CS 161 – Computer Security – Syllabus and important notes [pdf]

[joshAg]

I thought this was a joke, but apparently it isn't.

Summary: Late to a class? You get an F and need to leave.

Late to section? You get an F and leave. By the way, four sections have been dropped. If you have a schedule conflict, report it by September 2nd, or get an F and need to leave.

Unanticipated absence due to family emergency or medical reasons? Full documentation must be submitted on the same day, or get an F.

Religious absence? Submit it by September 2nd, or get an F.

Cell phone beeps? Get an F and need to leave.

Use any non-medical electronic device at all? Get an F and need to leave.

Don't have a book yet? Pay $50 and also pay out the nose extra to get it overnighted; there's an exam on Monday. Oh, and the second textbook hasn't been published yet. Too poor? Too bad.

Requesting a re-grade? All of your exams will be re-graded.

Need to use the bathroom during a quiz? No.

Need to use the bathroom during an exam? Your test will be taken from you and photographed, and you will be escorted to the restroom.

Suspect someone is looking at your exam sheet? Stand up and report it immediately during the exam or get an F.

[jackmaney]

Required attendance for college courses is bullshit.

I believed that as an undergraduate. I believed that when I became a TA during my last semester as an undergraduate. I believed that throughout graduate school (where I TAed and taught several classes on my own). I believed that in my years as an Assistant Professor (before leaving for industry...long-ish story). And I most certainly believe it now.

Oh, sure, attendance is important. I always encouraged students to attend my courses. But college students are adults, and we should treat them as such. You know what? If you're hungover, or sick, or just walked away from a car crash, or exhausted, or in any other state where attending class isn't the best use of your time, then by all means, don't. You're an adult now. You can make choices and take the consequences of those choices.

And yes, I'll admit that I've had one or two students who skipped most of the lectures and did an excellent job on the quizzes, exams, and final (however, in my experience, students who could get away with that generally don't).

These issues aside, though, I didn't go to college for nine years to be a glorified hall monitor.

[zhte415]

I did maths in Imperial College several years ago. They had a simple way of assuring attendance: no text books. Everything was recorded by hand in the lecture (before the age of digital cameras). Not one course I took had a textbook. As a largely self taught book based nerd that didn't like authoritarian structure, I took myself to a university that was somewhat more sane.

[beambot]

Agreed, monitoring for required attendance is BS. The stern wording re:grading is probably sufficient to weed out grade chasers. Providing valuable information beyond the textbook in lectures will (in effect) cause mandatory attendance or enforce subject mastery on exams.

[induscreep]

Haha maybe my previous comment is off-topic, but it's because I want to read stories more like http://matt-welsh.blogspot.com/2010/11/why-im-leaving-harvar...

[induscreep]

Could you tell us why you left academia for industry?

[saidajigumi]

Sigh. Because 90s-boom-startup mentality is a really great pedagogical tool on motivated, previously tightly selected students. Or human beings in general. NOT.

Also, this bit: "Grading will be _highly competitive_." Meaning: "I could have used powerful team collaboration tools in this classroom, but instead I've pitted these students against each other." Meaning: "I don't actually understand evaluation of performance, I just like bludgeoning people over whom I have power." Meaning: "I was hazed with this kind of crap as a student, I think it put a few hairs on my chest, and so I return the abuse unto you."

Listen up, instructor: Berkeley probably has some excellent instructor training resources. You've missed the past half-century, esp. the past fifteen-or-so years, of vast improvements in educational methods. Maybe your security chops are great, but your syllabus says something radically different about your teaching skills.

[Ar-Curunir]

lol. I highly doubt that that he was thinking that. You're spouting a lot of nonsense in that post.

The consensus here at Berkeley is that this is simply a ploy to get students to drop the class because there isn't enough space for everybody.

[num3ric]

I also truly despise the phrasing "highly competitive". These kinds of classes, when you take a few in one semester, can eat your soul. They drown you in just enough material to kill that initial spark of interest. Gone is the pleasure of finding things out. And when these 'competitive' students succeed and graduate, they feel lost/void because their life is not dictated by the next exam anymore. (Yes, I learned a lot but I'm still resentful. Syllabi like these are not right.)

[ibrahima]

Apparently this instructor was actually quite good in the past, I think this is just a really misguided attempt to make the class smaller because they don't have enough instructional staff. I feel like the only possible outcome is that the instructor is forced to rescind this syllabus and has his reputation completely ruined, which is sad. It appears that he's playing chicken with the university, and I don't think the outcome can possibly be good.

