Return-Path: <kfoury@cs.bu.edu> Received: from cs.bu.edu (cs [128.197.12.2]) by cs3.bu.edu (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id i9E3UliW029772; Wed, 13 Oct 2004 23:30:47 -0400 Received: from cs.bu.edu (h000c41248e2b.ne.client2.attbi.com [24.34.20.189]) (authenticated bits=0) by cs.bu.edu (8.12.2/8.12.2) with ESMTP id i9E3UldF027593 for <cs520@cs.bu.edu>; Wed, 13 Oct 2004 23:30:47 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <416DF311.7080601@cs.bu.edu> Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 23:31:29 -0400 From: Assaf Kfoury <kfoury@cs.bu.edu> Organization: Boston University User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040413 Debian/1.6-5 X-Accept-Language: en To: cs520 Course Account <cs520@cs.bu.edu> Subject: about course contents and pace of the lectures Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-HitLevel: X-Spam-DCC: : cs3.bu.edu 1074; Body=19 Fuz1=19 Fuz2=19 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.0 (2004-09-13) on cs3.bu.edu X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.4 required=10.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00, RCVD_IN_NJABL_PROXY autolearn=no version=3.0.0 X-Spam-Pyzor: Reported 0 times. Status: RO X-Mozilla-Status: 8001 X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000 X-UIDL: 411f69ec00001315
Hello all,
This is a collective response to e-mail messages and conversations in
the last 3 days with 9-10 people in the course. This continues the brief
conversation we had this morning in class re: pace of the lectures,
weekly assignments, implementations, and relation of lecture material to
assignments. I refrain from mentioning names on the suggestion of
someone in the class, except for Mike Long who triggered this whole
exchange.
Five of the people who sent messages complained they are not able to
keep up with the pace. They went beyond Mike's suggestion for making
adjustments to make the work more manageable, e.g., extending the due
date for the implementations from Friday to Monday. They find the course
time consuming, far beyond 15 hours per week (corresponding to 1/4 a
full work load), and from what I gather, a disproportionate part of
their time is spent on the implementations.
Four of these10 people are able to keep up with the work pace, not that
the course is easy for them but they manage to complete the work.
I don't know exactly yet what should be done to serve everyone's
interest in the course. One thing I certainly can't do is to split the
class into two separate classes. My sense is that I should find a more
flexible way of allowing people to perform in the course, e.g.,
allowing a choice between (1) doing more hand exercises with no
implementations, and (2) doing fewer hand exercises in addition to the
implementations. Option (2) will be more or less the current
organization. Those who choose (1) will get a more theoretical version
of the course. And for those who choose option (2), we may give a couple
of tutorials, separate from the lectures, to explain basic techniques
about implementations (e.g., about parsing).
For now, I would like to change nothing in the course organization until
Problem Set 5 is completed (consisting of two parts: hand exercises due
on Friday, Oct 15, and implementation due on Monday, Oct 25).
Assaf
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Nov 19 2004 - 17:00:43 EST