This professor is something else...
This professor, where do I start? He's practically a must take professor at some point when taking Computer Science classes (though I've managed not to take him at all so far). He has a good grip on the department, it seems like it would fall apart without him and to replace him they may have to hire 2-3 others..
He teaches like a million CS classes practically, and every assignment without exception has errors. Right now, I'm in a class created to fit more CS students into assembly, but all the assignments come from this professor, who we'll call Professor X for now. The professor of my assembly class knows what to lecture on only because Professor X gives him the syllabus (which, you guessed it, also has errors in it..)
And because he's such an amazing dude, Professor X wanted to teach every class under the sun because he complained that he was receiving CS students that weren't experienced enough, or didn't know what he expected them to..
At the moment, I have a friend in his C++ course (the second one, where they learn about classes, recursion, sorting, etc..). He needed some help, I took a look at the assignment and the code he had written.. I was just baffled. Code looks like someone in 1998 wrote it.
He wanted sorting algorithms coded (like quick sort), which he said they could lookup online, so they may as well have just used quick sort from the STL instead of coding it. He showed the students how to use malloc instead of new.. And instead of using "auto" when timing, he wrote out "chrono::time_point<chrono::system_clock>" and it made something he tried to do later with the variables turn into non-portable C++ code (have yet to find a single professor not guilty of creating compiler dependent code...)
This isn't even my personal beef with this professor. I told him that his documentation (which he wrote) for something was incorrect. I sent him the code that showed this, and he had the gall to sit there and tell me that he wasn't wrong, and that it must be a bug with Assembly. I checked with reliable sources and it definitely wasn't..
Don't get me too wrong here, he doesn't seem to be a particularly tough professor to take a class with, but not one I'd enjoy interacting with.. I haven't even taken this guy and I needed to rant about him. If it wouldn't fill up an entire book and take so much time, I'd probably be ranting every week about the idiotic professors I seem to fall into.
A current professor I have (the three star programmer..) was apparently outed by a teacher at a small college. The teacher showed his students some of this professor's code as an example of what NOT to do - heard from a friend who took that particular class. Basically, this professor I have vaguely goes over a concept, then expects us to code it.. He shows NO code in class, he doesn't review how to even begin coding any of his assignments, and they all come with vague PDFs that don't make sense, and then we have to code his assignments that are basically just pointer paradise. At some point, I stop thinking about how many references and dereferences are needed and find myself just putting * and & until the code compiles.
I'm ranting again. I have NO clue what people who hate public school education are going on about. Those teachers in high school knew their stuff, always wanted to help, and ... spoke English? Is that something I have to count as a bonus now? And fucks sakes, they actually fed us in public school. People would say it was nasty or whatever, but it was actually some good nutritious food! Chicken, pizza, etc..
Then I get to this money grabbing shit factory, where to enroll you pay $250 just to be able to attend a mandatory orientation which basically walks you around like 3 buildings and gives you a $5 sandwich. I went to 1 of SEVERAL orientations which was filled with at least a hundred students... So 4 orientations * 100 students = 400 * 250 = $100,000 - VERY conservative number, there was way more than 100 students. Imagine making $100,000 just because students decided to enroll at your school that semester.
I can't stop myself!
EDIT:
I just had to rant some more...
Not only was the orientation mandatory, but they failed to mention that you can't sign up for classes till you take it... So I applied for a later orientation that better fit my schedule and ended up not being able to take a CS course my first semester since they filled up in a snap way before I could even register. I had to find out this lovely fact when I went to sign up for classes and it said I couldn't..
During the orientation, they picked out these amazing people who are still students to pick our classes for us. I gratefully dropped all those classes so I could sign up for classes that I actually needed... Like imagine being able to take a single class to fulfill several requirements and so they sign you up for 3 to fulfill those same requirements. I pulled up the list of classes I'd actually need to graduate, and one of the women "helping" us look at the university's website actually told me, "That's not going to help you."
I looked at her and I just didn't know what to even say. I asked why not and I don't even remember her response, just that I was baffled. Imagine having a list of the classes you need and someone telling you it won't help you. Like wtf? I'm supposed to sign up for classes based on intuition? "Looks like a relevant class, let's pick this one! .... Ooooh! Pretty colors! I'll choose that class!"
