CS 6501

Software logic covers an interesting topic, but the course organization is very poor. The instructor will frequently say there will be homework, but nothing will be assigned. You will get very little practice as a result. The homework he does end up assigning will be very trivial, and you will not learn very much. It's an easy grade though.

The instructor will also frequently go over-time and keep you for at least 5-10 minutes with students for the next class waiting at the door. There was no syllabus/schedule of contents of the course. Frequently, he will either forget his the upshot of his own examples or realize his examples don't work, and new ones need to be made on the spot.

Some classes are just half review even if everyone understands what's going on, resulting in an excruciatingly slow pace. Even if everyone knows what's going on, the instructor will assume you don't know anything. If you sit in the back, he will really assume you're clueless. Even if you volunteer answers frequently, he will proceed as if you didn't say anything. He seems very arrogant as a result. His tone can be very condescending, and he tends to get on his soapbox and overexplain very simple math concepts. This is a graduate course where everyone has taken some form of discrete math. We do not need a 30 minute explanation of the definition of an equivalence class. Generally, he speaks as if he wishes he were a mathematician; he seems very proud of knowing what a group is for example.

I entered this course wanting to learn about formal methods applied to software, which was mentioned in the beginning of the semester. Instead I barely learned the basics of Lean. For anything else, this class was not worth it.