| Numerous students in the past had to drop the course because of mismatched expectations. To avoid wasting your valuable money and time, it is therefore important for you to check that your expectations are compatible with those of the course. The expectations of the course (in terms of workload and effort, thus time and motivation) are on the high end of the spectrum because of two main factors: |
| ■ | The nature of its contents. You cannot learn the material well simply through reading and listening. You can only master the material by applying it, and by making errors and learning from them. In other words, practice (i.e., doing homework assignments) is an integral part of the course. Most of the homework assignments involve problem solving (developing algorithms) and programming (implementing algorithms), both of which require significant amouts of time, patience and perserverence. | |||||
| ■ | Its significance relative to your CS pursuit. (Please take note of the remark at the bottom of the page if you are a non-CS major.) CS 1428 (previously CS 1318), CS 2308 and CS 3358 form a sequence of core courses that are prerequisite to one another (in the order shown) and to other more advanced CS courses: | |||||
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| The knowledge and experience that you acquired in any one of them is instrumental to your later success in your pursuit - not something that you want to skimp on or to simply forget after the course is over. If you take it lightly (perhaps to just scrape by), you are very likely to stumble, stall, or fail to succeed later in your pursuit. | ||||||
| Provided below are four conditions (note that they are not necessarily independent of each other) to help you in performing the motivation/time check - conditions indicating that this course is not for you: |
| ■ | You need a course to earn some easy credits (i.e., to earn a good grade with little effort). | |||||
| ■ | You need a course with a small workload. | |||||
| ■ | You can't put in some very good effort (due to lack of time and/or motivation). | |||||
| ■ | You don't seriously intend to work hard and learn something (quite a lot of it). | |||||
| A remark for non-CS majors |
| Because this course is designed for CS majors, you will be treated just like CS majors. In other words there will be no double standards. |