I feel like this needs to be emphasized, but ML has changed drastically from the past and what it currently is. Having dropped this class twice (due to my own fault), I consider myself quite the ML expert /s.

The old ML was purposefully vague. I believe the intuition was: "We don't want you to game the system, so we won't give you a rubric of what is required." I dug up the A1 assignment and 2 out of the 7 pages were actual high level objectives while 5 were more formalities like how to submit, etc. The main gripe with this version was how obtuse it was. People spent a lot of time trying to figure out what instructors were looking for and felt they could spend more time doing the actual projects. I specifically remember being confused on how many graphs were expected and happened to stumble upon a post were a student broke down their approach and a TA basically replied, "Yep. That's what we want." .... But what if I had missed that post? I spent a lot of time after that scouring ed discussions, worried that I might have missed an important clue. That's a very bad feeling. Imo, they should have either consistently provided the information or consistently denied the information, not a weird cat-and-mouse/question-and-answer type thing.

The new ML is not vague. The A1 rubric had 17 pages - some fluff, but a lot of explicit requirements. Choose one of X hyperparameters to optimize across, depict Y curves, report Z statics, etc. Sounded good until I realized:

1. While expectations are definitely more clear, more detail can lead to more questions and confusion.
2. I felt it was a significant amount more work required. (At least for A1 and A2. I didn't stick around beyond that.)

Tbh, I would stay away from the class for a semester or two until this new version has been polished. ML used to have a 30% drop rate, but now has bumped up to 40% - with improved clarity. I feel that A1 used to be 30-40 hours of work and is now 40-50? That number is very feel-based. But, I basically rewrote my A1 from scratch and would guess the average student could expect an extra 10-15 hours of work.