[dougtygar]

Hi, this is Doug Tygar here -- I'm in the instructor of the course in question. I appreciate all the comments -- but for various reasons, this course had a breakdown in finding TAs: so we have 170 students and only space for about 60-90 students. I'm sorry to say that the same problem is occurring in a number of other upper division (e.g., junior-senior) level classes this semester in computer science at Berkeley -- although for various reasons, CS 161 is taking it on the nose.

I really wish we had sufficient resources to teach the class properly.

[xvedejas]

At my university (Caltech), professors are not allowed to give proctored exams. Most quizzes, midterms, and finals are take-home. I'm curious why you think such strict oversight is needed when it's possible for things to work with no oversight at all? Wouldn't that be easier for you and the few TAs you have available?

[foobarbazqux]

Why not just arrange to pay the missing TAs out of your own pocket or a research grant? I'm sure you make enough money. If the issue is not financial but an inability to find other qualified TAs, then double the hours of the ones you already have and it will work out. Offer them 1.5x or 2x pay if they say they are too busy.

Asking students to drop the class just ends up making those who choose to stay in the class feel guilty. And employing draconian measures to encourage people to drop out in order to meet administrative needs is passive aggression, plain and simple. Your beef is with admin, not with students, so don't take it out on them, don't involve them in it, and don't use them as pawns.

Worst case, sacrifice research and do all the TA work yourself. You can use this as a bargaining chip with admin next semester.

[anonucbstudent]

This is quite a disingenuous explanation for the syllabus. Several of the aspects contained in the syllabus have nothing to do with a GSI shortage -- in fact, one of them (the daily quizzes adds work for the GSIs to deal with.

There's no reason to punish the undergraduate students for the failings of the department. Things like denying bathroom breaks don't do anything to help out your resource shortage, unless you're basically saying that the only way to have enough resources is to make the class so unpleasant that no one wants to take it. Still, this is completely unfair to those students that actually end up taking the class. If that is the case, I can at least understand it -- however, you should explicitly say so

If you've taken a particularly extreme approach to "wake the department up," you should just come out and say so, rather than claiming that this policy is the only way to deal with it.

A somewhat related thought:

I'm not sure what the reason for the lack of TAs is, but I do know that some of the security professors are spending their time on things other than Berkeley activities (i.e. startups, etc.). I have no idea if you're involved with this yourself, but perhaps you guys need to figure out how to get your faculty to be able to support more graduate students rather than spending your time coming up with an abusive policy.

[brianpgordon]

> You may not use any electronic device during class, including computers, tablet computers, cell phones, cameras, recording devices, calculator, or any device that emits noise (such as a beeping watch). Anyone who breaks this rule will fail the course and be asked to leave.

I think that at a certain point a professor's strictness just becomes an embarrassment to the department. This professor should be censured for this policy.

[nknighthb]

It's also a legal liability. He's just banned devices relied on by disabled students. His "alternative exam" will also not meet the requirements of many disabilities.

[derleth]

Disallowing a calculator in any upper-division math (or math-heavy) course is an embarrassment to the department in particular. If you can get a meaningful advantage by using a calculator, the course is bullshit and a waste of upper-division credits.

Yes, I include graphing calculators like the TI-84 or, my personal favorite, the HP-48GX. They can be used to store a tiny amount of note material, but, again, if you're testing for rote memory at that level, your course is bullshit and a waste of upper-division credits.

[k3n]

Is there any oversight at universities to how much extra-curricular time is to be expected? When I was in school I didn't know of any oversight, but perhaps it was behind-the-scenes...

> [...] you can expect to spend 20-25 hours each week on the class.

IMO you should be getting 20-25 credits then. Why even bother with assigning credits to classes, if it's not at all a realistic reflection of the actual effort required? It makes the credits seem 100% arbitrary.

[cdwhite]

So I was always told that (as beambot points out) the number of credits was based on lecture time, and moreover that you should expect to spend 2-3 times as much time outside of lectures as you did inside. So your generic 3-credit course (nominally three hours of lecture, actually more like 2 1/2) would require something like 9-12 hours total: 3 in lecture, 6-9 at home.

Now in my experience, this was much more accurate for humanities than for math/science classes, where the amount of time the class took depended strongly on one's ability and preparation. I remember in particular one math professor whose problems were tricky: if you had the right insight, the proof was usually very simple, but if you didn't have that insight, you'd struggle and struggle. (And then there were the classes for which I was way under-prepared, and on which I spent way more than 25 hours.)

