CS 4750

Upsorn is so sweet. If you're not one for going to class in person, I would avoid this class. She does worksheets and homeworks where she largely explains/ completely does them in class, sometimes on Fridays. This class was super interesting and helpful to learn. I've been asked about it in interviews a couple of times. You get to build a website as your final project which is a cool deliverable to add to your portfolio.

Upsorn and Bassit teach this course together so the grading is the same between them. Both professors are super nice. Pretty easy A would recommend for a 4th year CS elective.

There is a group project that you work on for the whole semester, make sure to make a solid group, or else you might find yourself doing a lot of work by yourself. In general most of the grades feel like a participation grade. Exam 1 was pretty easy, exam 2 was cumulative VERY long and a bit tricky. The good thing is that both exams were weighted equally at 25% of the grade.

There are already comprehensive reviews, so I'll just talk about my personal experience with the class instead. I found the class to be fairly easy, despite not going to lectures or ever watching the recorded lecture videos. I was able to complete all weekly "in class" assignments within 30 minutes or so by just skimming through the slides. The homeworks required a bit more effort, but were also reasonable to do with the slide skimming technique. I think this is because most of this course could probably be condensed into three or four weeks instead of a whole semester. The project was graded leniently imo - I don't think my group's website was very good, but we got full credit. As long as you do the bare minimum with respects to the database programming, the rest of the site won't matter and you'll get full points. The exam was sadly unfair. The exam was "designed to be completed in three hours," but we had a 12hr window to do it (covid semester, so timezone differences were in play). The exam was, in fact, not a three hour exam. There was a huge piazza thread where everyone was sharing their experience and talking about how, despite taking 10+ hours to do the exam, they did not complete it. I spent 5.5 hours and only completed maybe 70-75% of the exam, and I would consider myself to be a fast worker. The mean score was high (83% or something), so no curve was given. This was unfairly advantageous to people who spent more time and unfair disadvantageous to those who only allotted themselves 3 hours. I don't care much since I went CR/NC anyway, but my blood would be boiling if I took this class for a grade and saw an A+ turn into a B+ over something like this.

#tCF2020

SUMMARY: This course gets a solid "Meh" from me. It is not a particularly difficult course, especially if you have already gone through Advanced Software Development. None of the topics are very hard to understand (although the professor does try to make them hard to understand at times, it seems), and the homeworks are all pretty easy. GRADING: Grades break down like so: 20% homework assignments (usually can work with 1-2 partners), 20% practice of the days (POTDs -- Usually one per week. They are essentially very simple assignments that keep you engaged with the current material. Should not take more than an hour or two to complete each, if that), 30% project, and 30% final exam. PROJECT: The only real annoyance of the course is the project. You will work with 2-4 other students (3-4 students is recommended) on developing some sort of application (typically a web app, but you can create a desktop app as well, if you choose) that incorporates elements of database development. This project has the potential to be really cool, but the problem is that most people do not know PHP coming into the course, which is the only language Upsorn really even mentions or gives examples for linking to MySQL DBs in class. So, most groups are forced into learning PHP. While Upsorn "teaches" PHP, it is really hard to gain critical parts of it from two 50 minute lectures of watching her code very specific examples in it. So, really, you are on your own if you want to do anything beyond that. As a result, most of the projects that groups do in the course only achive the bear minimum required to get the best grade possible. It is not like CS3240 in which you see a lot of effort put into some of the projects. The project is 30% of your grade, but only 1/4 of that 30% is dependent on your final deliverable and PHP code. The other 3/4 are based on your project proposal (we finished that in around 2-3 hours), database design milestone (~6-8 hours depending on how complicated your project is), and MySQL implementation milestone (~4-6 hours depending on how compliated). These three milestones are spread out to be due every 3 weeks and none of them use PHP -- so to be clear, this project is really not that hard. But the final deliverable milestone is very annoying. FINAL EXAM: I will update this post with info about the final, but I have heard from previous students that it is not that hard. Additionally, at least in this COVID semester, the exam is open book. So, it should not be very difficult. PROFESSOR: Upsorn is very kind and approachable. No one has any problems getting along with her. However, her lectures are sometimes a bit convoluted and confusing which, when combined with her excessively wordy slides, makes for lectures that are difficult to track, even if you are watching a recording. As such, if there was ever a topic that came up that I was a bit confused about (this only happened 3 times -- again, the material is not very difficult), I would look up a youtube video that explained everything in like 5 minutes. Make of that what you will, but I am personally not a fan of her lectures. ENJOYMENT: I would call it below average. you are kind of bored most of the time because much of the material is either obvious, or things that you question whether you really need to know. There is some good stuff sprinkled in though, so don't completely dismiss the material. USEFULLNESS: If you are planning on working with software that heavily uses databases, and you have never really worked with them before, this course does provide an excellent introduction into the thought process behind their development. But, honestly, DBs are simple enough that I would argue that most people could pick up the material while on the job, making the course kind of like a head-start in the knowledge, but not super useful in the long run. WHO IS THIS COURSE FOR?: If you are taking an extremely time-consuming CS course, like Algo, OS, Comp Arch, or the like, this is a fantastic choice as a "complementary" course that will fulfill a CS elective requirement slot, and take up another 3 credits on your transcript, all while not destroying your schedule. (For that reason, it also a good choice for the 4th year "coasting to graduation" semesters, if you are fortunate enough to be in a position to do so). That is the course's biggest strength. It is also required for the cybersecurity focal path (for some reason, idk why), so if you are doing that, you will have to take this course sooner or later. Finally, I have never really heard anyone who is just dying to know and understand all about DBs, but if you are one of the odd few, you may get some enjoyment out of it. WHO IS THIS COURSE NOT FOR?: If you are trying to fill your schedule up with meaningful classes that will be relevant in the workforce and don't need it for some other requirement, I would avoid this class for the reasons mentioned above. You will consider it a waste of time.

The professor is SO sweet and very approachable. She has quizzes and in-class activities every week which requires attendance, but she gives you a couple drops for both of them. Each week there's also either homework or part of the semester-long group project due. The assignments are fairly easy for the first half of the course and then it picks up a bit. The project is interesting in that it gives you a lot of freedom to design a database, but the last part of the project requires a ton of PHP coding which isn't really covered in the class, so that can be difficult and time consuming for those with limited web dev experience (but it's actually a small part of the overall grade).

In the course, you'll mostly work with SQL and basic database concepts. There's a lot of content each week, but the concepts aren't super difficult to grasp. The workload isn't hard, but calling it an "easy A course" isn't super accurate either because you have to put consistent effort throughout the semester. There's lots of short assignments, in-class activities, and quizzes with grading that weighs a lot of these things nearly the same. Also, Upsorn is a super nice professor who is always willing to help. She gets really sad when people skips her lectures. (But it's kinda hard to resist when all lecture slides are thorough and posted online)