Week 12 Last words

12 weeks passed so fast, I just got the last CSC148 lecture this morning. So in this very final slog, i just want to give some comments on my overall learning experience.

Danny Heap was a great lecturer and very approachable outside the class. Unlike other professors, he always spent considerable amount of time during the lecture to discuss the assignments. He gave class plenty of hints for the assignment as well as the exercises. The assignment he made are extremely useful, while the first assignment helped me to understand the basic concept of recursion, the second assignment made me become very fluent in using recursing!  

 The only thing that i did not like were the midterms. I don't understand the 20% policy for blank answer. It discouraged the students to think about the problem and express the idea on paper. Since there were always multiple versions of a test, it sometimes lead to unfair results for some students. For example, two students who study nothing before the exams, they end up getting 20% by leaving the entire test blank. However, the first student was lucky because it was the harder version of the test so he got an additional 20 % after the bell curve while the grade of the second student was unchanged... I am not one of those two, it is just my opinion on how the test might became unfair for some students. 

My TA, Jack, in W 1-3 lab session was a very nice guide too, he spent plenty of time talking about ADT, LinkedList, Tree, BST... the abstract concepts that the students are usually weak at. His accent was a little bit difficult to hear but he was very familiar with the course materials and engaged in the lab works. My partner for the labs was a Japanese girl, who was very nice and hard-working. 

The overall learning experience is great, I definitely learnt much more stuffs than what i learnt in CSC108. However, i am little bit disappointed about my performance in the course, especially my grades for the two term tests. I got about the class average in both but i felt like i could do much better if did not misread the question in the first midterm or choose easier questions to do first in the second midterm. But any way, i am working hard for the final, i hope that i can get around 85% so i won't lose my 4.0 CGPA .

Lastly, i want to say thank you to the professor, automaker TAs, Slog TAs who spent lot of time marking my works. I also want to say thank you to the TA in CSC help center, who always willing to help me to understand the materials covered in the lecture. I hope you all will have a great summer vacation and see you next year :).