Like oh my God. Holy fucking shit balls. I can't even wrap my head around the stupidity of it all.
And before anyone calls me out, yea, I'm pretty arrogant which I'm sure plenty have noticed. But I like to think I have an open mind and can admit when I'm wrong. However, you'd have to have some magic words to convince me that this university bullshit is somehow teaching me and worth a dime.
He teaches like a million CS classes practically, and every assignment without exception has errors. Right now, I'm in a class created to fit more CS students into assembly, but all the assignments come from this professor, who we'll call Professor X for now. The professor of my assembly class knows what to lecture on only because Professor X gives him the syllabus (which, you guessed it, also has errors in it..)
And because he's such an amazing dude, Professor X wanted to teach every class under the sun because he complained that he was receiving CS students that weren't experienced enough, or didn't know what he expected them to..
At the moment, I have a friend in his C++ course (the second one, where they learn about classes, recursion, sorting, etc..). He needed some help, I took a look at the assignment and the code he had written.. I was just baffled. Code looks like someone in 1998 wrote it.
He wanted sorting algorithms coded (like quick sort), which he said they could lookup online, so they may as well have just used quick sort from the STL instead of coding it. He showed the students how to use malloc instead of new.. And instead of using "auto" when timing, he wrote out "chrono::time_point<chrono::system_clock>" and it made something he tried to do later with the variables turn into non-portable C++ code (have yet to find a single professor not guilty of creating compiler dependent code...)
This isn't even my personal beef with this professor. I told him that his documentation (which he wrote) for something was incorrect. I sent him the code that showed this, and he had the gall to sit there and tell me that he wasn't wrong, and that it must be a bug with Assembly. I checked with reliable sources and it definitely wasn't..
Don't get me too wrong here, he doesn't seem to be a particularly tough professor to take a class with, but not one I'd enjoy interacting with.. I haven't even taken this guy and I needed to rant about him. If it wouldn't fill up an entire book and take so much time, I'd probably be ranting every week about the idiotic professors I seem to fall into.
A current professor I have (the three star programmer..) was apparently outed by a teacher at a small college. The teacher showed his students some of this professor's code as an example of what NOT to do - heard from a friend who took that particular class. Basically, this professor I have vaguely goes over a concept, then expects us to code it.. He shows NO code in class, he doesn't review how to even begin coding any of his assignments, and they all come with vague PDFs that don't make sense, and then we have to code his assignments that are basically just pointer paradise. At some point, I stop thinking about how many references and dereferences are needed and find myself just putting * and & until the code compiles.
I'm ranting again. I have NO clue what people who hate public school education are going on about. Those teachers in high school knew their stuff, always wanted to help, and ... spoke English? Is that something I have to count as a bonus now? And fucks sakes, they actually fed us in public school. People would say it was nasty or whatever, but it was actually some good nutritious food! Chicken, pizza, etc..
Then I get to this money grabbing shit factory, where to enroll you pay $250 just to be able to attend a mandatory orientation which basically walks you around like 3 buildings and gives you a $5 sandwich. I went to 1 of SEVERAL orientations which was filled with at least a hundred students... So 4 orientations * 100 students = 400 * 250 = $100,000 - VERY conservative number, there was way more than 100 students. Imagine making $100,000 just because students decided to enroll at your school that semester.
I can't stop myself!
EDIT:
I just had to rant some more...
Not only was the orientation mandatory, but they failed to mention that you can't sign up for classes till you take it... So I applied for a later orientation that better fit my schedule and ended up not being able to take a CS course my first semester since they filled up in a snap way before I could even register. I had to find out this lovely fact when I went to sign up for classes and it said I couldn't..
During the orientation, they picked out these amazing people who are still students to pick our classes for us. I gratefully dropped all those classes so I could sign up for classes that I actually needed... Like imagine being able to take a single class to fulfill several requirements and so they sign you up for 3 to fulfill those same requirements. I pulled up the list of classes I'd actually need to graduate, and one of the women "helping" us look at the university's website actually told me, "That's not going to help you."
