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Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.
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Get ready to spend countless hours a week on these insane projects, especially the first two. Eggerts lectures are very interesting but often are not remotely useful to the homework until AFTER the assignments are due. Midterm and final are a guessing game of what might be on them, pray that you are able to take this class with Millstein instead.
This was my second class with Prof. Eggert. I took 111 with him and had a similar experience. Prof. Eggert is a world class lecturer. The difficulty of the class comes from the coding assignments and the exams. The medians for the midterm was around 60% and the final was around 50%. This is higher than the usual medians. The issue most students have with the class is that the homeworks, as difficult as they are, do not prepare students for the exams. I think this is correct. Doing well on the homeworks does not imply good performance on the exams. This makes the approach to doing well on Eggert's classes less formulaic. To do well you have to understand the material in lectures and the textbook really well. Take detailed notes on lectures and read the textbook. The text book for this class is wordy and not as good as the 111 textbook, but it is still a good reference. The lectures go into greater depth than the textbook and are more important. Go to office hours of the professor to get help on concepts. Go to TA office hours to get help on assignments. I did not go to discussions because the TAs just spoon feed the homework code. A class this challenging is essential to a rigorous computer science education and for developing your intuitive ability. Eggert's goal, in his words, is to "test your intution". Therefore he makes his exams open ended (not really) and really pushes you to reason based on the information you learnt in class and from readings. Regurgitation of notes/readings will not help. All the people who complain aren't interested in maximizing their learning but are more focused on getting good grades. Eggert is incredibly knowledgeable and a treasure of the CS department. I wish we had more classes like this and less classes like that of Prof. Reinman's.
The few criticisms I have are that I thought that the typed reports (homeworks 3 and 6) were not necessary. I didn't learn that much from writing a 5 pg. reports. The TAs also don't provide detailed feedback on them.
The students who usually like Eggert are students who code a lot outside class and like coding.
Be prepared for one of the hardest courses you will ever take (but you know that already -- it's a pretty standard Eggert class). The workload is very rough, where homeworks will take you on average 12 hours/week to complete (according to Eggert himself).
That all being said, this was one of the most interesting CS courses I've taken. You truly do get exposed to the entire field of programming languages and will definitely learn not only languages, but ways to think about code and programming. The assignments, while rough, provide great introductions to all programming styles and languages. Eggert's lectures are also (usually, sometimes not) pretty insightful. Take this course if you want a thorough exposure and experience with programming languages.
Completely agree with the previous reviews. The difficulty and workload of this course is beyond ridiculous. Be prepared for a rough quarter if you do decide to take cs 131 with the project lead of the tz database.
Homeworks were so long and hard that it was even funny. HW 2 and 5 were the challenging ones, but IMO the hardest was HW 3 (Java), the one about multithreaded gzip compression. We had less than a week to do that one, which was not nearly enough time. The only upside about this quarter's HW was that we had an autograder to test our submissions.
As usual with Eggert's exams, they have medians of ~ 50 percent and it is very hard to study for them. While many of the written conceptual questions are quite fair given what was covered in lecture, others were not. Many questions had very little to do with the lectures and seemed so random that you could only make an educated guess and move on.
On the bright side, I'm impressed by the TAs for this iteration of cs 131 (s/o to Matthew Wang and Ashwin Ranade). They were very helpful in explaining key programming languages concepts and clarifying assignment specs on Campuswire. TA Matthew even organized a review session the week before the final to go over the most important concepts in this course and answer any questions students had. And many of the key ideas Matthew emphasized in the review session did end up making its way onto the final!
Looking back, I'm grateful that I learned a lot about PLs and more importantly, how to think critically (mostly from the TAs, less so from Eggert). But given the choice, would I choose to take cs 131 with Eggert? Hell no!
Everything you've heard about this class is true. The homeworks are awful and nearly impossible to do. The exams are the hardest things you've seen in your life and even Eggert talks about how this class has way more work than you should expect.
Now, even after saying all of this, I have learned so much from this one class and I think I would still take this again especially since it felt so rewarding after I was done.
Now, here is my unsolicited advice on how you can do well in this class. The breakdown was: 24% Homeworks (each 4%), 8% Project, 24% Midterm, 44% Final
The very first thing I recommend doing is starting the homeworks early. Literally the day or the day after they get out. If you're able to stay on top of them and finish them a few days before they're due, then you'll do great in this class. Don't be afraid to ask the TA's for help and make sure you understand the rationale and reasoning on why things are the way they are.
When you eventually fall behind, don't be afraid to just turn in an unfinished homework. It's honestly worse to take the late days because the work just starts pilling up so quickly and coding with deadlines is never a good idea. Given that, it is super important that you get the basic idea of what you would have needed to do (and why you need to do it like that) even if you don't get it working.
For the Project, spend as much time as you can on this. Test your code and make sure that your report is really good. There are a lot of edge cases that are not explained. Check Piazza, so you can keep up to date with the various edge cases people think of because you won't get all of them.
Now, for the Midterm/Final, to add on to what everyone else says, I would also recommend studying by trying to connect the various topics he talks about. For example, think about Garbage Collection methods and the issues that could arise if Java used Python's Garbage Collection. Overall, I studied by trying to connect the topics when I was writing my study guide(had to make 2) and then looking at a few practice exams to see if I knew how to approach it. I was able to do really well on the final and average on the midterm
Good luck to whoever read all of this, you're going to need it
Get ready to spend countless hours a week on these insane projects, especially the first two. Eggerts lectures are very interesting but often are not remotely useful to the homework until AFTER the assignments are due. Midterm and final are a guessing game of what might be on them, pray that you are able to take this class with Millstein instead.
