Course: Amount learned
Course: Appropriateness of workload
Course: Fairness of grading process
Course: Overall quality
Instructor: Organization and preparation
Instructor: Classroom delivery
Instructor: Approachability
Instructor: Overall quality
Any additional comments (about the course, instructor, assessments, online experience, Zoom, review sessions, etc.)? Feel free to discuss anything and everything Operating Systems related.
On the by-and-large, the assignments are very well designed and went a long
way toward improving my understanding of the material. The Zoom lectures
were very solid, and all the TAs are lovely.
Jae continues to keep his students and their learning experience as a
priority, and this is seen by his extended efforts to make sure we were
still learning and engaged, even through all the challenges COVID has put
up. It is true this class is extremely difficult and not easy, but I am
grateful to have such an amazing professor and staff of TAs to help guide us
through. Thank you Jae for a great year!
OS=life
This class was absolutely brutal once we went online. I really have enjoyed
it overall, and I feel like I’ve learned so much, but it just became so much
harder to learn, focus, and complete tasks once we were virtual. I know
that’s not anyone’s fault, I just wish I had a regular semester because I
feel like I let myself down in the second half and could have done much
better. Thanks to everyone for being so understanding though in this tough
time!
10/10 would take again One nit: my groupmates and I found some of the HW
specs a little misleading sometimes. Often, they would signpost when exactly
you needed to go off the deep end and search the kernel for the random
macros, etc. we'd need (e.g. "you might want to look at x, y, and, z files,
along with some others"), and sometimes they would hold your hand and walk
you through a more technical step. Sometimes, though, you needed to do very
technical things that the specs glossed over, leading us to suspect that
those things couldn't have been correct. I've kind of purged my brain of OS
at this point, but I remember this coming up during HWs 7 and 8 especially.
In Pantry, for example, we found it kind of weird that the specs would
explicitly mention d_add() but not something like d_make_root(), which
seemed just as necessary. Something even as small as "this is harder than
it looks" in the directions would be nice in cases like these. If that makes
things too easy, it would even be better if there were never any hints about
the kernel digging at all---it was mainly the inconsistency that was
confusing.
It was a very great course and Jae was very prepared as usual. The TAs were
very impressive and had a deep depth of knowledge. Would definitely
recommend this course for every CS major.
There could have been more focus on how to solve problems rather than some
(sometimes) outdated backgrounds and theory to particular problem. I think
that the group projects are a good motivator and good learning experience in
this course, but perhaps some recitation style reviews would be useful
especially for things like locking. The dev guides were a very useful and
clear resource
Great course leaned a lot!
Thank you for soliciting feedback after the midterm and for the course as a
whole (it is appreciated!), as well as trying to teach us as best as
possible given the circumstances.
I think this course was important in that I learned a lot of really intense,
interesting material about how computers work. However, I think that the
structure of this course does a really bad job of making the class feel
equal and accessible to all students, and I know that within my group, it
has been women who disproportionately feel this way. I think the Listserv
is really problematic because if you look at the participation rate, there
is a huge disparity between men vs women participating. It should say
something that at many times throughout the semester, you actively had to
scroll back many many emails to find one female student voice. Even though
there are fewer women than men in the class, the Listserv is continually
dominated by a few male voices. You could argue that these are the students
who are most engaged, but I would also argue that there is a caveat here--
these are the students who are most confident about sharing their questions
and troubles publicly. In AP, I never felt seriously uncomfortable using
the Listserv because women contributed too and there was a wide range of
questions. Numerous studies how that women feel more comfortable and often
are more successful when there is a greater female presence in a class.
Because the Listserv was almost all male and dominated by a few powerful
voices, it made getting help feel less accessible and more intimidating. I
understand that Jae has reasons he prefers using a Listserv to a Piazza, but
I would seriously suggest that he look at the statistics of what his
Listserv is doing and consider the effects it might have on the confidence
of women in his class. Students are told that there is a TA Listserv where
they can ask questions, but it is made clear on the first day of class that
emails here are answered AFTER emails to the real Listserv, effectively
telling students that the questions of those who feel less comfortable using
the Listserv are lower priority than the people who dominate it. It straight
up sucks to feel like your question would be answered later simply because
you don't feel comfortable posting yours publicly (perhaps because you feel
like an outsider in the class or on the Listserv). I additionally think
that the class sometimes breeds a toxic culture of "flexing" and that the
Listserv at times contributes to that (which in turn makes it more
intimidating for women and people who are not doing as well in the course).