I looked at her and I just didn't know what to even say. I asked why not and I don't even remember her response, just that I was baffled. Imagine having a list of the classes you need and someone telling you it won't help you. Like wtf? I'm supposed to sign up for classes based on intuition? "Looks like a relevant class, let's pick this one! .... Ooooh! Pretty colors! I'll choose that class!"
Like oh my God. Holy fucking shit balls. I can't even wrap my head around the stupidity of it all.
And before anyone calls me out, yea, I'm pretty arrogant which I'm sure plenty have noticed. But I like to think I have an open mind and can admit when I'm wrong. However, you'd have to have some magic words to convince me that this university bullshit is somehow teaching me and worth a dime.
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| Code looks like someone in 1998 wrote it. He wanted sorting algorithms coded (like quick sort), which he said they could lookup online, so they may as well have just used quick sort from the STL instead of coding it. He showed the students how to use malloc instead of new |
| I told him that his documentation (which he wrote) for something was incorrect. I sent him the code that showed this, and he had the gall to sit there and tell me that he wasn't wrong, and that it must be a bug with Assembly. I checked with reliable sources and it definitely wasn't. |
Basically, he said that 5 is an invalid offset in YASM (valid and invalid strictly referring to whether or not it'll compile). It was a test question in which I put it was valid but wouldn't do what the user expects - and I got it "wrong". Since it's assembly, array offsets are done with the amount of bytes as I'm sure you know.
However, this compiles just fine (lst being a variable array):
What WON'T compile is something like this:
Where rbx is holding the memory address of the variable array lst.
So it's conditional whether or not the offset of 5 actually works for arrays.
I showed him this, and he said YASM shouldn't allow it and it's a bug. I went to stack overflow with this, and was given a thorough explanation on why it works. The professor talked as if it was impossible due to the way it does offsets through bit shifting, but turns out that's not the case.
However, this compiles just fine (lst being a variable array):
mov eax, dword [lst+rsi*5]What WON'T compile is something like this:
mov eax, dword [rbx+rsi*5]Where rbx is holding the memory address of the variable array lst.
So it's conditional whether or not the offset of 5 actually works for arrays.
I showed him this, and he said YASM shouldn't allow it and it's a bug. I went to stack overflow with this, and was given a thorough explanation on why it works. The professor talked as if it was impossible due to the way it does offsets through bit shifting, but turns out that's not the case.
It looks like the assembler is automatically transforming reg*5 into reg+reg*4. If he mentioned a specific assembler and the assembler accepts the code and generates correct machine code, his documentation is obviously wrong.
What he should have said, which I think is what he actually meant, was "the instruction encoding of mov allows one constant base address, optionally one register, and optionally one register multiplied by either 1, 2, 4, or 8. The first register and the second register are allowed to be the same". He should have admitted his mistake and changed his wording, not argued like a child.
What he should have said, which I think is what he actually meant, was "the instruction encoding of mov allows one constant base address, optionally one register, and optionally one register multiplied by either 1, 2, 4, or 8. The first register and the second register are allowed to be the same". He should have admitted his mistake and changed his wording, not argued like a child.
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I just rechecked his book to make sure I wasn't misrepresenting his documentation, and it indeed states that only 1, 2, 4, and 8 are legal offsets.
Now, to be fair, this was a tad bit of a petty argument to make with him, it's just that I was told I'd get bonus points if I found an error in his book after saying an offset of 5 would compile. So I was a bit disappointed and his responses to me pissed me off.
I don't need the bonus points now, but at the time I had bombed the first midterm somehow. In the coding section of the test, I screwed up ONE line and he took off almost all the points. There were like 4 formulas to code stacked on top of each other, so I accidentally mixed in an operation from a formula underneath the one I was coding. It was an obvious mistake, I was rushing to finish because the test was super long. And instead of the grader realizing that, they decided to remove about 90% of the points. I didn't do bad on the rest of the test, but the coding section was worth a large chunk of points.
It's actually ironic how I got a bad score on the test, and in my strong suit as well - the coding section. I'm pretty comfortable coding in assembly and friends in the class usually ask me for help because they know I probably coded the assignments already.
Anyway, did great on the next one, (and to show off a bit) using my usual method of not studying. Only my calculus classes ever made study, can't understand what the hell those professors are saying.
