Reinmann is a super nice guy but this is not a very easy class. We did too well on the midterm and he made the final extremely hard. A lot of practice is needed. Homework often took a while.

I did not really enjoy this class, but I appreciate that Professor Reinman is a really good explainer so that made it easier.

The "flipped classroom" format of this class required us to watch about 1-2 hours of extra video each week, which made the instruction during actual lecture feel more optional, since it was just going over the pre-recorded lectured.

The grading in this class is stressful. I'm sure he curves nicely (grades haven't been released as of rn) but weighting 40% Midterm and 50% Final is a really unforgiving grading scheme.

Overall, this is definitely a class where an A is achievable with some effort, but actually enjoying the content and the way it's delivered will depend a lot on preference.

Prof Reinman is great! He uses a flipped classroom structure where you have to watch 1-2 hours of pre-recorded videos before each live lecture, and these videos by themselves cover the basics of the topic you will learn in the live lecture.

The live lectures, the professor goes more in depth over the topics and answers a lot of questions. He also goes over some practice problems live in order to clarify topics and such. Lectures are very engaging since its all handwritten and uses zero slides, plus professor is very fun and charismatic. Must attend these lectures, they solidify concepts and also VERY relevant to problems you will find in exams. In fact, the professor will literally tell you that this kind of problem will show up on the exam so pay attention.

Exams are tough, but the professor will curve it up. They are worth 90% of your grade: 40% being the midterm and 50% being the finals.
All of the exam questions are advanced variations of questions the professor brought up in class or high level stuff that you don't need to know the details for, so it always feels like fair game. Since they are open note, you don't need to memorize anything(although you must have a good understanding of topics, notes won't help you much).

The midterm does have a time crunch, the final was alright.

Homeworks are based on completion, and you can just bs them if you don't want to actually do it. I personally didn't do any of the homeworks and did fine on the exams, but you do you.

Take the class with reinman yo

This class was a flipped classroom, so Professor Reinman would require us to watch online videos before coming to class, which was basically a Q&A. The workload wasn't too bad, consisting of seven homework assignments which didn't take more than a few hours. The midterm wasn't bad, but the material gets more difficult in the second half of the class and as a result, the final was much more difficult. The midterm and final decide most of your grade, and the averages were high for both, so it pays to study a lot for both.

This class is difficult, mainly because the tests are focused on very specific subjects, and the amount of practice problems aren't that good.

This class covers a variety of computer architecture topics, but the midterm and final are always from a subset of very specific practice problems which you need to study (in my case, cram) to do well. The problem is that many of these topics are not covered well online, forcing you to rely on Reinman's antiquated normal time lectures (since he does reverse classroom).

For example, one question on the exam was focused on a concept called "TCPI"; however, this was nowhere in the textbook, nor was it in the prelecture slides + lectures that Reinman does for his reverse classroom setup. Hence, you're forced to learn everything about this question from: old tests on test banks, the practice final, 1 lecture where Reinman kinda shoddily covers this material, and discussion slides (which end up just taking the same problems from test banks or the practice final).

This style of learning is mirrored in many other questions in this class. The main reason this class is hard is because of lack of practice problems; many times, the concept is only covered once in a practice problem, whereas it takes many repetitions for me to actually understand what's going on.

I managed to get an A by just cramming the small subset of practice problems that Reinman tests on. I would recommend others to do the same if they want to get an A. I don't think I learned a lot in this class through lectures or the textbook, but cramming for the exams made me learn something (although I'll probably forget it).

All in all, Reinman isn't a horrible choice for this class, but the class in my opinion is just insanely boring. However, it's not setup well at all, and there is so much material every week (textbook, prelecture, normal lecture, discussion sections), and none of it matters except like 20 minutes from discussion each week.

BEWARE: This is definitely NOT an easy class - many of us who took this class this quarter were fooled by the grade distribution from last year (because they made final optimal). The midterm was ok, but the final was much more difficult with ambiguous problems and instructions, and many people didn't do well. For some reason they decided not to curve the class at all - quite surprising - so many ended up with bad grades. The "unique" teaching style was not my favorite - the live lectures (they called it "Q&A section") were completely unorganized and confusing from my point of view, and you'd be probably better off not attending them. I later found TA discussions and textbooks much more helpful, so I stopped attending them since Week 3 or so, and managed to get an A (but with lots of hard work).

I love that low key sense of humor, hands down, one of the best pictures of my college life, amazing professor

This class was pretty good -- definitely learned a lot, and Prof. Reinman was pretty good at explaining concepts. I appreciated how he told us the types of questions that would be on the exams (and what type would not be) -- it made things a lot less stressful. Most of your grade comes from exams, but the curve can help makeup for that. Also, if you show improvement on the final, it can (partially?) replace your midterm score. For doing well in the class, I would recommend:
- Watch the pre-recorded lectures, but don't feel a need to understand every single detail on those, and don't take notes (because it'll distract you from the important stuff that he'll actually test you on). Instead, just use it to help get context for lecture.
- Take good notes on his in-person lectures, especially any sort of sample problems he works through, because variations of those problems tend to show up on the exam.
- Also make sure you work through and understand all the questions on discussion section slides because those tend to be from past exams, which tend to be similar to the questions he asks from year to year.

good class

The whole experience felt somewhat similar to Reinman's CS 33 class, at least as far as the lecture style (flipped classroom) and exam problem style. There aren't any labs like in CS 33, so the homework was quite a bit less time-consuming. As far as the course material goes, I thought it was interesting and quite coherent, since pretty much everything was built up around the same architecture. The tricky part is remembering how the many various complex aspects of the architecture (virtual memory, caches, pipelining, MIPS, execution, etc.) fit in with each other in different ways. I never went to the actual lectures because they were at 8am, and I felt I was able to get by with just the prerecorded videos for the HW. Although I recommend you at least watch the recordings when it comes time to prepare for exams, since he mostly covers specific problems that will probably end up on the exam. Also if you choose to skip lecture, it helps to go to discussion a lot to make up for it. Shoutout to my TA (Victor Rios) who did a super good job of covering practice problems and reviewing us in general, would recommend in the future. Midterm and final are pretty challenging, and you can get tripped up if you don't really know your stuff. Also, the grades were barely curved this quarter, if at all. So fair warning, if you do really badly on a test, your grade might be screwed since the midterm is 40% of your grade, and the final 50%.