Martha Kim

Amazing professor. Lectures were just going over prepared slides, which had slides, pictures, and whatnot. The professor always made sure everyone understood the content, always took and answered questions thoroughly, and was very nice. The lectures were also always recorded. We used EdStem, and the TAs were very responsive and thorough. We had a system where if you were endorsed 5 times (essentially provided a good answer 5 times), then you would receive 3% extra credit on your final grade. As a result, a lot of the time, a peer student would answer your question, which would be fine most of the time, but sometimes the answer would not be sufficient, yet still marked as resolved. HWs were completion-based and worth 30% so very generous. There would be recorded review sessions going over them as well, and good, thorough solutions were provided. Past exams were also provided in preparation for the midterm and final; in both cases, review sessions were provided. After each unit (8 units total), the TAs would create a PDF containing summaries/notes of the topic, which were very helpful. Overall, you have a lot of help in this class. The topics themselves aren't too difficult, but they were boring at times. 30% of your grade is on completion and the rest on exams. For the midterm, the mean was 65.41, median was 68.5. For the final, the mean was 67.97, and the median was 72.5. Both…

Pretty much what I am expecting, start off with bit logic, combinational logic, digital logic design, then move on to finite state machine, end up with memory and cache and some assembly(MIPS). Good content, def help me understand basics of computers and lower-level stuff. Kim taught this herself this year and the quality is good, heard she had her phd taught before, just felt very lucky that she's teaching it herself this semester when I am taking it

Well, I am tempted to write this review because I dont want people to just live in ignorance that she happens to be from a great school/university and she can teach well. WELL NOTHING APPLIES. Also, because I am many of my friends got poor grades that costed me GPA and later job, I want to put my views/feedback/complains for all of you to view. 1)This course can be done in 30 minutes essentially. What I mean is that you wont learn anything great here except simple synchronizations mechanisms, which if you do 1 or 2 good problems, you can learn. 2) Whole purpose of "Vijay Saraswat' and IBM crap to teach this course is to get their language i.e. X10(that you are suppose to struggle to learn in this course) their research project @IBM famous in academia. NOTHING ELSE. There is not even documentation worthwhile reading for X10. 3) They have no clue how to teach, but SEAS department is really dumb fuck department that allows such courses to happen even when intentions are very clear of parties involved in teaching. 4)Martha kim is highly incompetent teacher. Her job in lecture hours will be just to sit back and reply to emails on her Mac. Once a while she would turn up to do announcements, afterall Columbia pays her for teaching.Really is that what she is required/supposed to do? 5) Vijay Saraswat's bubble is to let people try 'TRICKY' problems and they will learn rather give trick…

Martha is a great lecturer. When she speaks in class it's generally very easy to follow and the subject material is always very interesting so it's easy to be engaged. She's also very good about taking questions and stopping and going back to review places where people have indicated confusion. The same goes for her office hours. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND going to her office hours. Even if the people there have questions that you're already clear on it's always illuminating listening to her explain concepts. She really goes out of her way to try and help the students that come to her office hours. Like, I've been there at its peak where there are 20+ people in a small office space and she's taking questions and explaining them painstakingly and patiently or she's on her knees since she's offered all her chairs to her students and she's reading a massive circuit to try and troubleshoot some edge-case bug. Truly, she's a great professor. That being said, the way the class is organized is a bit uncomfy. The project-orientedness is nothing new for a CS class but the way that they're graded can leave a lot of work unrewarded. At the very least, it's all entirely objective for better or for worse. The good news is you can typically accurately calculate what you're going to get. The bad news is it's very hard to argue a better score later. Any distribution in score comes from optimization w…

I took Fundamentals of Computer Systems with Professor Kim back in Fall 2022 (before she had the PhD lecturer for the course thankfully – hadn’t been hearing many good things about her). I had a fairly solid experience with the course. I liked learning about the content of the course and in terms of difficulty of grasping the concepts, I thought it was a reasonable progression (although I found MIPS assembly pretty tricky at the time). Prof. Kim seemed fairly approachable (though I haven’t been to her office hours), and she was a decently engaging lecturer. She explained the concepts and went over examples that fell in line with the exam and homework questions. I had the expectations of learning the fundamentals of computer systems, and I would say those expectations were met – binary information representation, boolean algebra, combinational circuit design, sequential circuit design, finite state machines, memory and addressing, MIPS, processors, and caches. All in all, I would recommend taking this course with Kim – I’ve heard mixed reviews about some of the alternatives…

Course without any textbooks/reference books Only thing you can *rely* upon is class lectures that are nothing more than few lines long on topics that range from almost everything to everything in parallel computing. One Instructor Vijay Saraswat is more interested in telling what X10 can do and what HE can do rather than teaching something that we could understand. One of the worst courses I took in all my life. Vijay did not teach rather he just tested again and again what students know beforehand....everything he spoke only 3-4 in class could make out what he is talking about.Worst idoit I have every seen.Really sick of this person and unable to find suitable words to match culpa requirements. All IBM bastards were equally crap and they were also not so interested in teaching but i dont know wtf.. Just could not make out things unless you studied them beforehand(I mean in your undergraduate or so..) Got really really frustrated after taking this course, did not learn anything great here except some shit like asyncs , streams etc.. Dont take this course unless you have to just fulfill credit requirements and there is no other course to take.

Homework graded on completion 30%, midterm 35%, final 35%

I thought this would be decent class going in, but I was wrong. For 85% of the lectures of the fall 2024 semester, Professor Kim's PhD student gave us lectures. She refused to record lectures yet did a poor job at explaining and teaching concepts that aren't actually that complicated. I appreciated that the problems sets and weekly reflections were graded on completion, but this also means it required a lot of self discipline and pacing to make sure that I wasn't doomed when the exams rolled around. I ended up not going to lectures and teaching myself all the material. This was the worst teaching experience I've had at Columbia. And the lack of empathy towards students and their feedback was the cherry on top.

If you are good programmer already, you will be able to do relatively well, otherwise you will struggle like I did. It seems this year they tried to reduce workload, but frankly speaking, they wont teach you anything worthwhile. You will repent later like me for having taken this course under Martha and Vijay.

Martha Kim is super kind and understanding, and genuinely cares about how well her students do. She truly does not want to fail anyone and provides generally fair exams. She is a very clear and slow lecturer which is lovely and new in CS. She creates a supportive and understanding environment and wants students to ask questions and clear up their confusion. She gives generous partial credit on exams. I don't really have any complaints. She is one of the nicest and best professors I've had.