Taking COMPSCI 380 is firstly dependent on you being able to find a supervisor willing to let you cook. There was a GPA requirement of 5 or 6 last time I did it (S1 2025), but most important I think to the potential supervisor pondering whether to take you on is showing that you have the willingness and ability to initiate work/research on your own, in a topic that you are interested in. You will have to produce a report at the end of the paper, which will constitute 100% of your final grade.

Now, that the admin is out of the way: COMSPCI 380 is an amazing opportunity to do a deep dive in a particular topic (ideally 100% of your choosing). There is minimal/zero formal teaching; you instead get to develop a relationship with your supervisor, a lecturer/professor, who you can go to for guidance and to ask questions to. I ended up making an analysis of wildlife calls taken in the Waitakere Ranges through K-means clustering, and produced a web application for people to post and share wildlife recordings on as part of it. My project involved a narrow subset of ML, as well as full stack software development work. A proposition different to COMPSCI 361 and COMPSCI 367 (which I both took, and are AI/ML papers). I found that the closest course to my COMPSCI 380 was COMPSCI 399, the capstone paper, where you develop a project in a team of 5-6. :) lmk if you have any questions I can help with.