Course Review Structure

The following describes many of the design decisions I made in writing up my reviews of various courses.

Course Material Descriptions

For each class, I would like to explain the material the course covers.

However, considering that the intended audience is students who are considering what classes they would like to take, it is highly probable (if not guaranteed) that many of the topics I mention are topics to which the reader may not have had any exposure to.

It is not necessarily a good idea to simply omit the topics covered, as there may be students with advanced backgrounds who already know much of the content of a class, and therefore find it is not in their best interest to actually take the class.

Given all of this, I find it best to simply provide the summary regardless, with helpful links to various articles (primarily Wikipedia) on various topics of interest.

The caveat of this is that there will inevitably appear to be a lot of material that the reader might be unfamiliar with, which can make some classes feel very intimidating. To this, I would add the caveat

The Three Aspects

For my reviews, I will try to focus on three main aspects of a course: difficulty, enjoyability, and practicality. Most of this is somewhat subjective and dependent on many factors, so I will not attempt to assign courses particular numerical ratings for any of these areas. Instead, I will focus on highlighting the most important inforamtion you should know as someone who is planning to take a course.

Difficulty

Difficulty is simple - just how hard the class is. A lot of factors go into this, including how complex the concepts are, how much time students need to invest in the class, if there are any particularly difficult projects or exams, if the pace of instruction is slow or fast, and if the course dives deep or remains a more broad, shallow survey of topics.

Enjoyability

This is by far the most subjective of the three areas, because everything I will mention regarding a course is entirely from my perspective and the material I enjoy will be very different from the material other people enjoy. However, there are still some broad generalization statements that apply to many other people I know of who have taken various classes, and there are generally things about certain classes people enjoy and do not enjoy that I will try to mention.

Practicality

Technically speaking, every course could be extremely practical if you wished to specialize in the particular subfield of CSE that that class covers. That aside, there are certain classes that are extremely significant across many fields, to the extent that at other top universities (the likes of MIT, or CMU, or Stanford) they would be considered mandatory core classes rather than optional electives. Therefore, I have opted to keep this aspect of a course optional in my course reviews (or else I would repeat myself over and over with the previous claim) and focus instead on highlighting courses that are truly significant in their practicality.

Information Omitted from Reviews

I will make no attempt to highlight what the pre-requisites are for a course. I will also not exhaustively describe all of the courses that use some other course as a pre-requisite. This is because all of this information is readily available from the External Sources I’ve linked, and I therefore do not see much point in mentioning it in my course reviews.

I will not include any recommendations for professors or instructors in the core course reviews. With a few exceptions, professors do not necessarily teach the same classes with regularity, and therefore I do not think it is very useful to recommend any instructors, especially as by the time you’re making your decisions regarding classes, you might not have the same instructors available.