SU Testimonies and Advice

Testimonies on courses offered at SU from previous students. Pull requests are welcome so long as they're respectful and follow the guidelines outlined below.

Guidelines

1. Be respectful towards professors. This is a place to discuss your own experience with courses. Use respectful language and refrain from insulting or insuinating remarks. You may discuss an instructor's teaching style but only if it qualifies as constructive criticism. Replace statements like "he sucks" or "nobody really understood anything" with "there are some inefficiencies with the general instruction of the course, which I felt in the way I was reluctant to attend lectures."
2. Every entry must have the following fields:
   • Expected grade: The letter grade you felt you deserved in this course.
   • Rewarded grade: The letter grade you earned upon completion. Use a 'W' if you withdrew from it. If you attempted the course more than once, state all letter grades (or 'W's) obtained.
   • Semester: Spring/Fall/Summer 20XX
   • Professor/Instructor: Who was teching the course when you were enrolled? If more than one, state all.
3. File names for entries should comply with the the following format: <course code - all caps>_<number of entries present in the repository for this course + 1>
4. You may discuss your own personal advice for future students, the learning curve, the grading scheme, the instructor's teaching style, whether the course was understaffed, how many people got A grades, the assistant's performance (keep it civil!) etc
5. The length of your entry should at most be two paragraphs (3-5 sentences each) but one paragraph should be enough for most courses.
6. Format your entry using proper markdown. Use bullets or numbered lists wherever appropriate. If your entry is hard to read, we'll tell you to write it again : )

An Example Entry

This is an example entry about a course offered at another university:

Spring 2023/24
Lecturer: Prof. Chua Ding Juan
Lab Assistant: Christopher Moy
Expected Grade: A/A+
Actual Grade: A+

1. Prof Chua is an amazing lecturer. She was able to break down the concepts well, clarify doubts, engage students with exercises during the lecture + kahoot quizzes. She is one of the best lecturers in the whole of NUS, and I highly recommend going for them.

2. Tutorials are a bit more hit/ miss. The exercises are good practice for the quizzes

3. Labs can be completed at home. They do take some time

4. Verilog Evaluation is quite straightforward. They said you only have 1h to code verilog, but you also have an additional 20min to read the question + plan (on paper). You also have an additional submission attempt to clarify any doubts (which saved my eval)

5. Basic Project is 4 people, you can form your own groups. tbh not too hard, you are given week 7-9 to work on it which is more than enough time. Use the time to think about the open ended project.

6. Open Ended Project is in the same group. For my group we started planning very early, like Week 6, and even so it was very, VERY painful to integrate. I spent 2 whole weeks rallying my team to work on the project and integrating. Regardless, we fit in whatever features we wanted to fit in (we had a relatively ambitious project), and it was quite worth it

- A very important thing is that the project HAS AN INDIVIDUAL COMPONENT, each person is attributed to a specific feature. So in this case there is some incentive for everyone to do a specific part. That said, adjusting expectations of who does what is an issue, so do get that out of the way

- a lot of people in my batch did UART and 2 board comms. My group did 4 boards, 1 master 3 slave

- You have 3 weeks from this, around Week 8 - 11, but when you get your OLED from Week 7, just start planning and working on it, more time to work on the project = more time to fix things for integration

I think there's a trend to hype up this module as hard, but besides the open ended design project (which according to the profs, is only meant to differentiate A and A+), the rest of the content is relatively doable, provided you take the time to understand the concepts. The profs are wary against project inflation (people keep coming up with crazier projects like raytracing).

Also, do put enough attention into your quizzes/ lab assignments because those make up the bulk of your grade

Assessments
1. Midterm Quiz, Final Quiz - 20%, 15%
2. Lecture Quizzes - free 5%
3. Post Lab Graded Assignments - 3%, 6%, 10%
4. Verilog Evaluation - 11%
5. Project - Basic Mods - Standard among all teams - 4% indiv, 7& group
6. Design Project - Come up with whatever you want - 6% indiv, 6% group, integration, 5% presentation + Q&A

Contributing

• Pull requests will be accepted if and only if they conform to the guidelines outlined above.
• If you're not proficient with git, open an issue with the entry you wrote (markdown or plain, doesn't matter) and we'll ad it to the repository.
• If your name is not already in the Main Contributors list below, add it to the Contributors list.

Main Contributors

in alphabetical order

• Ahmet Emre Eser
• Bilgehan Bilgin
• Fikret Degirmencioglu
• Gozde Alan
• Mehmet Yildirgan
• Mustafa Canitez
• Mustafa Selim Turkmen
• Serhan Yilmaz
• Seyyid Ali Cebeci
• Taha Cakmak
• Yasin Mumtaz Kaskar

Contributors

in alphabetical order

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