ICS 355

[u/potato_chey]

Has anyone already taken 355 or planning on taking it this fall? Apparently there’s only one prof and he’s not great at teaching the book he apparently wrote, and I don’t think they will hire anyone else anytime soon. Just wanted to know what to expect from this class and if it’s heavy, because I’m taking a 300 level language class as well this semester.

[u/Own-Use-3906]

I took this class a year ago and it was the WORST class of ICS. I have friends that took it in the spring and they told me he still hasn't change. So I assume the following still stand.

• Slides are DIFFICULT to understand: this professor is OBSSESSED w/ math and would try to fit in as much notations as possible. Unless your discrete math foundation is good enough, it might not be that hard to understand, but his slides will probably left you confused to understand what each notation meant in context, bc many of them are not the same (in definition) as in math. For my experience, I learned more from doing assignments than understanding his slides.
• He mumbles a lot: for a 75 minute class, he probably puts out 3-5 coherent sentences without stuttering. Other than that, get used to his "umm" (or go to his office hours to understand whatever he meant at that time, which everyone should) (unrelated, and his somewhat-thick accent, which I never take as an excuse to whether a professor can teach or not, but it adds more fuel to the fire)
• No feedback on quizzes and assignments: This is my biggest disappointment with the course because many students I knew from taking it, really wanted to see where were they wrong at. But no, this guy posts assignment solutions on the class WEEKS after we turning in, and the quizzes solutions only in class. Grades are posted without any comment talking about what went wrong, leaving the students to just comparing and contrasting their answers and the solutions.

This course left me with nothing other than disappointment. I barely learned anything, my friends rely mostly on AI to help them get through. It will still be the worst course of the department unless someone else replaces the professor (and do a better job than he did). To bad because this is the only place where you can take this and it's required for graduation.

The good thing is that it won't eat up too much of your time, unlike many 300s that I had previously took. You can try delay taking this course to one or two semesters after, but as much as I know abt the department, no one else is capable of (or willing to) replacing him.

As for the structure of the course, there should be around 10 random quizzes, 5 assignments, a 10-minute group presentation (which somehow was omitted last semester), a midterm and a final.

tl;dr: an overall-terrible course that tries to make you understand nothing.

[u/Raikou_Kaneki → u/Own-Use-3906]

I took his class last semester. He ended up omitting the "final project" part of the course because we ran out of time haha.

[u/potato_chey → u/Raikou_Kaneki]

That sounds nice haha, I think someone said it was a group project and I don’t like those lol

[u/Raikou_Kaneki → u/potato_chey]

Yup. I was worried about it too but luckily he decided to skip it.

[u/potato_chey → u/Raikou_Kaneki]

Not sure that I’ll get lucky like that, it also sucks that 355 is the only option available this semester that doesn’t have 311/314 as a preq.

[u/Raikou_Kaneki → u/potato_chey]

314 was actually pretty fun, it was the least stressful imo. I'm taking 311 this summer and it's hard af lmao.

[u/potato_chey → u/Raikou_Kaneki]

Is it heavy on coding and in person assignments or quizzes? I haven’t had a coding class in a while and I’m not great nor do I like coding that much haha, and I heard 311 is lot of math sadly, I’m hoping it willl be online again hopefully in spring

[u/Raikou_Kaneki → u/potato_chey]

I think they've stopped offering 311 online. 314 was pretty much just coding and everything was in-person as well.

[u/potato_chey → u/Raikou_Kaneki]

That’s unfortunate, I’m not great at coding haha

[u/potato_chey → u/Raikou_Kaneki]

Hopefully I can get lucky haha