CSCI 0451: End-Of-Course Reflection
[your name here]
The Data
In this section I’ll ask you to fill in some data. You don’t have to give precise numbers – approximate, conversational responses are fine. For example, when I ask “how often did you attend class,” good answers include “almost always,” “I missed three times,” “about 75% of the time,” “not as often as I wanted,” etc.
Presence in Class
- How often did you attend class? (e.g. “almost always,” “I missed three times,” etc.) I attended all classes.
- How often did you take notes on the core readings ahead of the class period? I always read the readings ahead of class and took notes sometimes.
- How often were you prepared to present the daily warm-up exercise to your team, even if you weren’t actually called? I was always prepared to present.
- How many times did you actually present the daily warm-up to your team? About 1/4 of the times.
- How many times did you ask your team for help while presenting the daily warm-up? For a few times.
- How often did you learn something new from a teammate’s presentation of the daily warm-up? I felt I learned something new for most of the times.
- How often did you help a teammate during the daily warm-up presentation? For a few times.
- Did you contribute a question for our guest speaker? Yes.
Presence Outside of Class
- How often did you attend Student Hours or Peer Help? About once a week to every two weeks.
- How often did you ask for or receive help from your fellow students? About once a week.
- Did you regularly participate in a study group outside class? Yes.
- How often did you post questions or answers in Slack? I didn’t post questions or answers in Slack.
Assignments and Effort
- How many blog posts did you submit? 8
- How many of your submitted blog posts are at each of the following feedback stages?
- No revisions suggested: 6
- Revisions useful: 0
- Revisions encouraged: 0
- Incomplete: 0
- Haven’t received feedback: 2
- Roughly how many hours per week did you spend on this course outside of class? Around 7-10 hours
What You Learned
At the beginning of the course, you may have expressed an interest in focusing a little extra on one or two of the following four categories:
- Theory: mathematical descriptions of frameworks and algorithms.
- Implementation: effective coding and use of tools in order to implement efficient machine learning algorithms.
- Experimentation: performing experiments to assess the performance of algorithms and clearly communicating about the results.
- Social responsibility: critical analysis of sources of bias and harm in machine learning algorithms; theoretical formulations of fairness and bias
Did you choose to focus on any of these categories? If so, what did you do in order to pursue your interest?
I chose to focus on experimentation and social responsibility. For both topics, I have completed most blog posts that primarily focused on them, such as penguin classification, bias auditing, and deep music classification. I put extra effort into some of these blog posts by discussing beyond what is required. I have also focused on these two topics in my final project, where we explored different model and feature choices and included a discussion of potential ethical implications of our model.
Reflecting on Goals
For each of the categories below, replace the “[your response here]” cell with 1-2 paragraphs in which you reflect on the following questions:
- In what ways did you meet your goals from the beginning of the course? Be specific: explain what the goal was and what you did to meet it.
- In what ways did you not meet your goals from the beginning of the course? Be specific: explain what the goal was and what the gap was between what you aspired to and what happened.
- If there’s any context you want to share about how you fared relative to your goals, please do!
Blog Posts
I have met most of my goals for the blog posts. I submitted blog posts in most weeks during the semester, submitted no more thant two blog posts later than the best-by date, and revised all of them that I have received feedback so far to the “no revisions suggested” level.
For my last goal of going above and beyond in at least two blog posts, I think that I haven’t met the level that I expected when setting the goal because I didn’t explore any new visualization choices to communicate results. However, I did include more discussions in some of my blog posts, so I will consider this goal to be met.
Course Presence (Participation)
I have met all my goals for participation. I completed all required readings and most, though not all optional readings related to my areas of focus. I was prepared for all warmup activities. I prepared a question for our guest speaker. I often worked with classmates together outside of class. I did not attend office hours or peer help hours as much as I wanted during the first of the semester, but I have been there more for the last few weeks of the semester.
Project
I have met all of my project goals. We submitted all major milestones on time and I completed all my designated work on time. We set up regular times to meet each week and had clear and timely communications. I drafted designated sections of the project blog post and prepared for and delivered designated parts of the presentation.
In addtion to my goals, I also contributed to cleaning up the many notebook files that we created throughout the process and compiling them into our final notebook for the demonstration of our workflow.
Your Proposed Letter Grade
Take 15 minutes to look back on your responses in each of the sections above. Then, make a proposal for the letter grade that you feel best reflects your learning, participation, and achievement in CSCI 0451. Here are some soundbytes to help guide your thinking:
An A sounds like:
- “I am very proud of my time in this course.”
- “I have grown significantly in multiple ways that matter to me.”
- “I am ready to take the theory, techniques, and ideas of this course into my future classes, projects, hobbies, or career.”
A B sounds like:
- “I had some opportunities to learn more, overall I feel good about my time in this course.”
- “I am able to explain some new things or achieve new tasks.”
- “I can see a few ideas from this course that will be relevant for my future classes, projects, hobbies, or career.”
A C sounds like:
- “I often made a good effort, but I missed many opportunities to get more out of my time in this course.”
- “I might be able to complete some new tasks related to the course content, but only with significant further guidance.”
- “I don’t see any ways to take the contents of this course into my future classes, projects, hobbies, or career.”
You might find that some of these soundbytes resonate and other’s don’t! Take some time, see what feels right, and don’t be afraid to celebrate your achievements.
Upon reflection, I feel that my learning, participation, and achievement in CSCI 0451 are best reflected by a grade of A