Biggest waste of my time this past quarter. The class format is one guest speaker each week that talks about their specific subfield of computer science and on the day of discussion you are given a five question quiz on the speaker of the prior week.

Most of the speakers give very boring and confusing presentations. On two occasions we had our speakers forget to come. Four weeks in I stopped going to the speaker presentations and only went to the mandatory discussion to take the quiz. The quizzes are usually pretty easy, but sometimes they were more difficult. I found that the more difficult quizzes were just asking very specific memory questions from the presentations that were typically over 50 slides long. Most TAs will review the presentation during discussion before you take the quiz, but my TA was impossible to actually understand so that didn't help much.

Honestly, you don't really have much of a choice in taking this class as it is a requirement for any computer science student. Just know that you won't be missing much if you skip out on the presentations.

In my opinion, this class is completely worthless and a waste of time. It is a seminar where a different professor from the computer science department comes in every week to talk about a particular subject field/research interest. The lectures are pretty interesting usually, but the weekly quizzing and essay writing at the end of the quarter just make you hate the class. My essay was also given a 100 within a day after the essays were due, which makes me think that it was never even actually read. This really shouldn't be a required class and should just be advertised as a weekly seminar that you can attend if you want to hear about what professors in the department are researching.