Professor
Eleazar Eskin
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Winter 2026 - I haven't even finished this class yet, but I feel the need to write a scathing review so that all possible future students know, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS IF YOU DO NOT HAVE TO. Every week is assignment after meaningless assignment. We had homework, a project, and a mandatory guest speaker lecture + discussion assignment THE SAME WEEK as our midterm. The homework assignment was so poorly designed that only 3 people were able to solve the last coding problem due to a memory limit issue, so all of us apparently just wasted our time on an unsolvable problem right before the midterm. Mind you, there are project deadlines every single Friday (at noon for some reason), so all of this came after a horrendously long project designed to have at minimum a 30 min-1 hour runtime. How can we reasonably iterate on a project if it takes the whole day just to test it a few times? I think the entire class had to use AI on it, and the average was still a 60% because of how impossible it was. I had to run it overnight and force my computer not to sleep. The midterm also was 20 pages long and significantly harder than the practice midterm, which was only about 4 pages long. Many concepts were not mentioned a single time in class, only in discussion. The professors were also whispering to each other the entire time and kept picking up phone calls, which many of us found to be disruptive and disrespectful to the students. They also enforce mandatory participation at least once with both professors, so everyone participated once and never showed up to lecture again because we don't learn anything efficiently. Eskin is not able to get through a single sentence without stuttering and ending it incompletely. Another sign that the professors don't actually care about the student experience is how disorganized the assignments are. Not a single deadline is posted except for deep into the Lecture 1 slides, so every time I need to check when something is due, I have to scroll about 50 slides in. Additionally, NOTHING is explained by the project instructions. It was extremely hard to get started on Project 1 because the instructions did not even specify that it was a coding project, let alone where to find the files that we needed to work with. I had to deduce that I was supposed to go to the files tab and download the project zip, then write a python script to produce the answer file. Finding out what the project was took longer than actually doing it. They also do not mention at all where to submit projects in the specifications. I have to scroll through all of the BruinLearn announcements to find the submission link every week. Is it that hard to include basic instructions, the deadline, and submission link in the project instructions? Any of us could organize this class better. This class is hard to be hard. They want us to feel like it's a challenge, but they do it by assigning a load of assignments and enforcing arbitrary requirements rather than making it a challenging intellectual experience. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS.
Winter 2026 - I haven't even finished this class yet, but I feel the need to write a scathing review so that all possible future students know, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS IF YOU DO NOT HAVE TO. Every week is assignment after meaningless assignment. We had homework, a project, and a mandatory guest speaker lecture + discussion assignment THE SAME WEEK as our midterm. The homework assignment was so poorly designed that only 3 people were able to solve the last coding problem due to a memory limit issue, so all of us apparently just wasted our time on an unsolvable problem right before the midterm. Mind you, there are project deadlines every single Friday (at noon for some reason), so all of this came after a horrendously long project designed to have at minimum a 30 min-1 hour runtime. How can we reasonably iterate on a project if it takes the whole day just to test it a few times? I think the entire class had to use AI on it, and the average was still a 60% because of how impossible it was. I had to run it overnight and force my computer not to sleep. The midterm also was 20 pages long and significantly harder than the practice midterm, which was only about 4 pages long. Many concepts were not mentioned a single time in class, only in discussion. The professors were also whispering to each other the entire time and kept picking up phone calls, which many of us found to be disruptive and disrespectful to the students. They also enforce mandatory participation at least once with both professors, so everyone participated once and never showed up to lecture again because we don't learn anything efficiently. Eskin is not able to get through a single sentence without stuttering and ending it incompletely. Another sign that the professors don't actually care about the student experience is how disorganized the assignments are. Not a single deadline is posted except for deep into the Lecture 1 slides, so every time I need to check when something is due, I have to scroll about 50 slides in. Additionally, NOTHING is explained by the project instructions. It was extremely hard to get started on Project 1 because the instructions did not even specify that it was a coding project, let alone where to find the files that we needed to work with. I had to deduce that I was supposed to go to the files tab and download the project zip, then write a python script to produce the answer file. Finding out what the project was took longer than actually doing it. They also do not mention at all where to submit projects in the specifications. I have to scroll through all of the BruinLearn announcements to find the submission link every week. Is it that hard to include basic instructions, the deadline, and submission link in the project instructions? Any of us could organize this class better. This class is hard to be hard. They want us to feel like it's a challenge, but they do it by assigning a load of assignments and enforcing arbitrary requirements rather than making it a challenging intellectual experience. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS.
