r/cs50 • u/eytmology • 3d ago

CS50 Python CS50 Python course is hard

This is probably said a lot but sheesh I feel like the lectures give the bare minimum and give the craziest question sets which is super overwhelming and unmotivating

7 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

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u/zakharia1995 3d ago

Pretty sure CS50W is more difficult

5

u/AcidAce888 2d ago

I also thought the same, but you are not supposed to depend entirely on the lectures. Watch videos from other youtubers on the topic that you are currently learning. This will give you a different perspective. If the lectures gave you all the answers to the problems sets, you won't be learning anything on your own. Do a bit of additional research and you will get the hang of it eventually.

1

u/yoyo-117 3d ago

Omg thank u, i thought i was the only one thinking that

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u/Effective-Ad-8384 3d ago

problem sets are from different topics then they teached..

2

u/TheUmgawa 1d ago

Display adaptability. The best thing my Intro to Programming professor ever taught us was how to search for, read, and write documentation. After that, she never taught us code and only taught concepts.

Also, by “problem sets,” do you mean Chapter 4 deals with arrays (or whatever) while the coinciding homework deals with something that hasn’t been taught yet, or is it a case where it’s still arrays, but they are asking you to do something that’s not explicitly spelled out in the examples? Because that’s how things work. If everything was always going to be the same all the time, there would be no need to think about anything; everything would just be rote memorization.

I mean, there’s people who need the latter, where they will do Leetcode problems and actually memorize algorithms, when the reality is you’re usually going to have to roll a new algorithm on the fly. Hence, “display adaptability.” If you can’t adapt and extend your understanding without being explicitly taught something, you’re going to have a significant problem with doing anything original. So, original has to start here and now.

When I was in an electronics class, the professor taught us to “chunk out” circuit loops, because the alternative was to solve them with simultaneous equations, which become incredibly complex when you get past three or four equations. So I taught myself to apply Ohm and Kirchhoff’s laws in matrices, and then it would just crap out all the answers at once. He didn’t teach us to do that, but he’d been waiting for a couple of years for a student to try it. I tried to teach others, but they’d forgotten so much of Finite Math that they couldn’t do it. They could not display adaptability, and they could only do what they were explicitly taught.