Take 33 with Glenn. Tests were very fair if you did the labs and closely resembled his practice tests he posted. Tough material but useful and interesting. I would definitely take this class again.

I did not find this class interesting so I did not pay attention to any of the lectures. Reinmann seemed enthusiastic and tried his best to explain things. He might not be the clearest lecturer but I can't really shit on him for it since I did not pay attention. Labs are worth a lot and will actually teach you 80% of what you need for the tests so put all your effort into understanding them. I did really good on the midterm but got fucked on the final yet still got an A. He said over 50% got some type of A and 25% got some type of B. I think if you like low level shit then you will probably like this class. And he does not do flipped classroom anymore so most reviews are outdated.

I'm gonna start of by saying that I think a lot of the negative reviews for Reinman from recent quarters have been due to the flipped lecture style that he used after Covid. As of my quarter (Fall 2023) he is no longer doing this, and lectures are fully in person (two hours, twice a week). Personally, I found the class to be extremely interesting and very manageable IF you attend lectures. I went to every single lecture and I never found myself behind or having to learn on my own to catch up. Discussion attendance is required: discussions consist of a review of the week's material or a short lecture preparing you for the lab (if it had been assigned that week). These are super helpful - since it's 2 hours, I often find it can almost function as another TA office hours, which is great. Definitely ask the TAs any questions you have, they usually can provide a really good answer.

Overall I had a great time in this class, which I believe was due to attending every lecture in person and taking notes, as well as giving myself a full week to complete the labs (often times you really only need a few days, but I think pacing it out to really ensure that you have time to actually understand everything is a good idea). The labs are no doubt the single best way to prepare yourself for the exams - the exams pretty much test those concepts (and potentially ideas from the homework) and nothing else, so give yourself time to REALLY get the lab and you'll be good for the test.

In terms of grades, I got a 92 on the midterm (initially 84, but requesting regrades is important) and an 87 on the final, and my final grade was well into the A range. This was because I fully completed every lab, and got extra credit on the labs that it was offered for (which is very doable). My point in saying this is that you don't have to get As on the exams to do well in the course, but just make sure every other portion of your grade is maxed out. My friend got an 83 midterm and 75 final and is ending with a B+ because he maxed out his labs.

It wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Definitely less time spent on homework and learning concepts than in CS 31 and 32, though you might miss how straightforward those classes were. It was a rush to learn assembly in the first few weeks and then the rest of the quarter was spent jumping around from topic to topic with not that much relevance between them. Mandatory discussions, and you should attend them because they are really useful. Definitely manageable to get an A in this class, would highly recommend attending and paying attention in discussions.

CS33 is often known as the weed-out class. I don't think thats true. CS33 differs in content from CS31 and CS32 in that it deals with lower level things such as binary and assembly. However, I wouldn't necessarily say it is harder than CS32. Maybe a lot of people have learned the things in CS31 and CS32 beforehand, so when they got to CS33, they were not used to having to learn content from scratch. Personally, I spent a lot less time studying and doing projects for CS33 than for CS32.

Breakdown of CS 33 w/Reinmenn and my personal experience:
- 5% HW: based on completion. Similar to test questions, they don't take too long, and are helpful.
- 10% Discussion Section Attendance: Chenda Duan (my TA) is the goat, all TA's were excellent and the discussions were very worth it as TAs would drop test/project hints and would review material clearly.
- 15% Labs: labs are fun, not too time-consuming, but understand them well as test questions are similar to labs. Data Lab is by far the hardest, most people looked it up online. Bomb and Attack Lab are the big parts of this course, both are fun and feel like puzzles. Parallel Lab is a joke more or less
- 20% Midterm + 30% Final: Failed the midterm, did pretty well on the final. Reinmenn will do grade replacement if it helps you (which it did massively). Tests are pretty tough and always a time crunch, best advice I can give is to become a master at the labs and know them in and out.

I was not expecting to get an A in this class and I did bc I grinded for the final and didn't understand a lot of the material to the end. IMO the assembly stuff (bomb and data lab) is the hardest, and the theory and computer architecture stuff later gets a bit easier. Was a pretty tough class for me in general and I wasn't a fan of the content most times. Reinmenn can be a confusing lecturer at times but ask him questions and he will give you great responses and help clarify things tremendously. He switched back from flipped classroom to a normal classroom this quarter which definitely improved test scores but his lecture material can be dense.

cs majors reading this go take a shower right now

Test review

Glenn Rienmann does not deserve the high rating he has on Bruinwalk. The flipped classroom approach would be reasonable if during the actual lectures he went into more depth about the things covered in recordings. However, lectures were just a disorganized mess that often left me with more questions than I had at the beginning. The recordings themselves were fine however but the fact that I had to watch them on my own time was annoying. Furthermore, people talking about a high curve in the comments are talking about something that is no longer applicable - the grade distribution for this class is not as nice anymore with Rienmann himself saying that this year he aimed for:

35% A's of some kind
37% B's of some kind
23% C's of some kind

This is a far cry from the 75%+ are A's of previous years so be warned!

I was also not so happy with the projects we had to do. The projects (and most of the slides) are copied from CMU's curriculum, with a lot of the solutions floating around on the internet, making it extraordinarily easy to cheat in the class. If Rienmann cared about student learning, he could design his own, new projects for the class each year (I guess he did that this year with parallel lab?).

Overall, the class would have been interesting had it not been for Rienmann's dumb "flipped classroom" approach, disorganized lectures, the (in Rienmann's words) "generous" curve, and repetitive projects. Just take it in the fall with a different professor (Hopefully Nowatzki).

Reinmann is a pretty cool professor. He was very conscious of his students' performance, evident in how he rewrote his final in response to low midterm averages. He's nice on partial credit on exams, and a few of the labs get extra credit as well. The only thing I didn't like about CS 33 was the flipped-classroom format. I found myself spending a LOT of time on the class, watching both the pre-recorded video lectures and the in-class lectures. Eventually, I stopped attending the latter, and it didn't end up making much of a difference. CS/EE majors should take CS 33 with Reinmann.