CSEE W4119

2 projects (30%) 4 assignments (22%) Midterm (15%) Final (33%)

Three written assignments + one optional (extra credit). Each written assignment was very reasonable in length/difficulty (around 4 questions). Two programming assignments. These will require a lot of time, so get started early. OH help. A midterm and final. Both were open notes.

5 HWs: 7-10 questions, takes a few hours to complete based on whether you know the material 2 Programming Assignments - both take quite a bit of time. First one was to make a p2p chat app. Second one was to simulate a network and implement routing algorithms with file transfer. Each takes about 2 days to complete if you do nothing else. Not hard conceptually, just a lot of grunt work. Midterm - quite hard Final - really really hard and the room was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers

7 HWs including 2 long programming assignments. 1 midterm, 1 final.

5 homework assignments (10-25pg) one for each chapter, 2 projects (Video proxy and creating your own router internet network), midterm and final. Homework 17%, Projects 33%, Midterm 15%, Final 35%. I easily spent 10-12hrs per week on the class and 20-25hrs at times when projects and assignments overlapped.

Ten labs, with quick prelabs and LONG group reports (a lot of ours were 60+ pages; although a lot was debug output, it was still a ton of writing; even trading them off, they ate up lots of time. A few brief homework assignments thrown in now and then.

Ethan is a good professor. He is very knowledgeable of networks and can answer all questions. If you attend lectures, you will learn a lot about computer networks. My main issue with this course is the assignments. I have taken other 4000 level courses at Columbia and none have felt so monotonous. He gives out 4 written assignments and 2 projects. These are very relevant to the coursework, but the amount of time it takes to complete each is extremely long. Some classmates and I already had experience in computer networks yet still found the assignments to be way too long. Some written assignments were ~20 pages worth of questions (that are not trivial). The course will deepen your understanding of networks at the cost of your free time. The projects themselves come in multiple stages and also take at least entire days to complete. In conclusion, while Ethan is knowledgable and taking this course will help you learn a lot about networking, Ethan's version of the course simply has an unnecessary amount of workload that at a certain point no longer is helpful.

Misra is clearly very knowledgeable about Networks, and it shows in his lectures. However, his teaching style is not the most engaging. He pulls his slides directly from the textbook, and I ended up watching the textbook author's (Jim Kurose) videos to get through the class. Expect to self-study a lot. The class itself felt disorganized (maybe it was just my semester). I felt that there was weak communication between the TA team and students. The TAs, however, were helpful during OH.

Augustin is super-friendly and probably one of the nicest professors in the CS department. Everything else about this class kind of stinks. In this class, you’ll basically learn how the internet works at each layer of the stack. There’s a large discrepancy in the level of understanding imparted via lecture in class and the level of understanding required to do well on the homework and exams. His Comic Sans slider are also sans of deep material. They basically cover the textbook at a highly abstracted level. I just read the slides for exams which turned out to be a big mistake. Augustin is more than willing to go over concepts again for you and answer all your questions. However, he’s too accommodating and ends up not finishing the lecture since he wasted time answering a bunch of not-so-great questions. It would also have been nice if he went over some topics in detail (though he expects that kind of detail in tests) Logistics for this class were a mess. Homeworks and exams took forever to be graded. We had Piazza but didn't get responses for 4-5 days at a time which was frustrating right before deadlines. The TAs were also generally not helpful. HW questions were often poorly worded. The exam is just a bunch of hw questions put together. At the end of the course, you’ll have some idea of how the internet works, but all the material could have probably been covered in a third…

He's not a terrible teacher, but studying for his class was a nightmare because he's unorganized and lazy. For the midterm and final (70% of the grade) he gave absolutely no guidance of the test's subject matter or format. He would upload midterms from other teachers with the not that his tests would not be similar. He is unresponsive on piazza to valid questions, with him/the TAs leaving most questions unanswered. When students complained that they were unclear on one particular topic, his response was to upload a bad black/white scan of an entire chapter of the textbook.