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After my first semester at CMU, here are my thoughts on the various courses I took. I’m rating classes based on difficulty, academic quality, workload, and miscelleneous aspects which encompasses things like TAs, OH, etc.

Workload is total hours per week spent (including lecture, HW, etc.)

When it comes to rating miscellaneous factors, I’m treating it as bonus points.

NOTE: I tended to err on the side of safety when rating course difficulties as to leave room for future harder courses. I also came in with a solid background.

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07-128 First Year Immigration Course

Professor: Veronica Peet, Thomas Cortina
Grade: A
Difficulty: 0/5
Quality: 2/5
Workload: 2 lecture, 0.5 hw
Misc: N/A

This class is super easy. Just show up and do the occasional assignments. I don’t think I’ve used any knowledge I’ve learned from the class but I guess they’re all good things to know.

07-131 Great Practical Ideas for Computer Scientists

Professor: Veronica Peet, Thomas Cortina
Grade: A
Difficulty: 0.5/5
Quality: 3/5
Workload: 1 lecture, 1 hw
Misc: 3/5

The TAs teach this course. It’s super easy (you can Google) and the labs, in my opinion, are actually quite fun and interesting. I also find the content to be actually useful and rewarding if you do happen to spend the effort to genuinely learn it.

The TAs are honestly all great and going to the extratations lets you skip the final.

15-122 Principles of Imperative Computation

Professor: Anne Kohlbrenner, Iliano Cervesato
Grade: A
Difficulty: 2.5/5
Quality: 4/5
Workload: 3 lecture, 1 check-in, 1 precept, 4 hw
Misc: 5/5

Anne’s lectures were great and simply sitting in lecture is often enough when it comes to understanding the course material. I feel that properly engaging in the course will make you a better programmer. The labs are, in my opinion, very fun.

Your performance in this class is basically 1-1 with your check-in performance. If you do all of the precepts problems, the extra practice, the homework problems, and the programming assignment before the check-in you are almost guarunteed to do well (how much you need to do depends on your background and test-taking ability).

Autolab is great, the TAs in my precept were super cool, and Ed had amazing posts.

15-151 Mathematical Concepts and Proofs

Professor: John Mackey, William Kuszmaul
Grade: A
Difficulty: 2.5/5
Quality: 3.5/5
Workload: 3 lecture, 3 hw
Misc: N/A

Kuszmaul’s lectures are great and you learn a lot. Mackey’s lectures are entertaining and you learn a comparatively less. How much you’ll get from this course is entirely dependent on how much knowledge you came in with. If you have solid competition math experience you probably won’t get much out of the course content wise, but it does help you be super strict with your proof writing (although this was sometimes ambiguous even amongst TAs on the required rigor).

I personally never had to read a single page of Clive as I went to all the lectures. The most arduous part of this course is typing up all the homework problems with LaTeX, which you don’t have to do if you choose not to.

I didn’t really interact with the TAs all that much (I had an 8am recitation so I went a total of two times the entire semester), but from the interaction that I did have during OH they all were helpful and chill.

21-242 Matrix Theory

Professor: Wesley Pegden
Grade: A
Difficulty: 3.5/5
Quality: 4/5
Workload: 3 lecture, 2 reci, 3 hw, 1 studying
Misc: 4/5

The lectures in this class were quite good in my opinion. I didn’t know all that much Linear Algebra coming in and I ended up learning quite a lot.

I personally don’t think the class is hard to get a good grade in if you spend the needed effort from the get-go. Everything builds so you really do need to develop a strong foundation on all the concepts as you learn them. What helped me was discussing the content with others after class and asking a lot of questions during and after recitation when I was stuck.

The quizzes are honestly not that hard if you study for them. I personally just studied an hour before each quiz and ended up getting a perfect on all but one (which was exactly the one I didn’t study for).

My recitation TA was also amazing and had answers for the sometimes bizarre questions I asked after class.

21-295 Putnam Seminar

Professor: Po-Shen Loh
Grade: A
Difficulty: 1/5
Quality: 3/5
Workload: 1 lecture, 1 hw
Misc: N/A

I ended up going to the intermediate sessions every week. I personally thought all the lectures were interesting, although some of them were a little messy.

The class is super easy to get an A in as you just need to try on the homework and show up for the exam.

82-333 Modern China

Professor: Wei Peng
Grade: A
Difficulty: 1.5/5
Quality: 3/5
Workload: 3 lecture, 1 hw
Misc: N/A

This class was my gen-ed and was incredibly easy. The lectures were honestly a little bit slow paced for my liking at the beginning of the semester, but they got more content-dense towards the end. Honestly just a really chill class and the professor is super sweet and leniant.