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Taylor Oshan
GEOG276 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/13/2025 |
This class is pretty hard, and your grade will depend on how much work you put in. It's comprised of 8 Labs, 6 Quizzes, and 10 practice modules to help cover the topics. I'm going to go in depth on these Labs: Ok so the labs are weird because they start off really easy, get super hard in the middle of the semester, and get pretty easy in the last months of the class. AI will be your best friend if you're really stuck on something. Thankfully the program you're coding in (google colab) will have Gemini AI built into it. I would use gemini with caution though, because you don't want it to necesarily substitute your learning, however sometimes you'll run into a brick wall and literally have to use it. Labs 4 and 5 were by far the hardest and lowkey had me coding for hours. Make sure you make friends in your lab and try to tackle them together because I promise you it will save your sanity. I would try your best to maximize your grades on these labs because it's one of the main things you can control Quizzes: These 6 quizzes will actually make or break your grade. If you read any of the other reviews it's pretty apparent lol. Quizzes are only weighted to 30% of the grade so if you get a 100% on every lab + practice module you could theoretically fail all the quizzes are maybe stick a B. However if you really want an A heres what you're going to do. Quiz 1 and 2 are very free. 1 is just a multiple choice quiz (DO IT AFTER LAB 1 NOT BEFORE), and quiz 2 is mainly very basic concepts. Quiz 3 is probably the first real taste you'll get for these upcoming ones. Professor Orshan is very generious enough to essentially tell you what's on the quiz before hand. Even doing some demos on the board to let you know what to expect. To prepare for these write down everything he types, and before the test try to code some functions you think could be useful for the quiz beforehand to have at your disposal. This is essential for getting the most amount of points possible as typically the functions are like 50% of the grade itself. Quiz 4 5 and 6 are when the geospatial components come into play. This is when the practice modules are extremely useful as they outline what you'll expect to see. It gets pretty specialized to the point where you're going to know almost exactly what the quizzes will have within them. I would make sure you get close to or a 100% on at least the first 2, and maybe the 3rd. Then you can fallback on some of the more advanced topics. Practice modules: These are very basic datacamp activities that is just busy work. All are completion and help a lot in the second half of this class. Personally I didn't really pay attention much to the first half of the datacamp stuff because all that information is already on youtube and I just preferred to self study. But make sure you do these because its all just easy points you could grab I would say overall the class is fair, you just gotta be on your stuff extremely. Pull up to every lecture imo expecially if a quiz is coming up, however if you're a little lost in his lecture slides I really wouldn't worry, I stopped looking at those like halfway through the semester and just self studied the topics. However you should still pull up anyway for the quiz instructions he gives before the test. They're very important It may be a little scary and overwhelming at times but I promise it ends up being easier than you think, you just gotta put in the effort |
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Taylor Oshan
GEOG276 Expecting a B- Anonymous 01/20/2022 |
At the start of the Fall 2021 semester, this class was pretty easy. The only things I had to focus on were lab assignments and modules. The lab assignment criteria was clear on what you had to do for the programming, and the lectures that the professor teaches in class alongside the problem sets given to you help you get an understanding on how to use/execute specific coding for each assignment. Even though the problem sets are not required to complete, it is better to do them before doing the assignment since they provide an overview on what you need to do for said assignment. The practice modules are rather straightforward and easy to complete since you go to Data Camps and watch videos of programming for different Python related topics, then complete basic assignments that follow up with the videos. The modules are rather simplistic to do and easy points to earn for the class, as well as providing knowledge on Python programming. Overall, the course was good during the beginning of the semester, however, things went bad when during the middle of the semester, the professor decided to do quizzes in a PROGRAMMING CLASS, and he said that this was the first time he ever attempted to do such a thing. There was only 5 quizzes, however, they were worth more than the lab assignments, as well as the fact that the quizzes are not multiple choice, rather they are composed of PROGRAMMING, where we had less than an hour to write and execute coding to complete specific requirements. What made it worse was the fact that all of the quizzes focused on the harder topics that we barely covered in class one week beforehand. By the end of the semester, a lot of students in the class had a significant drop in their grades (including myself) due to the quizzes killing all of our grades. Dr. Oshan should either remove the quizzes from the grading criteria altogether or make the quizzes be focused on the easier topics, otherwise, the course is not worth it unless it is mandatory for your specific major or you are a Python programming expert. |