Violetta Cavalli-Sforza

This is probably one of the worst one's in the department. 3 weeks into the lectures and I was lost. Her lectures are straight from the notes and books. The quiz questions seems to come out of nowhere. I read the book, lectures, and did homework but never seem to catch up or understand the material she presents. Power point slides are cryptic. Role call system forces you to stay in a dry and out of this world lecture. Just Pray you get through the semester and graduate.

By the end of the first month of the course about 1/3 of the class showed up for lecture. Lectures were kinda dull and were pulled pretty much straight from the book. Instead of C++ or Java, the homeworks were programmed in Lisp.

First homework assignment was to get you introduced with Lisp.

Second assignment was to program an interpreter for a simplified Fortran language. This assignment was pretty demanding considering we were still learning the Lisp language and the program specs barely gave us a clue on how to approach the assignment. The due date of the assignment was postponed at least 3 times because students were complaining about how hard the project was. The assignment would have been much easier to code in Java or C++.

3rd assignment is to add new features onto the interpreter.

There are four 10-15 minute quizzes. The lowest one dropped.

This is not the hardest csc course at state, like csc 313 & 413, but it is pretty difficult and frustrating. Unlike 313 or 413, I felt I barely learned anything of real significance to help me along on my career.

This is one of the more disappointing csc course at SFSU, next to csc 510 (analysis of algorithms).

If you are considering taking a class at SFSU starting this semester check the name of the instructor carefully. And if the name says Cavalli-Sforza do not take this class. I am currently taking CS 600 and CS 665 and booth of these classes are total waste of time. She basically re-wrote the entire text book on the board, making the lectures very boring. The homeworks are hard and must be completed in the short time possible. Be aware of her grading policy, which is very unfair. Her computer science skills are not sufficient enough to teach elective courses and her professional skills are minimal. There are plenty of people in both CS600 and CS650 that have better understanding of C++ and Java and often volunteer to answer questions. Also her innovation of classmates grading eachothers project should be a subject of state investigation. Her addition to the CS department weakened the quality of education and the reputation of our wonderful school.