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Elite Member
Join Date: Jul 2014
Posts: 738
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Author review |
Overall Rating | | 1 |
Professor Rating | | 1 |
Interest | | 1 |
Easiness | | 1 |
Average 10%
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Software Engineering 3SH3
Summary:
Operating Systems course for Comp Eng, Elec Eng and Tron students.
The course is supposed to teach you the basic parts that go into operating systems.
Marking Scheme:
10% - Assignments
20% - Midterm
25% - Final Exam (not required to pass the course)
45% - Projects
10% - Bonus Project
Prof:
Dreadful, one of the most unenthusiastic profs in the program. She used to work in University of Houston or something like that, and probably has the lowest RateMyProf rating in history of humanity.
... and now she's teaching us. Isn't that swell?
Midterms:
Pretty straight forward if you have good memory on textbook terms and such.
Assignments:
Basic questions from the textbook and the lectures. Assignments are part of Avenue2Learn homework, so it's pretty easy to succeed in those.
Projects:
Oh man, this part defines the course. Effectively the projects require you to complete a simulator OS. Some fancy shmancy piece of software that was first designed in the 90s, then transferred to Java in 2005. From what I know now, very few universities actually use it, wonder why....
Unfortunately this is where the course falls flat on its ass. The course is taken by Comp Eng, Elect Eng and Tron students. So basically programs that don't deal with complex high abstraction programming concepts that are used in Nachos. Essentially you end up learning the bloody thing more 90% of the time, and then trying to do the actual assignment within whatever time you have left.
There's no reason to take this course for students who deal with low level programming and hardware. Nachos simply doesn't teach you anything. If the course was dealing with low level implementation of the basic operating systems, like programming an efficient multitasking algorithm using a microcontroller while implementing the ideas that we learned from the book, that'd be awesome. It might be because of the fact that the prof came from the university that actually designed the thing, but as far as I know those guys are the only ones that use it and it's not used outside of the Software Department like it is in McMaster (Tron is part of Software, but whatever, you get the point).
Because of this, the only few people who succeed in the course are people from the Embedded Systems program (that are the only Software Students in class), and a few software buffs that just crack the code in no time. Make sure you get them in your team for the projects, otherwise you will be living in the world of pain.
Essentially, whoever designed the course knows nothing about the programs that take it. This seems to be a theme in McMaster's software department.
Conclusion:
This course is a pointless waste of time.
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