CSE 143

This is my course review for CSE 143 at the University of Washington. The class is a continuation of CSE 142, so most of the things are similar to what I already wrote there. I also concurrently took CSE 390 (for CSE 143) with this course.

Just some notes:

• The homework assignments were actually nontrivial this quarter. I also had a nontrivial number of deductions (up to 6 points) for assignments, almost entirely due to coding style (i.e. my solutions were almost always externally correct). I didn’t get very many deductions in 142, but I suppose the increasing complexity of the assignments made me trip up many more times. (Some of the deductions seemed silly though, like 2 points off not checking for exceptions at a specific point(?)) With Blank/Obourn, the homework is 47% of the overall grade, compared to something like 20% in 142, and 40% if you take 143 with Reges.

• Messing up on the final proved to be costly (this is especially difficult if you have other finals/projects that are due beforehand¹). Also just two of the programming questions together make up 40% of the final, i.e. 19% of the final grade.

• There are actually two days for sections in 143, compared to just one during 142. This means an extra day where one is supposed to attend something CS-related. However, only one section homework each week was required to get the full points for the section portion of the course, so the actual amount of work (besides difficulty) was constant.

Grade

I got a 3.7 in the course, which is on the lower side of people admitted to CSE.