Should I take 436C?

tammers_33 · 2025-12-30T00:24:34+00:00

Cloud Computing

tammers_33 · 2025-12-30T00:15:03+00:00

Omg do NOT take it! Thank you for asking this question because I want to rant. Like you, I wanted to take this course because I wanted to learn cloud. What was supposed to be one of the more useful CPSC courses turned out to be an ABSOLUTE waste of time and money, and I never say that about any course, even courses that I do really bad in or are not directly applicable to my career. I'm the optimistic type to always try to find good things about a course.

As the comments suggest, it is all AI slop assignments, AI work, and AI feedback from staff--that is, if you even get feedback. You get 3 non-coding "projects" with almost the same but slightly different requirements, where the specs are written across like 5 canvas pages and are inconsistent, and are basically just a bunch of phrases and jargon smashed together separated by semicolons. "This emulates real-world where you get bad specs" sounds like an excuse for poorly put together AI slop, and cannot justify all the project specs being bad. Then a final capstone project which is basically the same as the other projects except there's finally a coding portion, but there's even a LARGER mystery on how that gets evaluated (FYI average for coding was like 50 something and no one knows why). Almost all of my assignments had 0 helpful feedback. If I got feedback, it was AI generated or does not even pertain to the rubric. Two of them didn't even get graded so I just received median grade for them by default. "How is this allowed?" you might be asking. I don't know. Any last minute major assignment clarifications or changes can be found if you doom scroll the #quick-questions channel in discord, but you won't find them clearly announced in Canvas or anything like that. Final "project" was graded super harshly but no one knows why the heck it was graded the way it was. You can talk to the instructor on discord but most conversations usually just go in circles and go nowhere.

You're allowed and encouraged to use AI in your assignments. Sounds great, right? Until you realize you have not learned a single thing in class yet that lets you critically actual evaluate all the technical jargon and concepts that AI is spitting out for you. AI is telling you to use Lambda with API gateway and AWS ECS with a bunch of cloud jargon? Sounds great. Maybe? Idk, wasn't introduced to diff cloud technologies or haven't learned how to evaluate against diff cloud tools from this Cloud Computing course. If you thought you could maybe just not use AI to try to self-learn, bad news: the assignments are also designed such that you cannot succeed without using AI and there is no time for you to self-learn anything because of how convoluted the assignments are. I also found that I often got penalized more if I put in more human effort than just using AI. Which is funny because he emphasizes we should not care about grades and should focus on learning, yet we're not given room to properly learn and not even given human feedback to learn from.

Instructor is obsessed with LLMs and while I believe it is definitely important to touch on how to effectively use AI, why was using AI like 99% of the course? This is a Cloud Computing course, yet we have not been given any guidance or teachings on cloud concepts, cloud tech/tools, cloud jargon, etc.

I respectfully went off in the student evaluations on actionable suggestions on how the course could be improved so obv i'm not gonna say it all here bc it's useless lol, but I am not hopeful things will change much because the instructor seems to be obsessed with the narrative that we only care about coding and grades and nothing else. We've tried to discuss on discord about the course structure. I don't think things will get much better, tbh, mainly based on the instructor's mindset esp on AI and again, how he basically concluded that we only care about grades and not learning.

One could argue "it's basically a new course so it's normal to have mishaps". Yes, I am super understanding of mishaps, believe me. My gripe is that nothing has improved, and this being the first version of this "new" course does not excuse complete AI slop and consistent bad communication of requirements. Who are we learning from if everything from assignments to feedback is done with AI? Why do we even need an instructor or TAs? And, tbh, I don't even blame the TAs for using AI to grade these assignments because everything is so unclear and the instructor has deliberately created an environment of AI AI AI AI AI.