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Spring 2023 - *grabs you personally by the throat* SAVE YOUR SOUL. DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE. Unless you want to do 4 projects that have very little guidance in the specs, each split into 2 parts that require different types of outputs, on top of doing 7 homeworks, each with 4-10 Leetcode-like coding problems evaluated on a shitty $80 online textbook website (Stepik) where you have to download the input to your computer, run the code, and upload the outputs and pray that you matched the formatting exactly, otherwise repeat the process. (Also, I get Stepik advertising emails in Russian, which 1) I did not sign up for 2) I don't know Russian.) And about those projects, they decided to try something new this quarter: making us upload our results to a bioinformatics leaderboard website. The fun thing is that 1) They don't post the leaderboard until 2-3 days before the project is due. 2) Someone has to manually approve that you can join the leaderboard. Which means you wait for some poor TA to handle your request. 3) They don't post the grading thresholds WITH the project spec or even when they post the leaderboards sometimes, so if you finish your code early, you have to wait for the announcement of the threshold. If you don't pass it? Guess you're working on the project again! I have never taken a class with this many Canvas announcements about project extensions and grading thresholds and about homework problems becoming Extra Credit because very few people are successfully solving it. And have I mentioned that they also made us read 4 papers and ask and answer other students' questions about it? To me, it felt like the blind leading the blind. The only saving grace of this course is that the midterm was reasonable. If you read and understand the textbook and the slides (which is what I did because their lecturing is Pretty Bad, especially Ernst's), you can do the problems. They just make you apply the techniques to the given data. They also gave a set of practice problems that matched pretty closely. I'm writing this review before the final though, so maybe they decide to completely switch it up on us. (But, I'm skimming the final practice problems, it seems like it's the same problem format.) Who knows. Maybe you'll enjoy the torture more than I did. Maybe you're that kid who was already working on a bioinformatics library for their research and used it for Project 1, landing you a score in the top 3, at which point you're obligated to do a presentation of your solution to the class. The class is mostly empty, by the way. Just like how this class made me feel. Grade breakdown for Spring 2023: Projects 25%. Homeworks 20%. Midterm Exam 25%. Final Exam 25%. Paper/Guest Speaker Question and Responses 5%.
Spring 2023 - *grabs you personally by the throat* SAVE YOUR SOUL. DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE. Unless you want to do 4 projects that have very little guidance in the specs, each split into 2 parts that require different types of outputs, on top of doing 7 homeworks, each with 4-10 Leetcode-like coding problems evaluated on a shitty $80 online textbook website (Stepik) where you have to download the input to your computer, run the code, and upload the outputs and pray that you matched the formatting exactly, otherwise repeat the process. (Also, I get Stepik advertising emails in Russian, which 1) I did not sign up for 2) I don't know Russian.) And about those projects, they decided to try something new this quarter: making us upload our results to a bioinformatics leaderboard website. The fun thing is that 1) They don't post the leaderboard until 2-3 days before the project is due. 2) Someone has to manually approve that you can join the leaderboard. Which means you wait for some poor TA to handle your request. 3) They don't post the grading thresholds WITH the project spec or even when they post the leaderboards sometimes, so if you finish your code early, you have to wait for the announcement of the threshold. If you don't pass it? Guess you're working on the project again! I have never taken a class with this many Canvas announcements about project extensions and grading thresholds and about homework problems becoming Extra Credit because very few people are successfully solving it. And have I mentioned that they also made us read 4 papers and ask and answer other students' questions about it? To me, it felt like the blind leading the blind. The only saving grace of this course is that the midterm was reasonable. If you read and understand the textbook and the slides (which is what I did because their lecturing is Pretty Bad, especially Ernst's), you can do the problems. They just make you apply the techniques to the given data. They also gave a set of practice problems that matched pretty closely. I'm writing this review before the final though, so maybe they decide to completely switch it up on us. (But, I'm skimming the final practice problems, it seems like it's the same problem format.) Who knows. Maybe you'll enjoy the torture more than I did. Maybe you're that kid who was already working on a bioinformatics library for their research and used it for Project 1, landing you a score in the top 3, at which point you're obligated to do a presentation of your solution to the class. The class is mostly empty, by the way. Just like how this class made me feel. Grade breakdown for Spring 2023: Projects 25%. Homeworks 20%. Midterm Exam 25%. Final Exam 25%. Paper/Guest Speaker Question and Responses 5%.
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2020 - This class is as easy or difficult as you would like it to be. Although most people who took CS32 and did reasonably OK would get a good grade in this class, I would suggest taking it only if you are interested in exploring bioinformatics and not just for a good grade.
