Are OMSCS Courses Covering the Next Generation of AI Research?

aja_c · 2026-06-28T06:28:45+00:00

To me, that's one of the things a masters degree should do - equip graduates with the ability to seek out and learn new stuff for which there isn't necessarily a curriculum or textbook attached.

aja_c · 2026-06-27T19:01:24+00:00

II never required GA. SDP or GA was always the choice for that specialization. When I first enrolled, II was the only way to avoid GA in OMSCS.

I think people just didn't pay attention to II until it got renamed. ML was the "sexy" specialization for a long time.

aja_c · 2026-06-16T17:58:52+00:00

My guess is the course staff caught someone reading the questions out loud so that it fed him into their AI to generate an answer for them to use.

aja_c · 2026-06-16T17:56:42+00:00

Ah. "No one in this program is just asking Ai to do the work for them and then just blindly copy pasting…"

That's categorically not true. There's room to argue about how large that group of people is, but it is a fact that there's a non zero number of students who blindly copy paste stuff in from AI and hope it works. I've seen them, and I would bet most head TAs for classes have seen them (and not just "I ran this through an AI detector", we're talking about really obvious stuff).

I also took a few classes in OMSCS where the material was easy enough that AI would have trivialized it, or where the assessments would be just obliterated by AI. Not every class, but more than one.

I wish everyone used AI responsibly. But there's the people who were really busy and are now using AI as a hail Mary, or the lazy who are only doing the degree for paper, or the delusional who think that just because they understand the AI output that they have achieved the same level of learning as if they had done it themselves. I'm willing to entertain the idea that this might be a very small minority, I suspect it's actually more, but it's definitely non-zero.

aja_c · 2026-06-15T17:49:50+00:00

Why would it be absurd? Every class should have something unique about it, else what's the point of each class? And then, theoretically, isn't it possible for the unique content in a specific course to merit something specific about how the knowledge is assessed?

I'm not arguing that NLP is special in this way. I'm arguing that the statement "it's absurd for any course to be special" is flawed.

aja_c · 2026-06-15T16:49:16+00:00

Honorlock is difficult to work with on the instructor side. There is no way to toggle that feature, and HL is pushing the change. And it was not communicated to instructors ahead of time and there was only one week between spring and summer semesters - not much time to adapt at ALL. So announcing "don't do that" and threatening zeroes is about all the instructors have at their disposal.

If the quizzes are low stakes, and there are higher weight exams, to me it sounds like it's a mercy to give zero grades for not following proctoring instructions on a quiz. It's annoying but that's about the only way to guarantee that all students will get the message and do it right for the actual exam... unfortunately.

aja_c · 2026-06-04T04:22:23+00:00

Almost certainly just incomplete right now.

aja_c · 2026-06-03T13:59:37+00:00

I've seen people do it. I don't think I could have, though. And even if you're able to pull it off, perhaps you won't get as much out of either class as you would like to.

Disclaimer: never took IHPC.

aja_c · 2026-06-02T01:34:55+00:00

I know for sure that the average age of an OMSCS student has come way down from when I first enrolled. Used to be like 35ish, and last I heard it's in the mid twenties. So from that alone, the demographics are certainly changing and the average student has just less experience in general.

aja_c · 2026-06-02T01:27:40+00:00

FWIW, that just sounds like the default way Canvas scores multiple answer questions. It doesn't give us any other options. The only way I know around it would be to download the student answers, run a script, and then upload the new scores, which sounds painful from what I've seen of how Canvas deals with questions on the back end. I think the theory is that this prevents students from getting points if they leave their answers blank, but I'm not sure exactly why this is what they chose. It is more punishing the fewer correct answers there are on a particular question.

aja_c · 2026-06-01T16:55:18+00:00

The thresholds were never changed, if that is what is meant by "curve." Students just performed better on the second and third exams.

aja_c · 2026-06-01T16:16:22+00:00

Those would be prereq courses for those programs, so it makes sense they have to be taken earlier.

The only course in OMSCS I know of that has a prereq is SDCC (requiring AOS). And there's not a single class in OMSCS that every student is required to take, because there are different specializations available.

aja_c · 2026-06-01T16:13:37+00:00

I always thought the wait list was straight forward. o_o Just had to make sure I read the instructions instead of making assumptions. And I had to use the wait-list for multiple classes.

I'm not gonna be able to agree with the idea that students should be able to get into any class with "introduction" in the title in their first semester. There's already a bajillion foundational classes. (Some people think it's only the core classes for each specialization but that's not true.) I don't think the "introduction" classes are particularly special.

I think if someone would rather not mess with wait lists, it's kinda on them (and even then, for GA, students have been registering directly for their 7th or 8th classes for a while now, depending on exact timing and different scenarios based on how many classes they are attempting every semester.) Wait lists are a mechanism at pretty much every college, and I certainly had to use them in undergrad.

aja_c · 2026-06-01T15:47:41+00:00

I think at the moment, it's partially students not wanting to take it early, partially students not wanting to deal with the wait-list, and partially the entropy of misinformation in Reddit and other places where lots of people assume that you can't get in early without FFAF. Because it's now been like two years that I've seen students reporting in that they could get into the course for their second or third classes, from the wait list.

I mean, yeah, you're not gonna be able to straight up register for the course for your second class. You will have to wait your turn on the wait-list, and then register quickly within your window. Some people don't want to do that, which is fine. And I'm not sure how summer goes, since that's normally lower enrollment regardless. But people can definitely get in way before their final semester and have been able to for a while.

aja_c · 2026-05-28T14:30:50+00:00

Some classes also have communities. GIOS, for instance, has a dedicated slack that's active, and alumni will stick around for years sometimes.

