Disclaimers, Caveats, and Limitations

Courses vary from quarter to quarter

The variance of courses between quarters is surprisingly high. The are tons of factors that can affect this. For instance:

• Course instructor - different instructors have different preferences for how to run a course, some allow partners for various projects, others don’t. Some have greater emphasis on various topics and occasionally mix it up, some stick to the same tried-and-true structure every quarter.
• Fall/Winter/Spring/Summer quarter - the exact placement of holidays, the length of the quarter (fall tends to be longer), and other such factors can affect the course. Some courses cover slightly more or less content depending on the quarter too.
• New ideas and restructuring - as someone who has worked as a teaching assistant (TA) for various classes, I can tell you that this happens quite frequently. Instructors are constantly looking for ways to improve courses, and so classes may have new structures that change the feeling of the class quite significantly.
• TA budget/how many TAs there are/quality of TAs - it goes without saying that this an important factor affecting any particular offering of a course.

Remember to take into account the various factors, but also know that the vast majority of these factors are outside of your control.

Courses depend on the person

It goes without saying that different people will find different courses more or less difficult, depending on their personal interests, prior background, mode of thinking, etc. For instance, there are those who find mathematical and theory courses considerably more difficult, while others might find programming-heavy courses very challenging. This will thus be something to consider - where are your personal strengths? Where are your weaknesses? What do you struggle with?

I think that the vast majority of these factors’ effects are overestimated - I don’t believe, in the vast majority of cases, that there are necessarily people who are are innately “programming” people or “mathematical” people. However, there is one factor that is very important - passion, or otherwise your personal enjoyment of the class. If you thoroughly enjoy a class, this can make even a very hard course feel easier. If you thoroughly hate a class, this can make even the easiest class in the world torturous. This, in my view, is the most significant deciding factor with regards to determining what courses certain people have an “affinity” for.

Courses will change in the future

I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but courses are always subject to change. My information will be always be out of date before it gets to you, so keep that in mind. With that said, some or even a lot of things don’t change, like the general purpose of a class - the algorithms class will always focus on getting you think algorithmically and design algorithms instead of being a list of algorithms to memorize, for example.