Spring 2020 - This class is as easy or difficult as you would like it to be. Although most people who took CS32 and did reasonably OK would get a good grade in this class, I would suggest taking it only if you are interested in exploring bioinformatics and not just for a good grade.
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CS CM124 Winter 2013 Prof is a nice guy... really relaxed and if you need help just go to him or the TA. The class isn't too demanding, but if you want to work more on the final project you can always make it more challenging for yourself. HW/MT/Final are just there to show you kinda whats going on.. the TA helps you through all of them during discussions. And by helps you through them i mean walks you through the problems, and solutions. Lectures/Discussions are all filmed and posted, which is nice. Final Project: For this quarter, he gave us a list of projects to pick from, and corresponding difficulty levels. If you dont have much time or dont really feel like you know whats going on, just pick an easy one... and if you get the hang of it you can add more to the project to challenge yourself. The project is the majority of the grade, i believe. For future classes he said he might mix it up, but probably similar stuff (pick your own language to code in, etc). There is a presentation for the project at the end of the quarter. 10 min of explain what you did. Not coding details.. just the big picture and your results like accuracy and run time. Kinda strange.. but you vote on your classmates via text. Not sure if this actually affects the grade, but you get participation for doing it. Interesting peak into a different side of CS.. i'd recommend the class. Not hard, good prof, not too stressful... and you learn along the way.
CS CM124 Winter 2013 Prof is a nice guy... really relaxed and if you need help just go to him or the TA. The class isn't too demanding, but if you want to work more on the final project you can always make it more challenging for yourself. HW/MT/Final are just there to show you kinda whats going on.. the TA helps you through all of them during discussions. And by helps you through them i mean walks you through the problems, and solutions. Lectures/Discussions are all filmed and posted, which is nice. Final Project: For this quarter, he gave us a list of projects to pick from, and corresponding difficulty levels. If you dont have much time or dont really feel like you know whats going on, just pick an easy one... and if you get the hang of it you can add more to the project to challenge yourself. The project is the majority of the grade, i believe. For future classes he said he might mix it up, but probably similar stuff (pick your own language to code in, etc). There is a presentation for the project at the end of the quarter. 10 min of explain what you did. Not coding details.. just the big picture and your results like accuracy and run time. Kinda strange.. but you vote on your classmates via text. Not sure if this actually affects the grade, but you get participation for doing it. Interesting peak into a different side of CS.. i'd recommend the class. Not hard, good prof, not too stressful... and you learn along the way.
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Fall 2023 - Standard seminar class that's required for any CASB major/minor. Show up, take some brief notes, and write a review for each talk. The review is just a summary of the talk, the most recent developments, what you didn't understand, and feedback. Some of the talks were actually really cool and prompted several students to join the researchers' labs (my favorites were Neuroimaging Informatics, AI in Medicine, and Genetic & Phenotypic Psychiatry), but expect them to change year by year. If you're already in a lab and like the research you're doing, it's pretty boring, but there's practically no workload - if you sit at the back of the lecture hall, you will see a bunch of people doing homework, solving the NYT crossword, playing snake, or chatting while taking notes lol The slightly annoying part was trying to summarize a boring talk that didn't make any sense, since some researchers assume that undergrads have a working knowledge of a bunch of statistics and ML stuff from the stats 100 or 101 series. But, even if you have a big-picture understanding and can at least name the methods they used without explaining then you're fine. Also I kinda hate genetics and like 70% of them were about it so that was also pretty annoying.
Fall 2023 - Standard seminar class that's required for any CASB major/minor. Show up, take some brief notes, and write a review for each talk. The review is just a summary of the talk, the most recent developments, what you didn't understand, and feedback. Some of the talks were actually really cool and prompted several students to join the researchers' labs (my favorites were Neuroimaging Informatics, AI in Medicine, and Genetic & Phenotypic Psychiatry), but expect them to change year by year. If you're already in a lab and like the research you're doing, it's pretty boring, but there's practically no workload - if you sit at the back of the lecture hall, you will see a bunch of people doing homework, solving the NYT crossword, playing snake, or chatting while taking notes lol The slightly annoying part was trying to summarize a boring talk that didn't make any sense, since some researchers assume that undergrads have a working knowledge of a bunch of statistics and ML stuff from the stats 100 or 101 series. But, even if you have a big-picture understanding and can at least name the methods they used without explaining then you're fine. Also I kinda hate genetics and like 70% of them were about it so that was also pretty annoying.
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