University of waterloo

[Cameron]

Just thought I'd add in my two cents as another first-year student.

CS135 - As the other guys said, the first midterm was really easy. I'm still finding the assignments fairly easy - the newsgroup helps a lot for clarifying things, and it's more a matter of getting the assignment done before the weekly server crash on Tuesday night.
It's a lot different than high school CS, but I really enjoy it, and I actually haven't had much difficulty removing myself from the C/C++ way of thinking.

MATH135 - definitely a challenging (but really interesting) course. It's completely unrelated to high school math, and places a lot of emphasis on proofs and logic. You can't slack off in this course, and it moves pretty quickly. I really like the course though - I wish we did more of this kind of math in high school.

MATH137 - pretty much the same as high school calculus so far, but with more emphasis on theorems, etc. The midterm was really easy as long as you did the assignments and went to lectures/tutorials. A few questions that were done in the tutorials showed up on the exam, so it definitely helps to go to the tutorials.

PHYS121 - basically a review of Gr. 12, but with calculus. They expect you to know integrals, even though they aren't taught in high school or until the end of MATH137. Nevertheless, it's still pretty easy, and I've got an awesome prof. Haven't had the midterm yet (3 days away) though.

MUSIC100 - A music history course. It's pretty interesting stuff, but the midterm was really hard - a lot harder than the midterms for algebra or calculus.

[A.J]

Prabhakar Ragde wrote:

A.J @ Fri Oct 30, 2009 4:04 pm wrote:

Math 135 is actually pretty boring, imo.

That's pretty funny considering that you're not taking it.

Math 135 is the one course in the entire Faculty that I would defend to the death (and that includes the courses I've designed). That said, there are those for whom it might be relatively easy (which does not translate to "boring"), and for whom Math 145 would be more appropriate.

I stand corrected. I apologize. I meant to say that it is relatively easy course.

[monkey]

Hello,
I shall give my impression of the courses I am taking as well.

MATH 147: This is possibly the hardest first-year course a person can take at Waterloo. The assignments are much more difficult than MATH 137. However, they give you a lot of bonus marks, so it makes up for the difficulty. For example, I got 50/60 on the first assignment. But, the prof made the assignment out of 50, so ended up getting 50/50. Anyways, I found this course was too much work for me, especially since I am taking challenging non-math courses. So I dropped to MATH137 after about 4 weeks of classes. Unfortunately, MATH137 and 147 learn things in a different order and I was unsuccesful in catching up with the 137 material before the mid-term.

MATH 145: I don't think this course is nearly as hard as 147, but it was still fairly challenging. It is significantly more difficult than 135. They cover all the content of MATH135 in 6 weeks. Just as with MATH 147 there are a lot of bonus marks involved to make up for the difficulty. I also dropped out of this course after 4 weeks and switched to MATH 135

It felt a little depressing to drop out of these courses, but I was glad I at least tried them. For people planning to study Math/CS as Waterloo next year, I'd suggest attending the first 2 weeks of classes to see if you can handle the pace at which they teach. Make sure you attend your 130 classes too though. Of course, don't take the two weeks as a certain indicator of whether you should take these courses (I mean it wasn`t a good indicator for me after all).

CS 145: I attended this class and did the assigments for two weeks. I was fairly certain at the end of the two weeks that the course was a little too fast for me, perhaps due to my lack of significant prior CS experience, or perhaps due to my lack of intelligence. I know Professor Ragde says "No prior experience necessary", but he used words such as "parsing" and "lexing" on the first lecture, without explaining them much (maybe I just didn`t understand). I also think that it is easy to draw parallels between other programming languages and scheme eg. loops are quite similar to recursion. A person who knows loops, can understand recursion faster than a person who doesn't know what loops are. So I feel, certain that the right kind of previous experience would make this course easier. Professor Ragde said that last year many people did well in CS145 without having any previous experience, so I guess you might survive without any if you are really smart. Or perhaps my insight on this is completely worthless, because since I had to drop out of the advanced math courses, I probably just do not have the `ability` to have taken CS 145.

MATH 135: This course seems relatively easy in comparison to MATH145. Like everyone else has said, it is quite different from what one is taught in high-school. I suppose the mid-term was fair .

MATH 137: Well, unfortunately I was 3 assignments behind when I switched into this course (since I was in MATH47). It still does not seems particularly difficult though.

CS 135: The course was easy for about 3 weeks. Since then the content has become more challenging and interesting. From what I understand, It`an unconventional first-year computer science course, but in a good way. Thanks for designing this course, Professor Ragde.