Add on to that the fact the time spent in lecture (on which the number of credits depends) doesn't necessarily track the difficulty of the material, and you have a recipe for wide variation in the amount of time one spends for a certain amount of credits. (Labs are notorious for taking way more time than the number of credits.)

And then you get into how some classes are more efficient than others in terms of how much learning you get for the amount of time you spend, and this doesn't match up with the number of credits either...

[beambot]

Credits are based on time in class. I remember many grad classes that expected 2-3 hours per credit hour of weekly independent work. For example, problem sets and course projects were intentionally designed to push your limits. The best classes just assumed: if you're drowning, then you're probably taking in at least some of the water.

[sk5t]

I don't see the point of most of these policies other than to make people very, very anxious. Being late to section once or twice would seem to have no reasonable relationship to a student's understanding of the material, yet here it results in an instant F. I wonder if the instructor suffers from a personality disorder.

[acadien]

He actually has a pretty darn good rating on ratemyprof (yes I hate that site too). Anyways I suspect its his method of weeding out the students that are less passionate about the topic. As it says in the syllabus the class is overly full, and there aren't enough TAs to support it. I'm not defending his methodology, but I understand his motivation (preference to motivated students first).

[khwang]

I graduated from UC Berkeley a year ago, and I remember CS161 being known as one of the easier technical upper divs at Berkeley. Although I never took the course myself, these rules seem like quite a departure from the norm.

I wonder if perhaps the professor is trying to scare people into dropping the class?

[david_shaw]

> I wonder if perhaps the professor is trying to scare people into dropping the class?

This seems likely.

It also appears that the professor is making somewhat of a political statement about the University, the (lack of) teaching assistants, and the shortage of funds available to him. I attended a University of California school several years ago, and there were a plethora of similar issues regarding class sizes, funding, etc.

It's sad, because actions like canceling four of seven planned sections¹ only hurt the students' education.

1: This originally stated that lectures were canceled, but I was mistaken. Thanks to codergirl for correcting me.

[Scaevolus]

Looks like budget problems mean they can't support everyone:

"There are currently about 170 students. However, given the current TA staffing, we can only support 75-90 students in the class. Because this class is so challenging, I expect that about 2/3rds of currently enrolled students will drop the course. Those who remain will need to commit to being on-time for every class and discussion section, and willing to devote substantial effort to reading and understanding highly technical material (and being examined on it during every single class section)."

[saryant]

My alma mater has begun doing this with their intro CS courses. It's a small school of only 2400 students and only 8 CS professors but demand is so high for CS right now that they simply can't staff up and maintain the university's cap of 30 students per course (21 in this case given the size of the CS labs).

They're teaching as many intro sections as they can without depriving majors of electives.

Fortunately they haven't gotten dickish about it but it's a tough spot to be in.

[ben1040]

Escorting people to the john during an exam? This is a plain old college course, not the California bar exam.

Based on this I wouldn't be surprised if the TA who is assigned "bathroom escort duty" also would be instructed to check the toilet paper roll for crib notes prior to allowing the student to relieve themselves.

[pkill17]

For those unfamiliar with our curriculum: CS161 is given as a "choose-two of these required courses" choice in order to complete the CS major. Many students are enrolled out of necessity.

[sqrt]

This is false; you are confusing 161 with 162.

[joshAg]

Really? Wow that's rough! L&S CS, EECS, or both?

When I graduated the only requirement was enough units and at least one lab class.

btw, what's the other class?

[marincounty]

I had a friend who went to Berkeley 20 years ago. He told me his professor was teaching 300 students via a video monitor. Any, real instruction was taught through TA's. Plus, he said the professors didn't care about teaching; it was all about their research. Yea, I know they need to publish, but it just didn't seem fair to the students? There's a lot of students who drop out of that university, and never set foot in a college again.

[k3n]

One of the top reasons I gave up on "college" -- I'm paying for an education, so it'd be nice to be taught by, y'know, an educator. Someone who wants to teach, who enjoys their craft so much that they're excited just to talk about it... I had a few professors like that, and even though that was decades ago, I can still recall their names and mannerisms, if that tells you what kind of impact they had. They even made me enjoy classes that I loathed taking, simply because they were excited to teach it. However, as I progressed, I had fewer professors and more TA's "teaching" classes.

[xvedejas]

I am an undergrad at a university where the common sentiment is similar; professors care much more about research than teaching. However, it works out since it seems most undergrads at this school are more interested in doing research than attending classes. Maybe undergraduate education should be more research-focused at research institutes?

