Laura Biester

I took the course with Biester. I'd say my experience in class was relatively good. Biester is very understanding of students' circumstances. I often found her explanations of concepts a little needlessly convoluted. It was also sometimes hard to stay engaged in class during her lecturing, but she makes sure to throw in discussions and group work. Just make sure you really pay attention. We had to do two programming exams during the semester alongside our normal midterm and final exam -- since we were given the coding problems beforehand they were not hard to study for. Project-style homework due each work could sometimes be difficult, but drop-in TA hours were so so so helpful. What you give into the class is what you get out of it; there's an opportunity to learn a lot.

I took the course with Biester. I'd say my experience in class was relatively good. Biester is very understanding of students' circumstances. I often found her explanations of concepts a little needlessly convoluted. It was also sometimes hard to stay engaged in class during her lecturing, but she makes sure to throw in discussions a …Read more

Good grading system with benchmarks that you could achieve to get an A. The primary part of this class was the culmination of an LLM model development in the second half of the year, which was difficult but doable with the homeworks and lectures. You have to pay attention because missing one class can throw you off

This course was not too difficult if you already have computing experience. I had done AP CS in high school and for the first bit of the course it was review, until eventually we got into some new data structures. Overall it wasn't too hard to do any of the homeworks, I only spent at most two hours on a weekly assignment