Posts Tagged ‘CS 240’

Two down, three to go…

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Well, it looks like the graph I made last Wednesday has been pretty accurate so far. I’m not sure if that’s something I should be happy about though. :P

First off was CS 245. Yeah… I’m not going to lie: the final for this course was made of pure suck. It might not have been so bad given a very strong grasp of the concepts, but that wasn’t going to happen. I’ve already mentioned how woefully inadequate the given resources were; throughout the term I was drawing knowledge from various sites, textbooks and similar course offerings at other universities (go Wikipedia!). Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mind having to do extra studying. But when I learn more on my own time than in class (say approximately 75%), why am I paying for tuition? Meh.

Despite my rant, I still did relatively well throughout the rest of the course so I should pass comfortably. *Knocks on wood.* The main thing I’m worried about is how adversely it will affect my performance in the future (for example, when I take databases next term). It hasn’t been too bad thus far, but eh…

CS 240 is on the other extreme. Typically people don’t complain when a course is too easy, but I think there’s a limit. Throughout the term, the class has been relatively quiet and disengaged (in contrast with CS 246 where questions were being thrown around left, right and center). I’ve even heard some comments along the lines of whether this course actually prepares us for CS 341. Guess we’ll know soon enough. :P

I just wrote CS 240′s final a few hours ago and I’d say it was a pretty fair exam. Approximately half the questions were derived from assignments (so they were kind of trivial in nature as long as a few key facts were memorized), but the other half actually required quite a bit of thought (for example, adapting generic algorithms to solve a given problem). Surprisingly there weren’t any short-answer questions, despite the fact that we covered complexity classes and such.

I kind of wish we were given more time though; I didn’t actually get to finish despite rushing through quite a bit of it. Time has been my adversary on pretty much every exam I’ve taken; very rarely do I get the chance to do things like proofreading and whatnot. I don’t like that – time limits test dexterity, not knowledge. My brain just isn’t wired for short, intense sessions. :P

Actually, I can go one step further: I have a bone to pick with the notion of writing exams as a whole. I’ll rant about it in another post though, since I would have to delve into different learning styles and whatnot (plus I’ve deviated enough already)…

Anyway, CS 246 is up next! It should be “fun”. :P

In other news, Facebook changed some privacy features (and in the process ignited a lot of controversy), RockYou gets hacked (exposing some 32 million accounts with passwords stored in plain-text – I didn’t think any company could be so incredibly stupid in 2009) and Google implements personalized search (thus changing SEO completely). Oh, and it started snowing here with temperatures dipping below 0 degrees celsius. Yay. (In contrast, central Alberta dipped below -45 degrees last Sunday. :P )

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It’s Exam Time!

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

Wow, last week was just crazy. I didn’t think it was physically possible to complete 5 assignments in a week. :P

First off was CS 240. It was basically an assignment on string manipulation via. the Boyer-Moore and Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithms. Then we had to manually construct a Huffman tree to determine an encoding sequence for compressing text. Pretty simple stuff, I guess.

Next up was STAT 231. This was basically on model checking, p-value computation (hypothesis checking) and finding prediction intervals. Again, relatively straightforward considering most of the stuff could literally be copied and adapted from the notes… I think I feel a little more confident about statistics now. :P

The two assignments for CS 245 were insane though. I literally spent two days reading through various logic textbooks and notes just trying to understand the material. It actually doesn’t seem that hard, but you wouldn’t think that from attending our lectures. I’ll repeat my quip earlier on Twitter – “University: the place where people make simple things needlessly complicated”. I think I’ll be using that quote for some time to come. :P The good thing, however, is that I think I have a working grasp of what’s going on; that last tutorial definitely helped a lot (the tutor definitely knows how to communicate concepts at a level most people can grasp). I do have one question though. Why were there two assignments due on a single day? It should have been combined into one (this would save about 100 pages worth of cover pages)…

Finally, I had a massive assignment due for CS 246. It was a two-person programming project modelling a soda concession service (with vending machines, students, soda creation plants and more). I have to say, it was actually a lot of fun writing code for this project; I think this was the first thing involving software engineering concepts that I’ve done in university. Perhaps I’d be singing a different tune if I wasn’t interested in or haven’t done any massive projects previously though. In terms of size, this assignment can’t compare to my content management system and I think that prior experience definitely helped a lot. :P (Alternatively, it might be because I got to express my evil side writing code that overcharges people and steals their WatCards/money. :P )

So now that those assignments are done and over with, I have to start studying for exams. Ugh. CS 240 seems pretty straightforward, but I keep wondering whether we’re going to be thrown a curveball on the final (the stuff we’ve done so far seems far too trivial for a second year course). STAT 231 and CS 245 are likely going to be my hardest subjects (with CS 245 coming up this Thursday…). CS 246 will probably be moderately hard, but at least I know what I’m doing in that course. Then there’s PSYCH 101 which I enjoyed but could barely put time into since I was trying not to fail my other courses. :P

Ah well, we’ll see how it goes. ;)

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The dangers of procrastination…

Saturday, November 7th, 2009

On November 1st, many Canadians turned back their clock and enjoyed an extra hour of sleep. Alas, I wasn’t part of that group. ;)

Last week was largely dominated by CS 240 (Data Structures and Data Management). Assignment #5 was due on Tuesday and the midterm was scheduled two days after. They were worth 12% and 15% of the final grade respectively (yeah, a midterm worth only 3% more than an assignment :P ). For me, at least, those were the only immediate tasks at hand. Easy, right?

Not so, apparently. The assignment, which was about implementing a B-tree structure, took nearly 30 hours. It definitely didn’t help that I had little experience with Java and completely underestimated the length (my estimate was <10 hours using C++). Anyway, there goes my weekend. :P I did end up finishing though, albeit with some minor bugs; the program length measured up at over 700 lines (with comments and braces) and the documentation at another 250.

Now, what’s really interesting was the number of people who asked for an extension on the assignment. Fine, there’s nothing wrong with that – indeed, I’m sure most professors wouldn’t mind accommodating their students (given a valid excuse ;) ). However, what really happened was that people essentially pressured the instructor into extending the deadline. It even went as far as implied insults directed towards the course staff (criticizing their lack of foresight in putting a major assignment right before the midterm).

If you ask me, most (if not all) of those arguments in favour of an extension were just BS. There was at least two weeks of notice given in advance (not including the clear weighting on the syllabus). Indeed, both the instructor and the tutor clearly said to start on the assignment early. There was really no real excuse why a mass extension was needed – those arguments were literally a façade to cover up people’s inability to manage time. Now, I’m sure there are those with legitimate reasons (perhaps coming down with the H1N1 flu), but those seem few and far between looking at the posts on the newsgroup.

Anyway, it turns out the extension (’till Friday) was reluctantly granted with a 30% penalty. I think those who needed it should be thankful the course instructor is so lenient; he was well within his rights to refuse (and he did, until an hour before the deadline). The tutor should be given some credit for dealing with this issue too; by trying to accommodate the class (asking the prof. for an extension in lieu of the students), she was essentially adding to her own workload. I later found out that approximately half the class didn’t submit on time; now that’s some statistic right there.

This is coming from someone who literally gets through university procrastinating (I have a pretty good reason for it, but that’s another topic). As I implied earlier, I pretty much rushed through the assignment and could have used some extra time. But I also realized that it was entirely my fault for miscalculating the length of it. It seems like a lot of people have a hard time admitting that.

Bah, whatever. What’s done is done…

As for the midterm? It was a breeze. ;)

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