Consider one of the threads that happened after the first exam. Someone
congratulated the TAs for the exam, but they didn't do it in an email to the
TA Listserv, they did it publicly, and other people (all male) in the class
hopped on to say how the exam was "on point." It is a completely different
thing to say that the TAs worked really hard, than to adopt the almost
bragging tone a lot of these messages seemed to have. I know I personally
was really nervous leading up to the exam because I felt on a much lower
level than the people I saw "flexing" consistently on the Listserv, in a way
I never felt in AP, despite having done quite well on and invested a lot of
time into the semester's first half of assignments. What I mean to say is
that the culture of the class (particularly what I saw on the Listserv this
semester) sometimes contributed to an impostor syndrome that I know myself
and a member of my group felt pretty strongly at times. I hope that in
thinking about the course for next year, the statistics of the Listserv will
be taken into account and the fact that women's voices were
disproportionately low in this class will be noted, and hopefully action
will be taken to remedy this.
I love Jae. I love OS. It changed my life. I will miss you Jae. Please teach
more classes just so I can take them with you 🥺. On a more serious note, I
felt like OS was extremely well-structured, and I learned a great deal from
this class. The group project format really helped me build my teamwork and
communication skills, and allowed me to learn (from trial and error) the
most optimal way 3 people could work on 1 file of code at once. My teammates
and I made many fun and fulfilling (albeit extremely painful...) memories
through OS: staying up until the sun rose at 6 AM, 3 days in a row, fueled
on Red Bull, working on Fridge; drawing out extensive diagrams and
pseudocode on the whiteboard in the McBain lobby lounge; crowding around the
central person's computer and pointing out small typos; ordering fried
chicken to procrastinate actually working on the project; staring at the
screen silently for an hour when we ran into bugs... Even after Columbia
went online, this situation turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as we
quickly adapted to group-coding over Zoom. It was, all in all, a wonderful
bonding experience for the three of us, and we certainly grew to understand
each other as people much better. In regards to course content, Jae taught
it extremely well and the kernel is no longer some mystical black-box beast
to me. Hooray! :D Many concepts that confused me in AP also became much,
much clearer after taking this class. I also really liked how the concepts
in OS could be viewed as extensions to the modern approach to labor as a
whole; it was so fascinating how machine reflected man so clearly in this
class. Very interesting stuff. Overall, an extremely painful but wonderful
course. (I must be a masochist. 😳) I enjoyed it tremendously. I learned so
much. Thank you. :D
It a very good course. Definitely the work is hard but I learned a lot by
going through this.
This was a difficult course, but I learned a lot. I don't think I'd ever
read this much code before. The class was decided to be online a lot earlier
than my other classes. I don't know how Jae predicted everything would
happen so fast, but it worked out well. The midterm was very different from
the samples but it was still a fair exam. I liked that the class had a sense
community and good humor. It still wasn't the same as AP though, and it
sometimes felt like people were straight-up showing off on the listserv. I
wish we'd had review sessions/videos/recitation notes to help us get started
with the homeworks, instead of Jae spending a lot of time on that during
lecture.
It'd be better to reintroduce basic ideas in linux like fork() as some
people never used linux before
I learned a ton in this course and really enjoyed it. Jae and all of the
TA's did a great job teaching the material and being approachable when it
came to questions on the assignments.
After each solution is posted, if TA can hold a review session or OH to
analysis the key points of the assignment, our understanding will be more
thorough. Overall, this is an excellent course and I get a lot. Thank you
Jae! Thank you all TAs!
Although I really liked the material taught in this class, I felt anxious in
participating on the listerv and even during office hours. While CS and
systems are traditionally male dominated fields, this class did not make an
effort to be inclusive. I frequently felt like I wasn't the intended
audience for the class, any interaction outside of the lecture (listerv and
office hours) were mostly male dominated and often involved questions about
the homework that went beyond the scope of the homework (which felt like
people wanting to exhibit they know more). While these questions/notes might
be helpful to some, it does create a stress culture around the class,
especially using a platform like the listerv. After the move to zoom, the
chat function being used by a lot of people for inside jokes was both
distracting and created an exclusive environment, where I did not feel like
I could ask questions I had. Jae is a great lecturer and I learned a lot in
both his classes, but because of these dynamics I've felt very anxious to
approach him.
