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<p>My son’s school is like this.</p>
<p>He took Compilers, Computational Geometry and Data Mining this past semester.</p>
<p>It’s a typical compilers course - you write a language compiler during the semester.</p>
<p>Anyone that’s taken a course like this knows that it is a killer project course which requires you to assemble the knowledge from a bunch of disparate courses taken previously (theory and practice) and put them together to create something that takes a language like C at one end which spits out assembler code at the other end. It’s also one of those things that is all or nothing - you have to add layer after layer and meet pretty hard targets on deliverables or else you will wind up with something that doesn’t work at all. It’s not that hard to flunk a compilers course. His professor had 100 students in an intro class and grad students and Phd students to advise so he didn’t have a lot of time for anyone. That’s what happens when budgets get squeezed.</p>
<p>His school has difficult courses with not much help from professors as they are overcommitted but students can learn a lot in this kind of environment. On the other hand, there are easy courses for students that want degrees without working very hard.</p>