, you have had enough practice. At this time in the course, we had been assigned 2 problem sets of <5 questions each, and Venkat had been teaching for a few weeks. Normally I wouldn't find this annoying, but Venkat actually said that he would be using a brand new test format closely aligned with the problem sets he assigns, rendering all of Reiss' previous exam resources unhelpful. I'll just go on the record here and say that 2 questions on the test resembled problem set questions, and the rest were totally new. He also had a true false section, which he did not discuss prior to the exam (and his problem sets do not have T/F on them), which contained an acronym he had never discussed in lecture. The day before the exam I looked through every slide and I have no reccolection of him ever discussing it.

---- Don't take this class with Venkat. Don't take this class if you have heard there is even a CHANCE Venkat may show up to teach a lecture. That said, I don't think future students have much to worry about because at this rate I doubt Venkat will be at the university in his current capacity for much longer.