I think the class and assignments were fantastic. I love Jae. The only thing
I found difficult was managing the assignments Amongst other classes. Though
group work made it much easier, faster, and helpful since we can communicate
and teach one another and split work. I can’t say I felt comfortable during
the assignments - I was in fear the whole time, but I can’t see any other
way to make it easier. I definitely think it’s a hard but excellent class.
First of all, thank you very much for the class! The following comments
relate only to the experience pre-zoom change. I would like to mention that
class felt a little more disorganized when comparing to AP. I know AP is
Jae's baby, but I was looking forward to having a similar experience here in
terms of my learning experience. However, while Jae knows a ton about OS, it
doesn't feel the same; the slides are old, the blackboard use is pretty much
non-existent, and the passion for this class is just not there. I feel like
I learned a lot about the history of OS's but not that much about OS's per
se. Also, I would also have appreciated some new topics in the OS world.
Despacito.
1. I think it might be more reasonable to change the group homework to be
individual homework, because we could not find a good way to collaborate on
this kind of assignment. Maybe it's better to make each assignment easier
and becomes individual one. 2. Since the homework is so hard, there are
usually many students attend OH, and the questions usually take very long
time to be solved, so we always waited for a long time, and sometimes cannot
be reached. I think the number of TAs should be greatly increased. Overall,
it's a super good class. Thank you all for the wonderful semester!
Great class. But I bet only 5% of the students did the optional final
project.
The workload is not sustainable for an undergraduate with lots of
coursework/many responsibilities. Instead of saying that the class should be
a 6 hour course credit and contributing to the stress culture of Columbia,
perhaps the workload should mirror that of a 3 credit class.
I prefer a 2 class day/week for this course. Since a lot of the course
material is rather dense, not staying engaged for the entirety of the
lecture sets you far behind.
1) The tag system for the homework was annoying. To some degree it makes
sense to split homework into different parts and use git tags for marking
it. But in many cases there is no real reason to split it into so many parts
and keep it all updated. For example, homework 8 is basically one project
that is developed iteratively, but requires it to be split into 9 different
tags. Then earlier parts need understanding of laters parts - e.g. the value
of nlink doesn't make a difference in the first formatting program. Then
those tags need to be updated, branches created, etc, what creates
unnecessary work and mistakes not related to material understanding. 2)
Grading of homework was very mechanical without much thought from TA's side.
No partial credits were given if TA's test programs failed, even in case of
small mistakes. For example, I printed stat in stdout instead of stderr and
the TA test program was checking only stderr. It didn't matter that it
didn't make any race conditions and implemented properly in other ways – the
fact that it printed it to the wrong IO zeroed the section. 3) The rubric
sections named by letters create unnecessary difficulties for referring
mistakes in homework. I can never tell what H1.2 or J2.1 mean until I find
the rubric, go back to coursework (cause I can never remember these codes),
and then find what part it's for. It would've been much more useful it was
called P10.2 or P13.5 indicating the part that it relates to.
I loved the structure of the assignments. Shame that COVID-19 impacted how
we worked on them.
Dave Dirnfeld
Overall quality
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Does this TA communicate effectively in English?
Comments
This guy know his stuff.
Dave is an incredibly talented and dedicated TA that would go above and
beyond to explain concepts and provide guidance.
So helpful!!!!!
He was very helpful and approachable
Thanks a lot for the help Dave! Enjoyed the quirky comments too :)
Thank you, Dave, for debugging our code! You're a lifesaver.
I really appreciate that Dave held his Saturday hours (sometimes the closest
to the deadline) because even though it's not convenient to come in on a
weekend, he made such an impact, helping a lot of students every time so
that no one neared the deadline while still completely stuck. I also know he
moved his hours at one point during the semester to be more helpful to
people and I seriously appreciate that! He also has a nice sense of humor
and is very approachable. He helps you figure things out in a way where you
are still doing the figuring out yourself, but he leads you in the right
direction. Also for my group, Dave was a hero because on one lab we had an
issue that we'd been to multiple office hours for and worked on for hours
but still not been able to fix. Dave suggested it within minutes and then
celebrated with us when we finally figured it out. His ability to help fix
sometimes bewildering kernel problems is amazing and his manner with
students is great. Thank you Dave!!
Dave!!! Very helpful and cool dude. Always had great responses on the
listserv. Thanks Dave!!! You're the man.
I really appreciated Dave trying hard to make his office hours a happy
place, whether that's bringing chocolate or just having a high energy every
time we went. He also uses the white boards and drawings effectively to
explain certain concepts.
