Review of my second year term two courses

I'm not good at blogging

Hi! I wrote about my second year term 2 courses a while ago and then forgot to finish the rest of the blog post. I don't feel like finishing the rest of the blog post lmao but I'll publish my review on the courses cause "why not?".

This is what I wrote:

I actually did pretty well in my courses this term. Probably not well enough to make up for my failures of all previous terms but pretty well.

• Math 220 - Mathematical proof: I MESSED UP the midterm. Like I ACTUALLY failed it. But I did really well on the final and there must have been scaling or weight moving because my final grade ended up being 88! I like how my class was taught. We were to learn the concepts through watching short videos (this is the playlist 👀) and then practice using those concepts through worksheets in class. The professor reexplained things in class, addressed common issues, and answered questions. This is 100% how math SHOULD be taught. In those horrible math classes in the first term we were somehow expected to learn by just sitting there and watching someone else do math for an hour straight??? My class was taught like this because it was the Math students only class. I'm not sure why all math courses can't be taught like that though. You'd probably just need a few TAs to handle larger class sizes.

• CPSC 213 - Computer Systems: By the end of this course you are supposed to be able to understand what your computer is doing when it runs your code. A very cool way they teach this is by having you incrementally program the logic that a computer's hardware performs through your assignments. And in parallel to this you are also learning to write code in assembly that you can run in your emulated computer! I thought a lot of the concepts we learned were complex and that the assignments were sometimes difficult - but I somehow got a pretty good grade on it as well! (86)

• Phil 321 - Decision theory: I picked up this course because I got removed from the math only differential equations class it required me to also be in some other math only class which I didn't need to take. I had listened to these really good lectures on game theory from yale earlier in the year so when I found this course listed I was really excited. I think I was very fortunate to be kicked out of the differential equations class because this phil 321 was CRAZY easy. Like the tests were mostly adding numbers and determining which number is larger than the other. I got 90 and was surprised because I expected it to be a lot higher! The sad thing is that the course wasn't really that interesting. There was nothing complex discussed and I was already aware of the simple stuff.

• CPSC 221 - Algorithms and data structures: The course content was pretty simple but definitely useful. My grade was okay but disappointing in this one. I really thought I could get a 90 and then I messed up the final and got final grade of 82 which is only 3 above the class average. Its weird that my 221 grade was lower than my 213 grade cause for the whole term I considered 221 to be the easy course. Coding in a high pressure timed event is really bad. In that final I coded sloppy because I wanted to finish quick, made an error early, took forever to catch, and then when I finally did THERE WAS ANOTHER ERROR. I ended up just not getting the full marks on the coding question which really dragged down my mark on the final.