CS 4102

Ahbi Shelat is a good professor who really knows his stuff and is willing to try and help on problem sets but the TA office hours/discussion of the problem sets are the most helpful and pretty much are the only way I got through the problem sets

Abhi is a fantastic professor, and despite being new to this, he puts forth a great effort to be interactive and engaging. He also works really hard to adjust due dates to help students out. He's definitely an expert on all of the material, but sometimes the concepts can be difficult to understand for students. The problem sets are usually very difficult, requiring several hours to formulate solutions. Insanely difficult midterm.

The worst professor I have ever dealt with at UVA. Homeworks are insanely hard, plus he gave us a tough midterm that he knew he was too hard, and nobody finished. [Yes, he admitted this publicly, too.] Stay away from at all costs.

This class must be the most interesting I have ever taken. Abhi pushes you hard intellectually so that you can feel the true joy of accomplishment.

Abhi is a great teacher that is really passionate about the course topic. However, the problem sets are quite difficult and take several hours to complete (sometimes as much as 10 hours). Working with a partner helps a lot as well as attending the TA's office hours for problem set reviews. While this is a tough class, Abhi's grading is quite fair and most people do well.

Best professor @ UVA, pushes you to learn!! He kinda reminds me of Russell Peters.

Tough class, of course. If you've had Theory of Computation with Abhi it will help you here, at least three of the lectures in Algorithms are identical with material from Theory.

Textbook is rarely helpful, wouldn't recommend.

The class is great and abhi is a fantastic lecturer. I learned a ton especially in the first 2/3 of the semester, and I can't recommend it highly enough. You have to do a lot of work so find a good group to work with.

The only problem is that in the last 1/3 of the class, it completely fell apart logistically. Grading stopped happening, abhi missed a bunch of lectures, and the class got drastically easier. I'm sure some students appreciated it but it made it worse in my opinion. I think this is partially due to a lot of students complaining about the difficulty (basically just whining) and abhi giving into them and getting demoralized about the class. Ultimately nothing has been graded in about a month, and posts on Piazza are answered slowly if at all. I wish it hadn't ended like this, but it did.

Overall though a fantastic class. Definitely recommend taking this with abhi if you're seriously interested in learning the material; you will work very hard in the process but it's worth it.

He graduated from Harvard and MIT...So you know it will presumably be a course like that. Please treat every hw as your final exam and put 120% effort to FINISH them if you want a good grade. Also please make groups to cooperate on every problem and make sure you thoroughly understand what he delivers in class.

Ahbi Shelat is one of the best lecturers at UVa. He is able to really make sure that you understand the material, as well as being very engaging in class. Very often he'll ask that you "take two minutes with your neighbor" to solve a particular problem in class. These short in class exercises along with Ahbi enthusiasm make for a fun, worthwhile course.

The catch to this class is that it can be very difficult. The weekly/biweekly homeworks have problems that you have never seen before, but are somewhat similar to in class problems and examples. The hard part is figuring out which algorithm to apply to the problem, and how to execute it correctly in the context of the specific homework problem. You're allowed to work in groups, as long as each individual submits their own work.

There is a take-home midterm and a final that must be done on your own. These problems aren't as difficult as the homework problems since you can't work together, but that's not to say that they aren't challenging.

Overall, this class is one of the best I've taken at UVa, and Ahbi definitely contributes to that experience. If you work hard, and really put your mind to it, you can definitely do well. If you want to learn a lot about algorithms, I wouldn't recommend taking it with any other professor.