Eleni Drinea

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.

The course demands lot of efforts, consistent efforts is the key. The professor grades well. She curves it.

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 course is well structured, but a bit rigorous. The professor is really helpful and supportive. You should definitely approach her and talk to her during the OHs. I personally did not score the best marks but I got to learn a lot.

HW assignments due every 2 weeks. 1 midterm and 1 final. HW questions were mainly given a problem: describe, design, and analyze runtime/space of an algorithm to solve it (no coding required, just writing pseudocode). The questions were pretty tough and typing everything up was tedious but they were all within the scope of what was covered during the lecture. Exam questions were in the style of HW questions and of similar difficulty which made completing them in a 70 min timeframe virtually impossible. The professor knew this though and curved quite generously.

6 home-works each with programming and theoretical parts. 40% - Mostly hard Midterm: theoretical 30% - (hardish) Final: theoretical 30% - (easier than midterm although it could be due to the fact that the midterm was hard)

While I was initially hesitant to take the class, I found the content quite interesting and helpful for the trickier technical interview questions such as dynamic programming, graph algorithms, recursion and runtime optimization. You will leave the class with a solid toolkit to design and analyze algorithms for many types of important CS problems. For example, Prof Drinea taught us step-by-step methods for solving DP problems and proving reductions which made them much easier to grasp. She is also a solid lecturer, although a bit of a fast talker, and did a great job of building each topic from the ground up. She also posed comprehension questions to the class during each lecture to make sure we were following. Her slides were also quite comprehensive and she gave detailed and quick responses to Ed posts. Overall, I would recommend this course- it is way more useful than trying to memorize solutions to Leetcode problems. You'll actually get good at solving them and learn some cool (and relevant) algorithms along the way.

Very down to earth professor who is highly accessible and who tries her best to make sure everyone is understanding the lesson. It wasn't a very interesting class however.

40% Homework - theory and programming, manageable 30% Midterm - difficult 30% Final - not as difficult as the midterm, but still difficult

I did not want to take this course. She lectures with a powerpoint slide and goes through things on her iPad. It's just algorithms, take it only if you have to/are really interested in it