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Comment by khwang | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

They're cancelling four of seven sections, not lectures, due to lack of demand.

All the lectures are still there.

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)."

Not a budget issue; they just couldn't staff enough TA's (not enough students expressed interest in becoming a TA).

Well, with this kind of attitude from the prof, I can see why.

This attitude likely resulted from the lack of TAs rather than the other way around...

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.

It sounds like a good time to be a CS professor looking for work, then?

This is after hiring two last year.

Problem is, the university was burned by that after the dotcom bubble crashed. They'd hired a bunch during the boom and then had far more than needed up until ~2010.

My freshman CS class in 2008 only had 3 students. The university doesn't want to repeat that.

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