SYS 3060

This course is awesome. It is unbelievably difficult and demanding at times (when the homeworks are due), but the material is very interesting and could potentially be useful in industry. Start early on the homeworks, you have three weeks to do them and they typically take upwards of 25 hours each.

Krzysztofowicz is hated for this class, but he is an old school teacher who loves what he does, demands a lot form his students, and pushes them to really engage the material and understand it. He is great at bringing in outside material relevant to the course, and can be inspirational in his lectures.

Overall, tremendously difficult but very rewarding class

This class is definitely doable. Start the homeworks early and pay attention in class and to his "textbook" to do well on the tests. The subject is interesting and Prof. K. enjoys teaching it. Sure he's old school, but this is a good class.

This class is incredibly time consuming. Exams are very difficult, first exam had an average in the 60's with no curve. Be careful not to fail any exams or problem sets (easier to do than you'd think) because you have to redo them if you do. Problem sets take a really long time, especially the first two. If you start early, you'll be ok.

So this material in this course is at times interesting and probably useful. That being said if you know how to read (and I know that's a stretch for us engineers) you really never have to go to class. Prof. K lectures straight out of his own textbook. After the first 2 weeks of going to class and realizing that I could take the notes for the entire lecture in about 20 min by just looking at the chapters online I never went to class again outside of exams. Did not affect my grade at all. If you don't mind teaching yourself, lecture is really optional.

This class is seriously flawed. The structure of the class doesn't promote student learning -- homeworks, while incredibly time-consuming, almost exactly mirror the examples given in the textbook. Because there is so much work to do, the student just duplicates the work done in the textbook rather than actually learning the material. Tests, on the other hand, have no calculations involved -- they simply involve rote memorization and regurgitation. However, this doesn't promote useful learning either, as you're memorizing things like the equation for the normal distribution instead of the actual concepts of the class. And the material isn't really relevant -- no advanced software tools are used, so the class is focused more on the low-level, nitty-gritty process of performing regressions, rather than actually performing stochastic prediction. I had an internship in this exact field and almost all of the class was irrelevant to the work that we were doing because it was so low-level and out-of-date. Do not take this class unless you have to.

Really hard class. I didn't find the way he measured knowledge of the material to be very useful. Maybe if I was someone with a photographic memory or hours to memorize his entire book, I'd feel differently. In any case, start the homeworks early. I know you won't (I didn't either), but don't say I didn't warn you when you are up for 48 straight hours finishing them.

If I was not a systems major I would not have taken this class. That being said I believe that it was informative and useful.

Painful!

To be successful in this class you need to not procrastinate, be good at memorizing, and have plenty of free time. If you don't need to take this class, I wouldn't recommend it. You have 3 weeks to complete each of the 5 homework assignments. Professor Krzysztofowicz says to start them early, and that's really the key to doing well in this class. (The week before each homework was due, there could be 20+ people in TA office hours.) The first 2 homework assignments were by far the longest/most difficult. For the tests, you literally need to memorize the text - including formulas. If you can do that, you're golden. It not as bad as people make it sound if you're willing to put the time into it.

Not worthwhile to go to class. Professor just stands at the front and reads from the text book. HW's are extremely tedious and time consuming. Some taking upwards of 50 hours.