CS 4457

I want to echo pretty much everything the other review (posted on 5/02/20) said.

Graham is nice guy and is very interested in what he's teaching, but unfortunately he's very unorganized and this makes taking his class frustrating (Graham even said himself in class that he is disorganized, so this isn't even just my own opinion). Often when teaching, it feels like he's jumping around and it's not very clear how the concepts he's teaching are related to each other which makes following his teaching better. Often I found that the textbook said what he was trying to say much better. But his disorganization is most felt on the homework. You know how in CS 2150 or Operating Systems you have basically a super in depth README file that gives all the instructions for the homework? Those were great, and when I took those courses I felt that the Professors (Bloomfield and Riess) did a great job of constantly updating the instructions/code so that it was as clear as possible. Graham instructions are ~very~ bad compared to those, and literally every assignment/email I've see written by him has grammatical/spelling errors which make the instructions even harder to understand.

Here's one example of his disorganization: I was working on an assignment (laptop receiver) and I felt like the instructions were clearly lacking some details about how to do what it was asking us to do. In discord I read about what some other people did but didn't understand why they did it. Turns out, the week before Graham had posted something in discord with the missing info. But he didn't send and email out about it or pin the message, so it was only helpful to those who happened to see it. I feel like Riess or Bloomfield would have surely sent out an email with the missing info.

Also, it's really hard to start homework early for this class because it's almost guaranteed that due to poor instructions, students will run into issues. So it's better to wait for early students to run into problems and then to read over how they fixed the issues in discord after they get help. Once I decided to start the homework early and finished it, only to have Graham change the files we needed to submit after the assignment had already been out for a week and I had to go back and change some stuff to make sure my deliverable was correct.

Overall, you might still want to take this class if you want a class that isn't too intense or if you really feel like you want to learn more about networks, but honestly I feel like you could learn more/faster about networks if you read a textbook or found an online class. Also, even though this class may not be the hardest elective, Graham has the threshold for an A be a 95 which is very annoying

I took this class during the Spring 2020 Coronavirus online classes and thought this class went well up until the end. The class had interesting assignments and Professor Graham cares about what he teaches. On top the exams weren't terrible and he scrapped some assignments due to the online learning. There was one issue however with final grades. We were given a deadline on SIS to choose whether to make the class pass/fail or count for GPA. The entire year Professor Graham had a syllabus on his website that stated
Home Work 30%
Midterm I 15%
Midterm II 20%
Final Project 25%
Scribing 10%
We will use collab, grading cuts off.
We do not round grades. 92.99% is not ≥ 93% and thus is an A- not an A.

I and the rest of the class was surprised to learn that these were not the grading bands and that rather than an A being a 93% as stated above it was a 95%. This was told to the class AFTER the deadline had passed to choose pass/fail or not and so the class had no chance to make this informed decision. According to the Professor "we will use collab, grading cuts off" is actually saying that grading will use the collab default bands which list a 95% as an A (despite a conflict between syllabus and collab grade breakdowns earlier in the semester where he said to trust the syllabus not collab). The professor then said that listing a 92.99% as an A- and 93% as an A immediately afterward is merely an example of what rounding is, and that it does not apply to the syllabus bands. This was misleading at its very best and neglected to ever give the class any grading scheme in the syllabus. The class obviously went with what was written in the syllabus and all assumed that the numbers written were examples of what the class was doing.
After bringing this to light, the professor stated online that the syllabus was clear and rather than acknowledge the entire class had been misled (and based grading decisions after it), he changed his website to say "We do not round grades." only, which does nothing once grades have already been submitted.
Overall, I enjoyed the class and the assignments were fun, but I felt the grading situation at the end was unfair to several who were making GPA decisions for grad school or other pursuits and out of character for previous classes I've had with Professor Graham,

Graham is a smart guy and a good guy but he’s super disorganized, which hurts the class a lot. A lot of assignments were unnecessarily hard because Graham did a poor job of explaining what we were supposed to do. For one of the labs he gave us broken skeleton code that didn’t even compile because it had syntax errors. One of the other labs (tcp) was just insanely hard, possibly the hardest assignment I have ever had for any CS class. One of the exams had ambiguous questions on it and graham doesn’t do regrades, so if you put the wrong answer you just got shafted. If you’re into networks maybe take this because the material is pretty interesting but otherwise I wouldn’t recommend it.