This was my second class with Prof. Eggert. I took 111 with him and had a similar experience. Prof. Eggert is a world class lecturer. The difficulty of the class comes from the coding assignments and the exams. The medians for the midterm was around 60% and the final was around 50%. This is higher than the usual medians. The issue most students have with the class is that the homeworks, as difficult as they are, do not prepare students for the exams. I think this is correct. Doing well on the homeworks does not imply good performance on the exams. This makes the approach to doing well on Eggert's classes less formulaic. To do well you have to understand the material in lectures and the textbook really well. Take detailed notes on lectures and read the textbook. The text book for this class is wordy and not as good as the 111 textbook, but it is still a good reference. The lectures go into greater depth than the textbook and are more important. Go to office hours of the professor to get help on concepts. Go to TA office hours to get help on assignments. I did not go to discussions because the TAs just spoon feed the homework code. A class this challenging is essential to a rigorous computer science education and for developing your intuitive ability. Eggert's goal, in his words, is to "test your intution". Therefore he makes his exams open ended (not really) and really pushes you to reason based on the information you learnt in class and from readings. Regurgitation of notes/readings will not help. All the people who complain aren't interested in maximizing their learning but are more focused on getting good grades. Eggert is incredibly knowledgeable and a treasure of the CS department. I wish we had more classes like this and less classes like that of Prof. Reinman's.
The few criticisms I have are that I thought that the typed reports (homeworks 3 and 6) were not necessary. I didn't learn that much from writing a 5 pg. reports. The TAs also don't provide detailed feedback on them.
The students who usually like Eggert are students who code a lot outside class and like coding.
Be prepared for one of the hardest courses you will ever take (but you know that already -- it's a pretty standard Eggert class). The workload is very rough, where homeworks will take you on average 12 hours/week to complete (according to Eggert himself).
That all being said, this was one of the most interesting CS courses I've taken. You truly do get exposed to the entire field of programming languages and will definitely learn not only languages, but ways to think about code and programming. The assignments, while rough, provide great introductions to all programming styles and languages. Eggert's lectures are also (usually, sometimes not) pretty insightful. Take this course if you want a thorough exposure and experience with programming languages.
Completely agree with the previous reviews. The difficulty and workload of this course is beyond ridiculous. Be prepared for a rough quarter if you do decide to take cs 131 with the project lead of the tz database.
Homeworks were so long and hard that it was even funny. HW 2 and 5 were the challenging ones, but IMO the hardest was HW 3 (Java), the one about multithreaded gzip compression. We had less than a week to do that one, which was not nearly enough time. The only upside about this quarter's HW was that we had an autograder to test our submissions.
As usual with Eggert's exams, they have medians of ~ 50 percent and it is very hard to study for them. While many of the written conceptual questions are quite fair given what was covered in lecture, others were not. Many questions had very little to do with the lectures and seemed so random that you could only make an educated guess and move on.
On the bright side, I'm impressed by the TAs for this iteration of cs 131 (s/o to Matthew Wang and Ashwin Ranade). They were very helpful in explaining key programming languages concepts and clarifying assignment specs on Campuswire. TA Matthew even organized a review session the week before the final to go over the most important concepts in this course and answer any questions students had. And many of the key ideas Matthew emphasized in the review session did end up making its way onto the final!
Looking back, I'm grateful that I learned a lot about PLs and more importantly, how to think critically (mostly from the TAs, less so from Eggert). But given the choice, would I choose to take cs 131 with Eggert? Hell no!
Everything you've heard about this class is true. The homeworks are awful and nearly impossible to do. The exams are the hardest things you've seen in your life and even Eggert talks about how this class has way more work than you should expect.
Now, even after saying all of this, I have learned so much from this one class and I think I would still take this again especially since it felt so rewarding after I was done.
Now, here is my unsolicited advice on how you can do well in this class. The breakdown was: 24% Homeworks (each 4%), 8% Project, 24% Midterm, 44% Final
The very first thing I recommend doing is starting the homeworks early. Literally the day or the day after they get out. If you're able to stay on top of them and finish them a few days before they're due, then you'll do great in this class. Don't be afraid to ask the TA's for help and make sure you understand the rationale and reasoning on why things are the way they are.
When you eventually fall behind, don't be afraid to just turn in an unfinished homework. It's honestly worse to take the late days because the work just starts pilling up so quickly and coding with deadlines is never a good idea. Given that, it is super important that you get the basic idea of what you would have needed to do (and why you need to do it like that) even if you don't get it working.
For the Project, spend as much time as you can on this. Test your code and make sure that your report is really good. There are a lot of edge cases that are not explained. Check Piazza, so you can keep up to date with the various edge cases people think of because you won't get all of them.
Now, for the Midterm/Final, to add on to what everyone else says, I would also recommend studying by trying to connect the various topics he talks about. For example, think about Garbage Collection methods and the issues that could arise if Java used Python's Garbage Collection. Overall, I studied by trying to connect the topics when I was writing my study guide(had to make 2) and then looking at a few practice exams to see if I knew how to approach it. I was able to do really well on the final and average on the midterm
Good luck to whoever read all of this, you're going to need it
Based on 84 Users
TOP TAGS
- Tough Tests (30)
- Engaging Lectures (24)