PHYS121: Most of what we`ve learnt is an extension of the mechanics we learnt in high school, with significantly more challenging problems. There is content in this course that is not present in the Ontario high-school curriculum (at least I dont think so) e.g. rotational dynamics and angular momentum. They used to teach special relativity in PHYS 121, but unfortunately they removed it this year. And Endless, this course IS NOT super-easy. It is the standard first-year course for physics majors. For some reason, some of the assignment questions require integration, which we have not covered in math.

BIOL 130: The content of this course is very interesting in my opinion. We have been learning about the mechanisms which allow cells to function. This course does involve some chemistry, so don`t take it if you absolutely hate chemistry .However, the tutorials are mandatory and sometimes have a few annoying and trivial activities. The mid-term wasn`t difficult, but I am told the final will be much harder.

PHYS121LAB: Don`t take this course if you don`t have to . It is a waste of time. We are expected to write our lab report during the lab itself. There simply isn`t enough time to write a good lab report. I find that the lab-reports I write in this class are sub-par to even the lab-reports I wrote in high-school. There is no time to do the calculation for uncertainties, nor enough time to do a proper analysis of your results and evalution of experimental errors. They ask the TAs to mark the lab reports easy, but there is simply no point to taking a course in which nothing is learnt. It is almost like the opposite of learning since our lab reports are worse than in high-school, due to the time constraints. I am very dissapointed with this course.

[Superskull85]

Reading some of the posts in this thread makes me wish I applied to Waterloo Computer Science, but I like McMaster a lot. Based on the posts so far, McMaster's Computer Science program is simple compared to Waterloo's program.

What are the sort of things Waterloo students do in Computer Science courses?

[Alexmula]

do you waterloo students mind posting some of your assignments or tests from math/cs courses?

[Cameron]

Alexmula @ Sun Nov 01, 2009 9:18 am wrote:

do you waterloo students mind posting some of your assignments or tests from math/cs courses?

http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs135/

Here's the course website for CS135. With the links on the left, you can get access to assignments, and the "Handouts and Errata" contains the lecture notes.
Under the "Exams" section, the 2 midterms from last year have been posted. The first midterm from last year was very similar to this year's midterm. We haven't had our second midterm yet this year, so I don't know how similar it will be to last year.
The entire course textbook is available for free online: http://www.htdp.org
And, the Scheme programming environment is available here: http://www.plt-scheme.org/

[Prabhakar Ragde]

monkey @ Sun Nov 01, 2009 12:48 am wrote:

CS 145: [...] I also think that it is easy to draw parallels between other programming languages and scheme eg. loops are quite similar to recursion. A person who knows loops, can understand recursion faster than a person who doesn't know what loops are.

If this were the case, then students in a typical "CS 2" course would have no problem with recursion, but it is a major stumbling block for most of them. The fact is that loops are equivalent to a certain restricted form of recursion (plus loops don't produce values but get things done via side effects, which makes it even harder to draw the correspondence). I've seen many students who keep trying to think in terms of loops (which they think they understand) run into difficulties in the early parts of CS 135 and CS 145.

Quote:

Professor Ragde said that last year many people did well in CS145 without having any previous experience, so I guess you might survive without any if you are really smart.

I didn't say "many". I said that there were people who did well in CS 145 without prior experience. Obviously the right kind of prior experience will help. I just don't see a lot of students coming in with that kind of prior experience. --PR

[monkey]

Prabhakar Ragde @ Sun Nov 01, 2009 3:48 pm wrote:

monkey @ Sun Nov 01, 2009 12:48 am wrote:

CS 145: [...] I also think that it is easy to draw parallels between other programming languages and scheme eg. loops are quite similar to recursion. A person who knows loops, can understand recursion faster than a person who doesn't know what loops are.

If this were the case, then students in a typical "CS 2" course would have no problem with recursion, but it is a major stumbling block for most of them. The fact is that loops are equivalent to a certain restricted form of recursion (plus loops don't produce values but get things done via side effects, which makes it even harder to draw the correspondence). I've seen many students who keep trying to think in terms of loops (which they think they understand) run into difficulties in the early parts of CS 135 and CS 145.