Dave is a national treasure and he should be protected at all costs.
Dave is a super good TA. He even extended his office hour before hw due
data. Thank you Dave!
Hans Montero
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Hans gave me bad grades :(
I don’t understand how Hans is available literally 24/7 for OS but it’s so
helpful
kind of excellent
Hans was very knowledgeable about the subject and was very open about what
he knows and does not know. Something not all TAs do
I think Hans did an amazing job as a TA for this course because he
consistently seemed to care so much. Something I particularly appreciate
about him is that he actively moved his office hours all the time to be most
helpful to students. Some office hours throughout the semester were
consistently hard for me to make because of my schedule, and I know because
of the every-other-week nature of the assignments that some weeks, people
with hours early in the week had very low attendance. It means a lot to me
that Hans would anticipate problems like these and move his hours so that he
wasn't just meeting a requirement but actively helping as many students as
much as he could, even though it wasn't what he had originally scheduled for
himself. I also really appreciate how active he was on the Listserv. He
continually got back to me about problems really fast and helped me make
progress I couldn't always make on my own. He is also very kind and makes an
effort to be approachable and respectful to students. My one point of
critique would be that I didn't always understand all of the points he was
trying to convey in some of his lab hints emails, but maybe he just was
trying to be vague on purpose so as not to give things away.
One time I sent an email to the OS TA listserv at like 12am and then Hans
messaged me immediately saying he would take a look at the problem. Within
12 hours, he successfully helped me fix the problem. But no surprise at all
here, since Hans is just this kind of person. Always willing to help, very
smart but very humble, will put in a lot of effort to help students succeed.
Thanks Hans! 😎
Best TA！
Hans is truly one of the best TAs in the CS department and at Columbia
overall. He's understanding, cares about the class and the students, and is
great at explaining hard topics.
Despacito.
Hans replies very fast. Thank you!
Great experience with Hans at office hours. One time I went to host my OH in
the CS TA room and Hans happened to be there holding his OH as well. He said
"thank god you're not here for my OH" and proceeded to make dinner plans
with his sidekick Stanley.
Lucie Le Blanc
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Lucie is awesome of course.
Great!!!!! The best
equally excellent
Wasn’t very responsive when I had a grading issue even after I tested the
code again on my as well as my partners computer
The multi-server recitation she led at the beginning of the semester was
fast-paced but clear and informative. She helped my team debug a bunch of
scheduler and pantryfs problems that we never would have gotten on our own.
She clearly knows her stuff.
I love you Lucie 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺
I went to her review sessions back when I took AP, and she was just as
helpful and knowledgeable here. At first, I didn't remember any C and was a
bit nervous to ask language questions, but she helped me quickly re-learn
stuff from AP in a kind and nonjudgemental way. She is good at explaining
things visually and asking questions to help you figure out the basic parts
of each assignment. Her Friday office hours with Zach on campus were great
because the two of them worked together to understand and debug my team's
code. A+ team!
Lucie was always very helpful and patient in office hours.
Brilliant
Lucie helped us a lot. Thank you!
So thankful to Lucie for all the help along the way! She is amazing at
pointing people in the right direction without giving too much away
Stanley Yu
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Love this guy.
Thank you for staying after your OH ended to help us debug code!
Stanley!!! As always, an excellent and highly knowledgeable TA, whether in
Fundies or OS. I look up to you. Big kudos.
Stanley is amazing! Every time my team asked a question he would answer
without hesitation but also without giving away answers.
Matthew Broughton
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Matt!!! A truly excellent TA. B) (Please come back to AP too LOL)
I found Matt to be the most helpful TA – he was quick in understanding my
difficulties, concise and helpful in his answers, and always followed up if
he couldn't answer something.
This man is an absolute legend. No joke, his deep voice scared the shit out
of me at first, but I'm pretty sure he's a softie. He knows his shit
Zachary Schuermann
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I only interacted with Zach once in this class during office hours, but he
was really great! At the time, there were a lot of things I didn't fully
grasp conceptually about the assignment, but he was very patient and fielded
all my questions very well, and I was able to develop a better synthesis of
all the components in the lab through his office hours. Without his
explanations, I definitely would not have been able to complete as much of
the assignment as I did. Also, his listserv responses were always great, as
expected. Thanks Zach! You are a great TA! :D
He's chill and very knowledgeable. Friday office hours were great; he and
Lucie spent a lot of time helping our team debug code. I liked the OS
question of the week!