CS 4710

TLDR: The content of this course is interesting and covers a groundbreaking field. However, this course was the most unstructured course I have taken here at UVA.

My review of this course will consist of discussing two different parts: the course and the professor. First, the course has some interesting content that can be applied to real life. Some of these topics included reinforcement learning, transformers (which is what Chat GPT is), Markov models, neural networks, and much more. Contrary to what previous reviews said, there wasn’t as much coding in this course. Furthermore, the structure of the course when I took it highly differed from the reviews of those in the past. Thus, when reading the reviews of this course, take them with a grain of salt since the course can change from semester to semester. Grading was broken into the following: 55% for homework assignments, 20% for midterm (which by the way, was extremely hard but they graded it generously), 20% for final project, and 5% for attendance. This course itself was not difficult and I found it not hard to get an A.

Moving onto my review of the professor I had when taking this course: Yangfeng Ji. He taught this course with a PhD student, Stephanie Schoch. First, the lectures were boring since they read straight off the slides. Moreover, sometimes the lecture slides had very complicated formulas and concepts that were not explained well but later showed up on homework assignments and the midterm. Second, the professors and TAs had horrible response times. Professor Ji emphasized to never email him unless it was an emergency, which I understand. He told us to only post questions or personal matters on Piazza. There were many times when students had questions about homework assignments that were posted on Piazza days to a couple of weeks before they were due and the questions were not responded to until after the assignment was due or hours before it was due. I would say that 25% of Piazza posts were never actually responded to, 50% of posts took around a week to be responded to, and the other 25% of posts were responded to within days. Third, Professor Ji and Stephanie sometimes did not show up to their office hours. Professor Ji held his on Fridays at 9 AM. There was one week when I had an emergency and needed to talk to Professor Ji. I figured going to his office hours was best since they don’t ever respond to emails to Piazza posts. I woke up that day and went to his office hours. He never showed up and sent out an announcement at 9:40 AM that he couldn’t make it. There was this other time I attended Stephanie’s office hours and she never showed up or sent out an announcement. I found these two instances to be highly inconvenient to us students. Fourth, the professors and TAs did a horrible job at grading the assignments throughout the entire semester. The first two homework assignments took around a month to be graded and returned to us. What makes it worse is that all the content that was covered in these two homework assignments was put on the midterm. Since we didn’t get the results from the homework by the time of the midterm, a lot of us really struggled on the exam. Subsequently, the midterm was not graded until another month as well. The last couple of homeworks were posted at the end of the semester so they had to be returned to us in a timely manner. As for the final project, we had final project proposals that were supposed to be graded and provided to us for feedback well before the final project was due. However, the professors and TAs took so long to grade them so my group was struggling to see if we were on the right path or not. Fifth, the posting of the homeworks was horribly planned. The syllabus at the beginning of the semester mentioned that we’ll have five homework assignments throughout the semester; note that each one was typically difficult, tedious, and time-consuming. The professors posted the last two homeworks within the last two weeks of the semester. Having these assignments on top of the final project during finals weeks made it so much worse.

Overall, I thought that I would enjoy this class but found it to be one of the worst CS classes I’ve ever taken. I would recommend other CS electives where you can actually learn the material on a fair basis.

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