CS371G Summer 2021 — Final Entry

How well do you think the course conveyed those takeaways?

This course better conveyed the more technical takeaways through the examples and concepts shown in the lectures. Many of the other takeaways that were listed were already in my standards when it comes to coding. However, the ones I did actually learn more about were very understandable upon taking the course. For example, the takeaways of designing around iterators were very intuitive. When it comes to writing code, an algorithm should cast a wider net around what it can handle, but on the other hand a container should provide the most amount of utility to that algorithm.

Were there any other particular takeaways for you?

Though this takeaway was drilled into my mind by other courses, it has remained in my mind more through this course with that takeaway being that students should use all the tools in their possession. One key tool to getting help for this course was Piazza, and I see that people need to use it more. Piazza can answer more than one person’s question all at once. When it comes to coding, look through the makefile and maybe even edit it! Running a bunch of commands in the terminal can be annoyingly repetitive, so having a command that runs a bunch of commands is helpful.

How did you feel about cold calling?

Cold calling made keeping up with the class much more important and overall benefited understanding what was happening in class. When there is a threat of being called to answer questions about what just happened or what happened in a previous lecture, the student can feel afraid that their image that they may try to keep up is threatened, but Professor Downing is fairly respectful when talking with students. If a student does not have a clue about what is going on, Professor Downing will explain what the answer is and more.

How did you feel about grading?

The grading system that was put into place for this course was very simple and interesting in comparison to the other courses I have taken. Where some people may not enjoy that missing enough of a particular piece of the course causes their entire grade to drop by a letter, I find that this exact same component of the grading system ensures that students are constantly involved in the class. When it comes to deciding whether a class was effective, I find that engagement is a large portion in making that decision, and the grading of this class when combined with the cold calling the professor does makes the class very engaging. I like this grading system.

How did you feel about office hours?

I felt like office hours were more approachable due to the cold calling and exercises occurring in class. Since students were already being directly talked to in class, asking the professor or TA for help was much easier to do, and the professor even incentivized it with a one time reward. This class has shown me that I should probably attend more office hours.

How did you feel about support from Amogh?

Amogh was very helpful in giving pointers to helping reach the goals that the code is attempting to achieve. He was very helpful especially in the Integer project, where my partner and I were lost on how to do the Karatsuba algorithm, and he pointed out what to do and showed resources that we had access to that we did not know we had.

What required tool did you not know and now find very useful?

I had no knowledge of the gcov tool, and with this course, I now see how useful it really is. One thing that I think is very important about testing code is ensuring that a piece of code handles all corner cases. If a piece of code is written and the programmer believes that they have handled all corner cases, then gcov acts very helpfully by showing that test cases would work with all of the code. In addition, gcov can expose code that may not be used that is not already detected by compilation.

Give me your suggestions for improving the course.

The only suggestion I have is better time management with the lecture. There were many times where the class was supposed to do an exercise, but the time was all used up before we could start the exercise. This clashes with the thoroughness of answering students’ questions, so this suggestion is very light.