Reflections Leaving CS340
We were asked to reflect on our learning strategies throughout the quarter. Here are my thoughts that I shared with my class:
Here is my overall breakdown on my assessment on the various learning strategies I have implemented throughout this course:
Very Useful
Peer Review Process
I found the peer review process through Ed Discussion to be incredibly useful. This is my first term at OSU, so I am unsure if this is a common feature of classes or not, but regardless, as my first time really using the service, I was quite delighted and hopeful that my home university will adapt something similar in the future. I found from the peer review process that I would often get excellent and helpful feedback from peers. This is a nice change of expectations, as I am used to the Canvas discussion threads with "you must reply to at least two peers," where feedback from peers is usually shallow and just written so that the writer receives full credit (which, to be fair, I am guilty of too). The structure of our reviews on other people's projects encourages actual meaningful feedback that I found incredibly helpful for developing my project.
Microsoft Teams / TAs / Office Hours
Very useful. I found all the TAs to be very responsive and willing to help out when I needed them.
3-Day-Late Policy
Again, very helpful. The policy feels like a fair compromise between not having a system that is too much of a burden on graders and having a strict submission deadline that fails to acknowledge that students often have difficult and complex lives outside of the academic world and, put simply, "things happen." I found also that it was a short enough policy that I only ended up relying on it when I actually needed it and did not use it as a tool for procrastination.
Somewhat Useful
AI
I could write a lot here, as this is a subject I do find interesting, but I did utilize AI (as permitted) in this course to mixed results. Asking AI to help rewrite or fix code often results in it implementing overly complicated or overly safe solutions that go well beyond the scope of this class, or trying to write SQL queries in obscure ways that are odd and likely do not actually reflect how people query in the real world. I ultimately ended up working with the policy that I would not have an AI do something unless 1. it was something I fully understand and could do myself (usually tasks that are well within my capabilities but are repetitive and incredibly time consuming), or 2. a task that is simple enough that I could trust a toddler to do.
I also tried using AI as a study resource by asking it to quiz me on relevant topics of the class before taking a midterm, and found even with careful prompt engineering, the results were not even close to the questions I actually had to answer, so ultimately it was not that great of a study resource.
Practice Quizzes
The quizzes were decent at preparing me for the midterms. I did find that the midterms had a couple of questions that were completely outside of the scope of what was on the practice quiz, while some others were very slight alterations of what appeared in practice.