Tony Dear

2 Midterms and a final. Homework due once every 2 weeks. Rather than individual exams being curved, he curves the end grade.

I remember wondering if I should take this course because all of the old reviews, but I am very glad I chose to take it anyway! I don't know if he has changed things, but this course was my favorite all semester and was not a problem. I really like Dear's teaching style, and the hws were never to hard to finish and he gave us plenty of time to do them. Also, TAs had plenty of office hours, and they would literally walk you through the problem step by step if needed. Labs were a bit more difficult because they were pretty rushed, but prof adjusted and gave us the whole weekend to complete them which really helped out. On hw and labs, averages tended to be high, the midterm was a bit harder bc of the time crunch, but people did not flunk for sure. Overall, one of the better SEAS courses in my opinion.

I took the class in Fall 2018. While professor Allen does follow the slides most of the times, he will always give some additional information with it. If you ask him any doubts he is always able to clear those. His course is well organized with pre-determined readings. The labs are interesting if you are a noob to ROS and Robotics, and covered a diverse range of topics. You get to code Path Planning and basic computer vision etc. It is an interesting course for a beginner. He also spends some lectures to get you started with ROS and OpenCV. I enjoyed this course a lot.

Genuinely the hardest class I have ever taken at Columbia. BUT he does curve significantly to compensate for the extra rigor. You will probably be fighting for your life at some points of this course, which has to happen at some point of one's academic career - this is an ivy after all! Don't freak out if you have to take this class with Dear - he is very nice, and you will probably learn more than the other section of Discrete.

Dear might possibly be the worst professor I've had at Columbia so far. He made easy concepts extremely difficult to understand and did not explain concepts well at all, would highly recommend people to not take this class with Dear. Exams were extremely difficult and expected students to be able to completely code out homework assignments without providing knowledge on how.

Hands down one of the best CS profs I've had. He's very nice, his lectures are very straightforward, he answers piazza posts very quickly, and explains the concepts very well. If you're not a fan of theoretical math and enjoy more plug and chug kinda math, then yeah this class will be a bit more difficult but as someone who struggled my way through Multi, I was not expecting to take this class and get As on all the assignments. I also liked how tethered this class was to AI / ML, (especially the labs) and it felt like I was learning practical math that I'd actually use someday.

Gets progressively harder. Not bad if you are consistent about it, probably around 8 hours a week. Do the textbook readings and make sure to actually understand everything that is on the homework and what is said in class. Do that and you'll be fine.

Honestly, I wouldn't take this class unless you absolutely have to. It's just another tough thing to deal with.

On the surface, this class is great. Professor Dear is organized, nice, and offers a lot of office hours for his students. This will especially be evident during the first week, where the material is trivial. However, I do not recommend taking this class for several reasons. The first is the fact that the lectures just spit out different theorems in a convoluted way, where he is just regurgitating statements from the textbook. So you think you can just learn the material from the textbook or online because this is probably not your first time experiencing terrible lectures at Columbia. In fact, it might seem tenfold better, where you can skip class and do the problem sets and learning yourself. So you try the textbook, and realize it's just as convoluted as the lectures, because well, he was regurgitating those statements. And so you go online to learn the material yourself, which works fine for actually learning linear, until you receive the problem sets and realize it's just as convoluted. I can't emphasize enough that the problem is not the fact that you can linear on your own, but to do well in this class, you have to answer those convoluted questions that you won't find any source teaching you how to do. And so you got the TAs, but they themselves admit that they do not know how to solve the problems. Most people have large groups of friends to try to crack the problems t…

Began with logic which was actually really interesting. Super easy start to the course WAS VERY MISLEADING. Then went on to graph theory and connectivity. This was MEDIUM DIFFICULTY. I wish I had not gotten complacent after the first unit -- be warned it gets harder. Then probability and encryption. HARD HARD HARD. I had taken prob before and thought it would be easy --- it was not. Honestly the subjects themselves are not too difficult, but I think that its easy to get scared off because you don't prepare enough. LESSON: DO NOT GET COMPLACENT. Overall, though, Tony Dear is amazing. He's hard, but that helps to make sure you do all the work. Only thing I wish is that he had a limit on late days, because it just becomes a system where the soft deadline doesn't really mean anything. Don't leave the HW for the last second.... Trust.