CS 4102

This course was co-taught online with Floryan and Horton.
Algorithms this semester was valuable in many ways- we covered a lot of interesting problems and approaches and got a good mix of proofs and applied programming problems. However, the curriculum was butchered by poor structuring and grading, which made this way more stressful and time-intensive than necessary.
The course was divided into four modules, which neatly segmented the material and in theory makes it easier to process. Each module had a "hard deadline" to turn in all of our work as well as an earlier "soft" deadline where we could get feedback on our submission and resubmit. The issue with having just four deadlines in the semester is that it created enormous bottlenecks. TAs were rushing to get all the submissions after the soft deadline graded while at the same time students would pile into office hours before the hard deadlines. Many of the problems were almost impossible to start without TA help, but office hours were severely understaffed to the point that you could join at 5:50, wait for 5 hours, and not get seen. On top of all this, the last module was compressed to the point you could not get feedback at all.
Grading was also extremely confusing (check the website) and extremely punishing, for example, if you didn't get every assignment nearly perfect you were capped at a B-. They kept on changing the grading to make it easier which was helpful but still very hard to follow.
With all of that being said, I still learned a lot, and both professors are pretty good lecturers. If we had had smaller assignments and more deadlines it would have been much easier, though.
#tCFspring2021