CS373 Fall 2020: Final Entry Anshuman Kumar

Overall, I wasn’t particularly satisfied with this course. As before, Professor Downing is a knowledgeable lecturer, and he attacks topics in a way that makes sure that his students understand every part of it. While I personally didn’t mind his “cold calling” strategy of creating student interaction with the class, opinions may vary depending on your personal comfort with speaking up in class.

However, my main issue with this class stems from the extreme disconnect between the class topics and the actual projects. While the first project was in Python, and connected with the topics being covered in class at the time, the rest were not.

IDB is a 4 phase team project that was assigned for the remainder of the semester, and was so unrelated to the Python being taught at the time that it left people reeling. Members of my team who didn’t have any previous experience with things such as React, SQL servers, AWS hosting, etc, were completely blindsided by the topic. The workload was intense for those who did know topics, with a lot of time spent both helping team members as well as trying to explain your own work to everyone else. Personally, I tried to help teach frontend (React, JS, etc.) to my team but was left overwhelmed between that and writing good code. The overall quality suffered.

The exams were not done extremely well, but it was better than it could have been. Although the actual content of the questions wasn’t too hard, the questions were extremely confusing. For example, in exam 2, Professor Downing clarified a misunderstanding in the writing of the question 30 minutes into the first part of the exam. The overall implementation of the two part exam was an improvement over when I took Object Oriented Programming with him last year, however. There’s was more time allocated towards the individual section, and problems were less reliant on simply typing code as fast as possible without any typos whatsoever.