the Sam Jackson College Experience

After each semester, we have an opportunity to review classes before we receive our grades. These evaluations are multipart and one aspect is to provide a summary for other students to read in future semesters. As I search for classes to shop this semester, the evaluations of past students are very helpful. One course I was looking at (principally in order to fulfill a Quantitative Reasoning requirement [QR credit, more on that later]) was Electrical Engineering 201, Intro to Computer Engineering. This course was generally favorably reviewed but there was one person whose comment was so singularly wonderful I  just had to share it with the world. It is reproduced below.

How would you summarize Electrical Engineering 201 01 for a fellow student? Would you recommend Electrical Engineering 201 to another student? Why or why not?

Stay away. This course will cause you nothing but misery. You'll spend hours on end slaving away in a lab, using software called "Xilinx" that's prohibitively buggy. It's so buggy that I doubt I can convey, in this short paragraph, an accurate impression of how poor it is. Maybe I can describe it by analogy. Imagine a sculpting course that requires you to chisel replicas of ancient masterpieces at the middle of a frozen pond during spring thaw. The ice is just barely thick enough to support the weight of you and the marble block for a few minutes at a time, but it keeps cracking and your work keeps falling through. Diligently, you begin again each time this happens, but you know it's just going to happen again in ten minutes. There is no hope. There is no escape. There is only anguish.

That being said, the course is overall rated as pretty interesting, but that software doesn't sound like too much fun. The lab, however, does seem to have some serious problems, not least the software program referenced above.

Shopping continues, for better or for worse...