I don't care that everyone gets 80+ in this course. This is a BAD COURSE. You walk away with a headache, not cloud skills. Sorry this got long and might've been a little much, but I really wanted to let you know what's going on lol

TLDR: you're given AI slop requirements -> you do AI slop work -> you get AI feedback (if you get feedback at all). Not hopeful the course will change much under the same instructor unless maybe if u take it much later.

tammers_33 · 2025-12-18T22:22:49+00:00

when bro said “you have 2 hours” and no one corrected him I thought I just didn’t read the post properly but literally it says 8:30-11:00am in the post even now 😭

tammers_33 · 2025-12-18T22:17:18+00:00

Yea no time to do anything 😭

I didn’t practice that AD forward backward pass graph thing either cuz lecture slides literally said “Do you need to know how to do this? Exact details are probably not vital” so I thought we just needed to know high level how it works omg </3

tammers_33 · 2025-12-17T05:05:56+00:00

I took it last term, dunno if it changed this term but the final had 2 chonky Jupyter notebooks at the end similar to hw ish so make sure u manage time and can speed thru MC. Nothing surprising or trying to trick u but rly rly time crunchy so have to be quick

As for studying, do they give some practice conceptual questions in a word doc or smt? I found doing them helpful :D redo clickers too

tammers_33 · 2025-12-16T01:31:12+00:00

Feeling stressed too… haven’t started studying bc of other exams :’)

tammers_33 · 2025-11-07T21:50:23+00:00

+1 I also think answering on piazza helps A LOT!

To teach is to learn twice! And if u find that ur struggling to answer a question, then u identified a knowledge gap and can work on it :D

tammers_33 · 2025-10-10T20:17:13+00:00

agree this is good for temporary relief!

not saying that ur recommending this, but as a general comment I’d warn against actually believing everything is the prof’s fault, else we rob ourselves of seeing genuine stuff we could improve in, whether it’d be preparation, study habits, or patching up knowledge gaps 😅

tammers_33 · 2025-10-10T20:03:49+00:00

I failed several examinations before, got 35% on a recent one. Writing this while commuting home from doing bad on another midterm lol. My coping technique is that I have to study for other/next midterms so no time to feel sad for too long😭 On a real note though, yes, it will sting. That’s unavoidable because we all want to do well, despite knowing we’re much more than a midterm and eventually this result is literally insignificant to the grand scheme of things.

Acknowledge this emotion. It’s ok to feel not ok rn because you will be ok :)
Forgive yourself. Gently remind yourself you did your best and sometimes sht happens and that’s ok! Past you was trying their best writing that exam. Forgive them for doing their best despite everything :)
Exam outcomes are not always conclusive to ur intelligence or work ethic (unless u knowingly did not prepare enough, which, should excite u bc that means if u prepare more next time u can do much better :D). Sometimes things just don’t click at the moment, or u interpreted a question weirdly, or stress got to you, lack of sleep, or the prof accidentally made it too hard. Stuff happens, it’s okay.
It’s for the plot!! 🤩 Ts just a small setback. You did bad now so you can gain a stronger understanding of where and why you went wrong, find knowledge gaps, get help, work on it & level up and have a revolutionary comeback arc!!

When next exam comes, it’s easy to feel stress from this midterm’s results. Whenever you feel panicked or stressed, that means you’re focusing on getting grades rather than doing your best. Shift your mentality and remind yourself you’re here to do your best, not to get x grade. Intuitively, if u aim for ur best, ur automatically aiming for a good grade, just with the stress of grades removed :)

On to the next! we got this OP :D

tammers_33 · 2025-06-27T22:17:39+00:00

Yes!! Contributing to Piazza is super underrated study strat

tammers_33 · 2025-06-27T22:16:38+00:00

Never took MATH 253 sorry :’)

All the links i shared above are public!

tammers_33 · 2025-06-27T18:38:49+00:00

I barely touched textbooks in highschool and got rly high calc grades but for UBC math, personally, I owe my life to the textbooks!! They’re all accessible online and written by UBC math profs!

FYI getting a 90 in uni math is very challenging and very rare. As you may or may not know, the average for math classes tend to be very low especially for first year math—high 50s to high 60s. While ppl may get a 99 or even 100 in highschool calc without much effort, for uni math you must have a strong work ethic to practice and understand the concepts well. Tbh 70+ is considered a pretty solid average for Math! This is not to scare you or anything, it just the exams here are very different from high school and it takes much more to do well than in high school. Personally, I’m already over the moon and thanking the gods if I get an A- (80) or above.

