So an unnamed professor for an unnamed class has assigned a project of which I am not a fan.  Here are the requirements, as paraphrased from the prospectus.

1. Create a makefile. (We spent 1 day on makefiles in class)
2. Populate a binary tree with random integers.
3. Understand and implement exponential distribution (defined in 3 lines of text in the prospectus)
4. Implement Quicksort.
5. Implement Inter-Process Communication between 3 processes using pipes.
6. Implement recursive calculation of Fibonacci numbers.
7. Read and write from a file.
8. The program must be designed so that it can be expanded easily.

None of these is particularly hard on its own, but most of these are unrelated.  We also didn’t spend very much time on any of these.  IPC was talked about for about 20 minutes.  It took 2 weeks to get a solid understanding of it in CS 452.  Recursion is half a semester in CS 163.

All of this combined is probably 12 hours of work and it’s only worth 8 points.  That’s 8 points out of 100 for the class.  The midterm and final combined are 60% of the final grade.  It’s possible to get a C in the class without even turning in any of the projects.  What a stupid class.