CS 3205

Easy class but really useful for software developers. Easy to use and apply outside of the class.

Really good class. Interesting and useful for after graduation

Highly recommend this class. Horton is a goon, he has a goofy sense of humor and keeps the class interesting. Very practical/useful class. Great real world applications and the hands-on experience you get with the group project is really cool. You practically plan, document, design, and prototype a potential start-up idea or improve upon an existing interface. A's are very reasonably attainable. The project is graded pretty tough so do well on the exams. Great soft skills course, no coding. One of my favorite courses to date.

Great class! Horton is relaxed but knowledgeable and is great at keeping the class engaged. The material is fun and interesting and a nice break from the grind of the core CS curriculum.

Pretty boring class TBH. Sort of an easy class but it's the first week of december and I still don't have my grades for Homeworks due in October so there's that. Exams can actually be a little tricky because if you don't use "HCI language" you get points off. Not really a great course but not a bad one either I suppose. Preeettty disorganized though.

Let me get something straight: Thomas Horton is a very fun and nice professor. He is clearly knowledgeable and keeps the class interesting with the open discussions and real world HCI examples. That being said, the exams are akin to a bar of soap fighting a medieval dragon. It's just impossible, unless you take the time to read all four trillion slides/textbook pages/external readings. Taking this alongside with many four year courses made my hair bald; the TAs are stringent and *extremely* in accordance to the answer keys, so any solution that may also be permissible could be ignored. Sigh. I wish I enjoyed this course a lot more, but the frivolous regrade policy and the large number of readings made this course turdy.

Horton a nice guy but he's too busy and completely unavailable for help, super unorganized, and really unreasonable. if you need help he's like send me an email and consistently never replies to them. If you go to his office hours, he will work his hardest to get you out as soon as possible, even if you don't have an answer to the question that brought you there in the first place. He blames the TA's openly in class for everything, but if there's a problem with the machine workers, there's a problem with the factory manager...

The day before we took the final we were missing like 5/9 grades, about half of which were turned in *weeks* before and 1 or 2 of which were turned in *months* before. The sum of these assignments 3 projects parts, an exam, and a homework; they were worth approximately 51% of our grade while the final was only worth 9%. However, It's hard to tell you for sure how much they were worth exactly because there are assignments in the syllabus we were never assigned mostly because he didn't want to grade them. He made a temporary class website with the apparent intention of creating an actual one but never did. The links are out of order and the whole things looks like an HTML skeleton someone would use as a torrent site in the late 90s. Talk about Human-Computer Interaction...

Additionally, his test answers are arbitrary and unreasonable, for example you might give an acceptable answer and explanation but if it does not contain one of his one or two approved buzzwords, you will get nothing. What is even the point of written tests if you are unable to argue your point. To summarize, lectures are meaningless, the class is poorly organized and poorly taught, the material is as redundant as it is boring (the useful bits are taught in other courses like Mobile Development and Advanced Software Dev.), you will learn nothing, and you'll be miserable while you suffer it.

My friends who took the class with Mary Smith say she's just as bad but a little more reasonable on grading. Take it with Floryan or bust.

Horrible, he's extremely disorganized at the cost of the students grades. TAs seem to bullshit their way through grading since his key is late/a mess. Take it with someone else. I dont know how the average was an A for other semesters but it was hardly an A this semester.

I don't know why the reviews for Fall 2016 are so bad, but I didn't think it was too bad of a course. The semester project was decent and pretty chill as long as there is an even division of work for each group member. The homework is chill as well, just make sure you use as much HCI vocabulary as possible or you will get dinged for it. Same goes for exams, I got consistently above the average on every exam. My trick? Memorizing everything on the slides. That's literally it, just memorization. When he assigns readings, do a thorough skim, you don't have to read every little thing, but a thorough skim should help you get points for questions having to do with readings that sometimes show up on the exams. The language used for the homework, projects, and exams MUST be HCI based or you will not get full points. So memorize everything + use HCI buzz words and this class is a breeze. I got an A.

Yeah I don't know. I thought HCI was an easy class and maybe it is, but I still don't know how I got screwed over. Like what the heck, the grade distribution be like - yes you will get an A, it's easy, but in reality it was more like wth, why is the TA giving me a random B then an A then a C, like she trying to use all the letters in the alphabet. But all joking aside, the class was more or less straightforward, read the slides and definitely read the textbook (sigh - first cs class where you actually have to read the textbook / supplementary reading) then do the test (use the HCI vocab and stuff, it's not too bad... according to the other kids). You have to write about 4 or 5 reports with your group of 4, which isn't hard, but should be extensive and as detailed as you can possibly get. To succeed, I would recommend maybe checking your report with a TA to make sure you hit all the points they want because it's hard to get a sense of how much you should write before you actually get the crappy grade back from the crappy TA (jk we love you TAs just give us a break some time).