Ended up ranting again ;-;
Now, to be fair, this was a tad bit of a petty argument to make with him, it's just that I was told I'd get bonus points if I found an error in his book after saying an offset of 5 would compile. So I was a bit disappointed and his responses to me pissed me off.
I don't need the bonus points now, but at the time I had bombed the first midterm somehow. In the coding section of the test, I screwed up ONE line and he took off almost all the points. There were like 4 formulas to code stacked on top of each other, so I accidentally mixed in an operation from a formula underneath the one I was coding. It was an obvious mistake, I was rushing to finish because the test was super long. And instead of the grader realizing that, they decided to remove about 90% of the points. I didn't do bad on the rest of the test, but the coding section was worth a large chunk of points.
It's actually ironic how I got a bad score on the test, and in my strong suit as well - the coding section. I'm pretty comfortable coding in assembly and friends in the class usually ask me for help because they know I probably coded the assignments already.
Anyway, did great on the next one, (and to show off a bit) using my usual method of not studying. Only my calculus classes ever made study, can't understand what the hell those professors are saying.
Ended up ranting again ;-;
@zapshe, if only we could somehow introduce your professor(s) to cblack618. Hilarity would happen, big time!
| @zapshe, if only we could somehow introduce your professor(s) to cblack618. Hilarity would happen, big time! |
LMAO! My professors would finally meet their match 😂
This "university" sounds like it's for-profit with a primary goal of extracting money from you. Find out if it's for-profit or non-profit. Also find out who, if anyone has accredited it. I've been a Board member of private schools for almost 35 years and I smell a rat.
| This "university" sounds like it's for-profit with a primary goal of extracting money from you |
I'm in the U.S., so I'm sure they're all this way.
It's become a "tier 1" university so they're more interested in their research I'm sure *shrug*.
| I'm in the U.S., so I'm sure they're all this way. |
Enough peekaboo. What university are we talking about?
I'm pretty sure the vast majority are for-profit.
We're talking about the university I go to ;)
We're talking about the university I go to ;)
Well, all of the Ivy League schools and Stanford are non-profit. On the wikipedia page, the list of for-profit universities is 5 pages, which may seem big but there are thousands of colleges and universities in the US, so presumably the rest of non-profits.
Google your school and "non-profit" to see if it is. If it is non-profit, google the school name and "IRS 990". This should lead you to a recently submitted IRS Form 990, which is required by all non-profit institutions in the US. It will give you a look at the school's finances. Most schools also produce an annual report that shows their financial position.
I'm going from memory here, but I think a well run school typically spends about 70% on educational expenses (facilities, teacher salaries, etc.).
But here's the bottom line. If you aren't happy with your school, then consider transferring.
Google your school and "non-profit" to see if it is. If it is non-profit, google the school name and "IRS 990". This should lead you to a recently submitted IRS Form 990, which is required by all non-profit institutions in the US. It will give you a look at the school's finances. Most schools also produce an annual report that shows their financial position.
I'm going from memory here, but I think a well run school typically spends about 70% on educational expenses (facilities, teacher salaries, etc.).
But here's the bottom line. If you aren't happy with your school, then consider transferring.
My university is public - it's going to be for-profit.
Transfer? And pay out of state tuition and make a mansion out of my debt? I may not like the university, but I'm getting money in my pocket to go there - NOT accumulating debt. It's one of the only options where I am, so to find a better one I'd go to another state, live off in the dorms accumulating debt.
I may not be happy with my school, but it's really just about passing with a good grade - and I can do that no problem. Doesn't mean I won't complain along the way 😜
| But here's the bottom line. If you aren't happy with your school, then consider transferring. |
Transfer? And pay out of state tuition and make a mansion out of my debt? I may not like the university, but I'm getting money in my pocket to go there - NOT accumulating debt. It's one of the only options where I am, so to find a better one I'd go to another state, live off in the dorms accumulating debt.
I may not be happy with my school, but it's really just about passing with a good grade - and I can do that no problem. Doesn't mean I won't complain along the way 😜
| My university is public - it's going to be for-profit. |
| Just the opposite actually. public universities are subsidized by the state |
Doesn't make them any less of money grabbers
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