<p>Exactly how hard are these classes? I know that they are difficult classes, but are they in your subjective opinion, impossible? What makes these courses difficult? The sheer amount of work, or the difficulty of the projects/tests?</p>
<p>I thought both were quite difficult. A lot of people find 280 to be pretty easy though. In 280 I thought the the projects were difficult and took a lot of time, but overall I got good grades on them. I did very poorly on the tests though and as a result got a low grade in the class. </p>
<p>281 I couldn’t even do the projects well. I didn’t use the autograder like I should have, but generally the feedback was pretty useless except the grade itself. I also went in thinking it would be like 203 and 280, but it has almost nothing to do with 203. I ended up withdrawing from the class.</p>
<p>Personally, if you get below a B in 280, I would recommend you not take 281 unless you are sure you want to do CE/CSE and nothing else.</p>
<p>Also, I think 280 is easier if you take/have taken EECS 183 before rather than Engr101. I remember people from 183 telling me they had learned a lot of the 280 stuff in 183, but in Engr101 we didn’t.</p>
<p>How does project grading work in 280? Do you just submit your project to an auto grader online whenever you’re done and it gives you your grade? Do you have multiple tries?</p>
<p>Or is it like ENGR 101 where you toss the project in a folder, and they get back to you a couple months later?</p>
<p>Similar to Engr101, but they will tell you if your code doesn’t compile or if it fails published test cases (they give you some test cases) or something like that.</p>
<p>280 is more practical; 281 is more theoretical. </p>
<p>280 will not be too bad if you’re already pretty good at programming and you know a little bit about OOP. If you don’t meet these qualifications, it’ll be a lot of work (but still do-able.) It’s been a long time from when I took it, but back then you didn’t get any feedback from the autograder before the project deadline. That meant that it was very difficult to know how you’d do unless you developed a pretty complete set of test cases yourself. So that made the projects tough to do well on, but I understand that this has changed.</p>
<p>281 is much less about programming and much more about understanding some fundamental theoretical ideas. The programming is just about applying these ideas, and it’s not that bad nowadays. The projects were pretty easy to do well on. I felt that the tests were way more difficult. The tests are also deceiving, since doing very well on the projects is not guarantee of good test performance.</p>
<p>The difficulty of 280 is really overstated. I was a very inexperienced programmer going into the class and still managed a B pretty easily. If you put a decent amount of time into it and start the projects early, there’s really nothing holding you back from getting at least a B.</p>
<p>No one should take Engr 101, from what I heard it was a poorly designed class.</p>
<p>I would recommend what I took, 151. It goes a lot farther and covers a lot of 183 I believe. (My prof just told me that, I’m in ME though)</p>
<p>@PurpleDuckMan</p>
<p>What if a student has absolutely no prior programming experience (and when I mean none - I mean NONE). Would you still recommend 151, or stick with 101 in this situation?</p>
<p>What if I had taken AP Comp Sci (taught in Java) a couple of years ago? Even if I brushed on C++ doing tutorials online over the summer, would you guys still recommend I take 183, or jump straight to 280?</p>
<p>Emzee1, if you are considering taking Engr151, you should try to acquire some programming experience before. If you think Computer Science or Computer Engineering is a possibility, then taking 151 will be very beneficial. I recommend you sign up and try to learn some on your own before classes start. If you feel overwhelmed, you will be able to drop it down to 101. </p>
<p>Infinit, if you learn/know all the syntax of C++, start with 280. You’ll relearn a lot of it in 280 again anyway.</p>
<p>Thanks Vladenschlutte, so you find out right away if your program passes preliminary test cases/compiles, and they get back to you later with your grade after they test it completely and check for style and stuff?</p>
<p>Also, im not sure when you took the class but if it was recently, was your book Absolute C++? Which chapters/topics did you cover?</p>