I think students would have a problem understanding recursion with or without knowing loops. For me, it was not a particularly easy concept to understand. However, I think that knowing loops would probably help them understand it faster, because they have seen something similar to recursion. The students which you say were trying to think of recursion in terms of loops, may have had difficulty understanding recursion even if they didn't know what loops are. I found it easier to learn recursion by relating to the basic knowledge I had of loops (just grade 10 computer science).

Quote:

Quote:

Professor Ragde said that last year many people did well in CS145 without having any previous experience, so I guess you might survive without any if you are really smart.

I didn't say "many". I said that there were people who did well in CS 145 without prior experience. Obviously the right kind of prior experience will help. I just don't see a lot of students coming in with that kind of prior experience. --PR

Correct me if I am wrong, but you also said that 60% of the people in CS145 last year were not CS majors. How many of these non-CS-majors would have prior experience? It also seemed to me that the "no prior experience necessary" part was one of the major advertising points you had for CS145.

[Prabhakar Ragde]

monkey @ Sun Nov 01, 2009 5:01 pm wrote:

I think students would have a problem understanding recursion with or without knowing loops. For me, it was not a particularly easy concept to understand. However, I think that knowing loops would probably help them understand it faster, because they have seen something similar to recursion. The students which you say were trying to think of recursion in terms of loops, may have had difficulty understanding recursion even if they didn't know what loops are. I found it easier to learn recursion by relating to the basic knowledge I had of loops (just grade 10 computer science).

Maybe it would have been easier if you hadn't done that.

I think that recursion is easier to understand than loops with the right mental model of computation. In our case, we have the substitution model, which makes recursion easy to understand through traces. I didn't stress those traces in CS 145 like we do in CS 135 because I trust good students to work through ideas themselves. I did a couple, and that was it.

Now, you are right to suggest that maybe students who had trouble with recursion would have had that trouble anyway. But we do have the experience with CS 115, taken by large numbers of students who have little or no interest in CS and little or no experience, and they seem to get it without too much stress.

Quote:

Correct me if I am wrong, but you also said that 60% of the people in CS145 last year were not CS majors. How many of these non-CS-majors would have prior experience? It also seemed to me that the "no prior experience necessary" part was one of the major advertising points you had for CS145.

I don't know how many of them had CS experience. We still recommended ICS3M at that point, for all students entering the Math Faculty. Many of the non-CS majors were top scorers on the Euclid contest and really strong in math. Such students tend to have no problems with CS apart from motivation.

I needed to stress "no experience needed" because I didn't want such people to think they were shut out of the advanced course just because they didn't take a lousy high school course. I also need to stress, to prospective students, that taking a couple of lousy high school courses does not qualify one for CS 145.

[ImateOthede]

Hello all,

What are the University of Waterloo equivalents of all the required pre-reqs? Does anyone have a comprehensive list of all the possible courses youd need to take at UW for across Canada and US med applications?

Ive got my enrolment coming up on Monday for the spring term.....Hurrah Ive got some pre-reqs under my belt, but I want to make sure Im not missing any. Also, I figured Id ask here first instead of bothering multiple med school admissions offices

Thank you in advance,

H

[A.J]

I got early acceptance to the honors math and honors CS program about a week ago.

I was wondering whether I should Major Math and Minor in CS or vice versa (although I am leaning towards the latter).

[chrisbrown]

Take a look at the BCS and BMath(CS) checklists. Both are offered within the Math faculty, but the BMath is more restrictive in terms of electives, and so is more math-intensive.

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/current/courses/checklistsandsequences.shtml

The most notable differences:
BCS gives you 4 elective units (8 courses; a course is worth 0.5 units) and 3.5 math units.
BMath gives you 1.5 electives, and 6 math units.

The question you have to ask yourself is whether you want your degree to say Math or CS on it.

[mono-1-rulz]

Can you by any chance get both the BMath and BCS by taking appropriate electives? My guidance counsellor told me you could....but I don't think UoW allows it, do they?

[chrisbrown]

I probably should have been clearer: the BMath(CS) is little more than a BCS with the requirement of more math courses. I could be wrong, but i believe a BMath(CS) means you have a Math degree with a CS major, whereas a BCS is a CS degree with a more specialized major. You can do double-degree and specialized programs, but if you want both a math and CS degree, BMath(CS) is the way to go.

[CodeMonkey2000]

You could check out the UW undergrad calendar.
http://ugradcalendar.uwaterloo.ca/?groupID=123

I plan on doing a joint CS & CO or CS & pMath.

@mono-1-rulz: I'm pretty sure you can't do that. You have an elective breadth and depth requirement that you need to meet in CS.