Your grade in the course is mostly dependent on exams and lab. The lab is worth 25% of your grade. The midterm is worth 20% of your grade and the final is worth 30%. Homework is worth 10% and quizzes are worth 15%. All the homework comes from the textbook. He gives 4 quizzes throughout the semester and he'll let you know about them in advance. This is a difficult course and is considered to be one of the harder courses in the CS curriculum. A final grade of 60% is considered to be a C- in his class so it's important to pay attention.

You will definitely need to pay attention in this course since the topics being covered are usually what a lot of CS jobs like to question you about in interviews. He starts the course with a math review and then goes over recursion on the first day. After that, you'll learn how to analyze algorithms and learn how to analyze the time complexity using Big-O notation. Then you'll learn about data structures which is what the majority of the topics in this course cover. These include stacks, queues, trees, lists, hashing, and graphs.

He uses up the entire class period to go over lectures. He'll engage with the class and ask questions but that hardly happens. The lectures can be very boring but try to pay attention as much as possible. He wants you to pay attention so that you can do good in the class.

Look over the PowerPoint before class and find a YouTube video about the topic being covered so that you'll have a better understanding of what's being covered.