Below is my module review for Academic Year 14/15 Semester 2, my second semester in year 2.
CS3230 Design and Analysis of Algorithms
This module is one of the core modules for CS major. And it builds on top of CS2020 (or CS2010). Most of the algorithms covered in CS3230 are already taught in CS2020. The additional work is to “analyse” them or “design” some algorithm that fulfills certain requirements. In addition to giving algorithms, complete answers for this module require certain amount of proving, including correctness, termination, and analysis of running time. Apart from the usual graph algorithms, this module also touches on complexity classes (NP, NP-C, etc), amortized analysis on running time.
Overall the concept is not exactly new if you have some programming background, knowing what is NP and amortized analysis. Questions that involves proving can be challenging if you do not have a solid mathematics/discrete structure background.
Midterm, final, assignments and tutorial participation are counted towards the overall grade. If you can solve the assignments and tutorial questions independently, exams should not be a problem.
Expected Grade: A
Actual Grade: A
After thoughts: This is no surprise for me.
CS2103T Software Engineering
Again this is one of the core modules for CS, and lots of people are taking this (including people from ISE and CEG). The concepts are useful and can be readily applied to software projects. The module covers all phases of software development cycle, including requirement analysis, design, implementation and testing. I learnt a lot of useful knowledge on how to do software engineering properly, such as the various patterns and testing techniques.
Project makes this module really hard. As our tutor put it, the project can be done easily in a few weeks by one person, but the team-based nature makes it hard. Coordination and communication within the team can cause a lot of delays and extra work. From a web and mobile developer background, I find it troublesome to “code from scratch” without using any frameworks. Our team generally completed the software but it was not polished enough due to the delays in development.
The final and the participation marks are not hard. You need to make sure you can understand the concepts taught and apply them to simple cases.
Expected Grade: A-
Actual Grade: A
After thoughts: Well, I got a grade higher than I expected. I guess the lecturer was just scaring us when he said “we will not get the deserved grades unless we do well in finals.” after the product demo.
CS2101 Effective Communication for Computing Professionals
This module is paired with CS2103T. It serves to enhance our ability to communicate with others as an IT professional. The whole module is graded based on continual assessments. It covers basic rules and principles in communication and writing, as well as some areas that are important for the IT field, such as interviews and software project presentation.
Consistent effort is needed for this module as you are constantly graded for various components. The components themselves are not very heavy. A lot of work is in the form of writing and talking, so it is more of an English module than a CS module.
Expected Grade: A-
Actual Grade: B+
After thoughts: B+ is a bit lower than my expectations. From the way the tutor communicated with us, I thought we were doing fine and deserve at least a A-. Everyone in my group seems to have gotten B+ or lower, so maybe it is just how this module is graded.
CS3243 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
This module is first AI module that I am taking. It covers some basic elements of searching techniques, logic and uncertainty. A lot of focus is on understanding the various algorithms, such as A*, RESOLUTION, UNIFICATION, MINI-MAX. It certainly taught me a lot of new concepts, though some of concepts (logic) seem to overlap with earlier modules like CS1231.
The project is about implementing a learning agent for Tetris. The concepts used for the implementation is not directly covered so the teams has to do research on their own. Luckily in our team we have someone who is good at researching. He did a lot of work in implementing the learning algorithm. The lecturer required the implementation to be explicitly designed for large amount of data but I don’t feel that we are good enough to show that. We were pretty satisfied with our result that can clear about 20k lines on average. So we did not really put in too much effort to optimizing the running time.
The final and the tutorial questions are similar in terms of the difficult level. Understanding the concepts, especially the mechanism of various algorithms is important in answering the questions.
Expected Grade: A-
Actual Grade: A-
After thoughts: The grade that I expected. I can say that I understood the concepts well but the midterm and the project was not well done so A- is pretty normal. It turned out we did not score very well for the performance of tetris agent, in fact, we got zero marks for some test cases. We were expecting at least a decent performance since we have a “good” average of more than 20k lines cleared. Maybe the requirement for this project was much higher than we expected.
CS3882 Breakthrough Ideas for Digital Markets
This module is one of the less known and less popular modules, only about 10 students took it this semester. It focuses on generating ideas for digital products and transforming the idea into a prototype. A lot of interesting concepts were taught, like design thinking and patenting.
Half of the work for this module come from the individual reviews of the concepts taught and group effort on proposing and refining the idea. Then after deciding on the idea, the teams are required to develop a prototype and do a final presentation with demo. The prototype is mainly used to demonstrate the feasibility and the appeal of the idea, so only minimum amount of coding is needed to develop the MVP. Overall this module does not take up a lot of time. It is quite useful for people who are intended to do a start-up. The professors for this modules are very helpful and they have good experience in the IT industry.
Expected Grade: A-
Actual Grade: A
After thoughts: A little higher than I thought, but no surprise. It was a very small class size and there had to be some people who score A. So even though our project was not fantastic, it proved to be better than our classmates.