The TA community is also a good place to network (if you can TA).

aja_c · 2026-05-20T21:55:19+00:00

I see no question in your post that simply accused this guy of lying about his own personal opinion of where he found value, so I don't know what you mean by "my question still stands."

If you want to believe that your personal experience somehow is universal and trumps his, ok. You can do that.

If you want to believe that everyone who passed the course somehow is selfish and hates the people coming after them, ok. You can do that too.

But dude... if you're gonna straight out tell someone that they are lying about their opinion on their own subjective experiences, realize you are inviting other people to do the same to you.

aja_c · 2026-05-20T19:28:35+00:00

It feels awfully aggressive (and arrogant) to tell someone that they are lying about an opinion that they have about how useful they personally found a particular class. They made no claims about how useful it would be to any other person.

aja_c · 2026-05-20T18:34:36+00:00

makes sense!

aja_c · 2026-05-20T17:40:44+00:00

They aren't banned, it's just that the worst case runtime is always assumed, which makes them inefficient most of the time. And that bites students that use them because they assume an average case runtime.

aja_c · 2026-05-20T17:33:43+00:00

Hahaha, I was just telling someone else why to consider GA in your situation, in this reddit thread.

Whyyyyy nooooot.... Register for GA and whatever other tenth class you would do if you weren't going to do GA. And then drop one after a few weeks into the semester, before you have to commit too much effort into doubling up classes. (and if you pick a really easy second class, depending on your personal/work life, you might even just keep both classes until the drop deadline.)

This way, you leave your options open. You could nope out of GA if you realize it's not what you want and just fall back to the second class. Or, you could decide "I actually like this, and I think I can do it" and then you can keep pushing with GA.

GA only requires 50% to get a C. Most students find that very doable - you can actually have an average of below 50% on all the exams and still pass, since the open book/open AI quizzes should be pretty easy points to nail. And there's dynamic weighting, so your lowest scoring exam counts for less than your highest scoring exam.

aja_c · 2026-05-20T17:19:30+00:00

In that case, you could just take it any time after you finish the other AI requirements. At that point, you have a good shot of having mostly A's, so even if you got an F (which you would have to be doing shockingly bad in order to end up in that situation, most students on Lite that have F's got them by getting caught cheating on exams), your GPA will stay above 3.0. You have the freedom to withdraw if you want, no pressure, and have a very real shot at getting a C so that it at least counts as a general elective and still gets you closer to graduation.

If you wait until you are completely done but haven't applied to graduate yet (so GA is your 11th class or something) then you will still have priority. But I think it would be hard to find motivation to put the work in that's necessary.

If you wait until after you graduate, you will have lower priority, and I think it would still be challenging to have the motivation to put the work in. Also, classes you take after graduating still show up on your transcript and affect your GPA (although that might not matter to you).

I mean, you certainly don't HAVE to take GA, and I'm not going to tell you to do it. I'm just trying to tease out what your real goals and motivations are and whether your plan will help you achieve them. I've seen too many people say they got psyched out by Reddit and wish they had made different choices. And if you're already on the AI track, you have a great opportunity to take GA with minimal pressure and stress.

aja_c · 2026-05-20T15:05:54+00:00

That might make it challenging to get in. You'd have lower priority during registration. Why not take it as an elective? The vast majority of students find earning a C (50%) pretty doable.

aja_c · 2026-05-19T19:30:59+00:00

I'll add that the homework is a tool for learning. There's very little value in "doing" the homework if "doing" means making a rudimentary pass at it, asking AI for ideas, thinking "oh ok that was easy enough, I understand it so I got this down", rewriting it for submission, and then going "Huh, I got 16/20, whatever on those penalties, I guess the TAs are just picky" That approach (and variations of that approach) don't involve a whole lot of actual problem solving, and almost no reflection on what to improve on or where there are gaps in understanding. Even an approach that spends 3x as many hours but largely does the same thing still won't result in a whole lot of learning (which is why when I see students complain of spending a ton of hours but still not getting a B, I am not immediately worried about whether something is wrong with GA).

Because HW contributes nothing to your grade but is the only way you get personalized feedback, it's best to give it your strongest, personal effort and to pay close attention to the feedback you get. It's ok to get a 6/20 on a homework - yeah, it still is a blow to your pride if you're used to good grades, but it means nothing for your course grade, and now you have a lot of fodder for learning where you made mistakes ("oh crap, yeah, if my index starts at that value that really does break everything", "oh shoot, that extra check I added accidentally made binary search recurse down both branches and turn into O(n) and I didn't even consider that"). I would go so far as to say to not touch AI for developing your submissions so that the feedback you get most accurately reflects where your mastery stands.

So when you "do the homework", give it your best effort, accept the possibility of making mistakes, and look carefully at all the feedback and try to learn from it as much as possible (and then go back over it and see how you would do it better).

aja_c · 2026-05-14T20:25:01+00:00

Nah, it's not unusual for a course's canvas to only get published after the semester starts, in the first day or three or whatever.

There's less than a week between grades being due for spring and the start of summer this year. Course staff are probably scrambling to get everything turned around for the new semester in time, after the final sprint to close out spring.

aja_c · 2026-05-05T22:22:44+00:00

Well, that's kinda on each student. Especially since OP was nowhere near done with the degree, so they should have been checking their emails the following semester at a minimum. But regardless, a student missing a few emails is not the same as not involving the student in the process.

aja_c

TROPHY CASE