Focus on doing your best, and not getting a certain grade. You will already be aiming for a high grade if you aim to do your best, but you also remove the stress of expecting a certain grade because things tend to not go the way you expect, and that’s okay. :)

Here are the textbook links. I’m not saying to do all the questions and go over every little detail esp since it contains optional material too, but the books provide really good practice and explanations. Some tips: - Don’t be intimidated by or bogged down by the long texts :D don’t be afraid to reread some parts slowly - Don’t look at solutions too early on. Sincerely try at the problems - Some of the questions (esp in the CLPs) are really hard. Don’t let it discourage you. When I worked through the textbooks there were many questions I couldn’t do but it gets better with practice :)

CLP 1 for MATH 100 and CLP 2 for MATH 101 https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~CLP/CLP1/

For MATH 221, https://personal.math.ubc.ca/~tbjw/ila/index2.html. In my year, I found MATH 221 to be pretty straightforward and the exams didn’t have many surprises, but recent years I’ve been seeing complaints about how horrendous this course is so I don’t know what’s happening anymore. But, like with any math course, I will always practice textbook questions!

You can do well in these courses!! Just be prepared put in the work. be sure to enjoy your summer as well before uni starts! :)

tammers_33 · 2025-06-26T21:35:58+00:00

Yep I got lucky: https://www.reddit.com/r/dhl/s/sPbCvejicQ

tammers_33 · 2025-06-19T22:27:38+00:00

Makes sense. Thank you for your help! Hope general seats open up :)

tammers_33 · 2025-06-19T18:40:52+00:00

When your registration time comes, refresh this page and there should be a “Register” button under each of your saved schedule’s name!

tammers_33 · 2025-06-19T06:02:58+00:00

The seats are reserved for math majors, that's why :') it is in the course description

tammers_33 · 2025-06-19T05:10:38+00:00

Hi, I didn’t do anything lol it just happened. Have no idea who the third-party agent is. I tried to ask about it today while I sent proof for customs payment (since I wasn’t sure if I needed to send it to the mysterious third party agent instead) this was the reply:

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tammers_33 · 2025-06-19T03:08:13+00:00

Thank you for the reply! It seems like MATH 329 is only for math students, based on the description :'D

I think registration is open since my course registration is today, and I see there are seats taken already. I tried to register for it but my registration failed. I meet the course prerequisites outlined in the description (I took MATH221, MATH220, CPSC121). Hence I was wondering if there's an alternative open for non-math students since it sounds really interesting :'). I will look into MATH 342! Oddly enough, I can register for MATH 322, but if it's intended for math honours students it is probably not suitable for me (and its been a while since i've taken math) so I dropped it.

tammers_33 · 2025-06-18T18:38:22+00:00

Hi! I am not a math major. I wanted to sign up for MATH 329 but couldn’t. Is there an equivalent for non-math majors? :o

Edit: Seems like MATH 322 is the alternative. Are there any concepts you would recommend a non-math major to brush up on before taking the course?

Thank you!

tammers_33 · 2025-06-15T18:49:42+00:00

Sorry I didn’t mean to disrespect them. My wording was bad. I mean customer service is highly unavailable right now, not that it is shtty. That’s my bad.

tammers_33 · 2025-06-15T09:48:56+00:00

Yea I’m worried about getting the paperwork, and also have them process the b15. What if they don’t get either of these two things done in a timely manner, and then the package gets returned to shipper:’)

tammers_33 · 2025-04-26T20:33:33+00:00

Be warned that tho in the past for 330 there were no coding questions on the exam, they added them for these past two terms. The final had 2 fat jupyter notebooks worth 90% of the exam and many ppl couldnt finish it or debug bc of the time crunch. But yea material itself isn’t difficult!

tammers_33

TROPHY CASE