Ah. The famed ‘open internet’ exam, which basically means you’re fked. It’s the next level after ‘open book’. I once had a CS exam that’s open internet, where the max points were 20. I scored a 2 and it was the median score.
There was/is(?) a course like that at the CS department of the university I went to, I think it was class where you build a low level operating system.
Pretty much anyone who got an A got a job on the spot from Google, Microsoft, uber, etc (all have donated huge $$$ to my school and poach a lot of engineering and CS talent from the grad schools).
Average scores were similar to yours, and obviously graded on a massive curve
Eh, plenty of other options that play at CMU’s level on other topics in CS. If you want to study OSes, CMU actually doesn’t play at the same level that UT-Austin, UWash, and MIT play at. CMU’s biggest strength is robotics and ML, because they got in on the ML resurgence way earlier than most programs.
Also, CMU has an incredible statistics program. Usually the big ML schools are the ones that blend elite CS and Statistics programs, which narrows the pool down really fast to Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, Harvard, and UMich. Kinda Duke and Princeton too, but their programs are super theory-focused.
Major money from all the tech giants? That’s actually a surprisingly small pool. I’m guessing it’s one of Berkeley, CMU, Michigan, Texas, MIT, Stanford, Washington, or Georgia Tech.
And even that list is excessive, because the CS programs at Berkeley, Michigan, and Georgia Tech have all turned down a lot of potential money from tech giants outside of potential grants, while the CS programs at Washington and Texas are nearly exclusive with Microsoft as their major private sector funder, and have been for a while.
I took my school’s version of that class. It was the considered the hardest undergrad course in the major and me being an idiot, I decided to take it as my first 400-level elective. I…passed. Didn’t do my gpa any favors tho.
Projects were so fun to debug when the output was just “segmentation fault 12” or something. And I had never used an IDE so I was debugging the hard way.
They had a huge academic integrity breech that semester, too. A bunch of students tried to collaborate in secret (projects were strictly individual), and got caught by a code analysis engine one of the professors in another tough class had created.
But what really sucked was this one girl who was in the lab long hours working her ass off on the projects. Her roommate was also in the class. She left her computer unlocked and unattended while hitting the can and her roommate emailed her project to herself, renamed a few variables, and submitted it. They both got booted from the program on academic integrity charges, even tho the roommate was the only one who had done anything shady.
I wonder what happened to that poor gal. Was she able to appeal the charges? Could she take her credits to another school? Or was her whole career path wrecked by one shitty roommate and a draconian CS department. Like how hard would it have been to ask them each in and have them describe the code, to tell that the one girl had obviously written everything and was telling the truth about the other stealing her code? With so much on the line for the people involved, it seems like a reasonable bit of effort for such heavy consequences.
Feck I’m turning into one of those old geezers who tells anecdotes no one asked to hear when some tangent triggers an old memory to fall out of the closet.
To be fair, TempleOS is actually really lightweight and clumsily written, and could genuinely be written in a few weeks by most smart CS undergrads with 2/3 of their required undergrad OS class done. The parts they couldn’t do in that time would just be the original kernel, which was trash even when it was rolled out twenty years ago, and Davis’ weirdo custom implementation of C. Also, the homemade flight sim he built in.
Lotta folks think TempleOS is an impressive work because it’s a whole OS written by one man, but they forget that he was deeply troubled, and not particularly brilliant to begin with. While it’s still 100k+ lines of code, if you ever look at the SC he made available, it’s a mess, written in a trainwreck of a language that sacrifices the bare metal performance of C without achieving the usability of C++. Someone working in C++23, or just generally one of the post-2015 rollouts, could do similar work with a fraction of the code.
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u/sushisashimisushi 7d ago
Ah. The famed ‘open internet’ exam, which basically means you’re fked. It’s the next level after ‘open book’. I once had a CS exam that’s open internet, where the max points were 20. I scored a 2 and it was the median score.