CS 3205

Terrible class where you don't learn anything. Unfair teacher when it comes to participation (15% of your grade but only 4 collected assignments). Don't waste your time on this class. Take something useful when it comes to CS such as Statistics or math

Really easy A, really easy workload. I recommend taking this during a semester when you're taking OS, Algorithms, or 2150 to balance out your workload (and in-major GPA). You need to show up to lecture, but you literally never need to pay attention ever, and can definitely get away doing homework for other classes. Also nobody takes this class seriously, so the group project is a little bit obnoxious. I mean, even if you did the entire project on your own, it's still way, way, way less work than any other CS class, but you're very likely to get group members who couldn't care less about the class. If you go in expecting to learn valuable information about interaction design, you'll be disappointed. If you go in expecting an easy in-mjaor A, you should be satisfied.

Garbage class. Professor Mary Smith makes it clear from day one that she will not be engaging during lecture and that there's no real reason to show up except for brownie points for participating, and the occasional in class activity where attendance is taken. Most students are doing other stuff on their laptops or phones while she drones through the lecture slides, going over extremely boring material about prototyping or user analysis. The week before the three in class tests she releases a one page review sheet that covers all the buzzwords and pointless HCI material you should memorize for like two hours the day of the exam so you can regurgitate them, making it easy to do well on the exams but very unlikely that you will retain any information gained.

The class is project based, so you work in groups and have basically 3 long homework assignments, which inevitably get done hastily at the last second unless you somehow form a group that doesn't have one or two scrubs who do absolutely nothing. The weeks that the homework assignments are due are stressful and can be time consuming but every other week, there is zero work associated with this class.

I would not recommend this class to anybody unless you are exclusively looking for a class with as little work as possible, or if you have a serious project idea you want to see fleshed out, because if your idea is good enough for people to want to join your group you will be forced to do some analysis that I imagine is somewhat useful. As somebody who did not have a project idea, I found the class to be boring, stressful, and ultimately a waste of time. Trash