[deepblueq]

It looks like it has quite a few more students than it should, and he's using every excuse he can to drop people. This isn't very nice, but I can at least understand his position. Then I saw this bit:

"If you miss a class or are late to a class or section (without prior approval from the instructor) you will be considered to have dropped the class and will receive a failing grade."

It's practically a lottery for bad GPAs.

[fallinghawks]

"you will be considered to have dropped the class and will receive a failing grade."

You can't have both. Can you?

[readme]

Reads like every syllabus I've ever seen:

<ridiculous amount> of hours is required. If you don't put in these hours, don't expect to pass!

It's just a cop-out so the professor can assert it's your fault for not studying enough if you fail.

In reality, most of the kids who pass will probably study 5 ish hours per week for that class, if they are lucky and have time.

[genwin]

You get to pay out the nose for that treatment too. College is hardly worth it nowadays, and certainly won't be worth it in another decade when it has again doubled in cost in today's dollars.

[Ensorceled]

I had an Applied Math Professor like this, "You should be spending 20 hours a week per credit". We had 6 credits per term so that left 7 hours per day for eating, sleeping, getting to class and what have you.

[solistice]

Having gone through something similar (3-4 hours of sleep daily, irregular eating), it's not worth it no matter what. Within half a year, I was a bodily wreck, coming down with regular colds/flus, several eye infections and a debilitating 2 month diarrhea that left me with a 14.something BMI. Oh, and the ensuing pandemonium got me expelled from the school, to add insult to injury.

It's a damn diploma, which doesn't even guarantee you are getting a job, especially since those 7 hours left mean you don't get to network during that time. It's totally ridiculous anyone would expect you to sacrifice your health for that, and I did buy that con for far too long.

Ahh, well, such are things.

[antoinec]

"If you feel someone is looking at your exam sheet, you should immediately stand up and report the incident – during the exam" Sounds pretty fun actually

[dsuth]

"He's cheating off me!" "No, HE'S cheating off ME!" /slapfight ensues.

We never had anything this ridiculous when I went to University (EE at one of the better Uni's in Australia), but reading it sure didn't make me miss the ridiculous hoops you were expected to jump through in the name of 'education'.

Competitive grading is especially ridiculous and not a valid reflection of how industry actually works. Sounds like some of these professors need to be turfed out into the real world for a while.

[jackmaney]

Okay, something seems a bit weird.... When I saw that the instructor had a gmail account listed on the third page of the syllabus, I suspected that maybe he's an adjunct and wasn't given an @berkeley.edu email address. However, he's full professor at Berkeley (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tygar/)....

[ams6110]

I see this with academics more and more, they don't want to deal with the university IT department and policies, so they just use gmail, google docs, etc.

[wmf]

This almost sounds like an oblique commentary about the diligence necessary to implement secure systems. One buffer overflow and you fail.

[lsjaaa]

Hi Prof. Doug Tygar, Good evening, I am a Berkeley student in your cs161 class. I fully understand the situation. I have to say that the current syllabus is not too bad. Although the quiz part is kinda 'crazy', those quizzes will certainly force students to read the required reading before lectures, which is a good thing!!! I am not against this syllabus. However, if the student is 5 min late and he is unable to take the quiz, that would be really sad. So, if we can have a policy like having quizzes in the middle of the lecture and dropping the lowest 2 quizzes, that would solve all the problems. Again, I do believe that quiz will help students study more and read the required reading ahead. I am looking forward to a great 161 this semester. Thanks a lot for all the efforts that you have been taking in to make this course better.

[dougtygar]

lsjaaa -

thanks! You'll hear some very good news on Tuesday morning.

[ramate]

As someone actually attending this class, the primary reason for this syllabus is to get 2/3 of the class to drop. They couldn't find enough TAs for the class, and were forced to rework the curriculum, as well as get enough people to drop to try to alleviate the overcrowding.

[rickdale]

I spent a summer at Berkley coming from as liberal an institution as there is. The biggest difference that really affected me was the professor stood up during exams and shouted out every five minutes that five minutes had gone by. Where I went to school, professors weren't allowed in the room during exams. Even timed exams. I don't know, but the whole shouting out the time and stuff really sucked and did not help me learn calculus. It just distracted me and made me play games with time rather than with equations. Different environments suit different students.

[ibrahima]

As someone who graduated from Berkeley EECS, this is highly atypical. Something fishy is going on here.