It is one of those classes where you get out of it exactly what you put in. It is graded on mastery-based, so you have the opportunity to redo assignments and assessments where you didn't do as well as you wanted to. Your final grade is determined based on tier bundles based on your scores in various categories (like projects, assessments, labs, etc), or more accurately, the level you scored at for projects and the yes or no getting of points for others. The assignments, as a result of this policy, are really challenging: no matter how good a student you are, you'll probably need to redo at least a couple things. However, you'll learn a lot, and high effort yields high results in most every case.

Racket as a language is probably not the most useful, but the material of 151 and getting you acquainted with the principles of CS using a language that kinda levels the playing field whether you came in with a bulk of CS experience or little to none is very useful, especially as you go throughout the major. Even in this intro class, you'll get acquainted with lots of data structures that you'll use well into your CS education and career (hash tables, structs, lists, vectors/arrays, etc). Aside from the language, which will pretty much stick to 151 for most students, it's a really valuable class, but if you're a non-major looking to pick up some surface-level skills in common languages, 105 might be more up your alley. This class can be taken by anyone but is designed for majors or potenti...read more

I personally think Sam is great, he is not the most organized though and the workload can be a lot for an intro. He does genuinely care about his student's though, so if you're feeling overwhelmed, talk to him and he will absolutely understand and be supportive.

If youre getting pushed up to the deadline, especially on projects and learning assessments, it's better to just submit something and know you'll need to redo than to turn in nothing at all. Even if your code is awful and doesn't work, you'll have the chance to try again at effectively no penalty, and you'll often get feedback that is super useful when you give it a second try. Don't let your ego get in your way here!