COMS W4231

One difficult pset a week. They took me about 5-10 hours depending on the pset, and they had to be typed.

5 homeworks, 10% each. 1 midterm and final, 25% each. HW average was usually around 70-80%. Midterm average was 40%. Final was cancelled due to the protests (Spring 2024). TAs take a lot of points off for minor mistakes.

Homework every 2 weeks, one midterm, one final. Exams are fairly similar to practice exams provided. Homeworks are not labeled conceptually and not fairly graded but shouldn't be a huge workload if you start early on them.

Weekly assignments ( all written proofs, all on latex ) Three exams.

I guess professor does not have experience in teaching. She is not able to properly deliver the lecture, she herself is confused most of the time. Its a wastage of time attending her lecture. Its better to study by yourself from book as her lectures does not contain anything new. When you ask her some doubt, you will find that doubt is still doubt. Moreover, she is very harsh to the students, in short not at all student friendly. She even does not listen to the student's problems. Her grading is also very strict. I will suggest not to take this course under her. .

6 HWs, 3-6 questions with 1-4 subquestions each. Usually a mix of proofs, modifying algorithms, or analyzing 2 midterms, cumulative (but focusing on the material from that portion of the semester), 25% each 1 final, cumulative (but with strong focus on last 1/3 of semester), 35%

Take a class with Christos!! He cares a lot about his students and is a fascinating and wonderful person to know. His office hours have been one of the best parts of my college experience. His psets are difficult, but he is flexible, helpful, and brilliant. Also, he is the author of multiple novels and a wonderful comic book series called logicomix. Ask him about it in his office hour sometime.

The course covers basic algorithms, such as recursion, DFS/BFS, DP, and also about P v NP. The content is decent, but grading is not great. Drinea mentioned after the midterms to not worry about grades, and how a former student who failed the midterm still got an A+ in the course. However, this was misleading and it did not seem like she curved much. The lectures are pretty dry - Drinea mostly just reads off the lecture slides. Would not recommend this course.

The professor is just not good at teaching. He will put up some slides on an algorithm, haphazardly show an example and maybe some proofs, but it's incredibly easy to get lost in trying to follow him. I ultimately stopped going to class because his lecture style is just awful or at least not useful for me. The homework assignments aren't terribly long but there is no division conceptually and the graders expect correctness proofs for everything. I don't feel my work was graded fairly, as the TAs would just skip over certain problems saying they weren't present even when they were (pagination was off in Gradescope) and declined my regrade requests. Exams have low median scores despite high medians on the HW. Didn't learn much here, unfortunately, and will have to go back and re-learn it on my own. Do not recommend this professor or his TAs.

I am highly opinionated, but I believe he is the BEST professor in the entire department. If you don't believe me, watch his lectures on youtube first. Lecture was not recorded ( could be good or bad )