Continuation for Fall 2025

Published: 02-04-2026

Objectively another easier semester of school, but it was certainly very painful. This may have been my least favourite semester of my entire student career so far (spoiler I ended up only attending 1 of 4 courses I had this sem 💀). A rather late blog post as the fall semester ended around 2 months ago, but I blame UofT. Had to wait until January right before school started up again to get my final marks for these courses, and at the time, I was busy with actually getting a job. Anyways,

LINA01 | Introduction to Linguistics - C

First up is linguistics with Safieh Moghaddam, and my honest thoughts while taking this course was that linguistics is actually pretty interesting. Some of the contents such as morpology and pheonetics is pretty cool. I always enjoyed breaking stuff down and seeing how things work, and linguistics is exactly that. Going in, I didn’t know this so I was pretty suprised by this course. However I did end up taking the online section, which happened to overlap with another course I was taking this semester. However there is one thing that really set this course back.

Yeah I just don’t care about linguistics tbh.

Linguistics is cool as a fun fact you see while doomscrolling or on an article or something. It’s interesting, but once you start getting assessed and tested on it, it is all of a sudden no so cool anymore. This class also had a paid textbook that locked you out of a decent amount of grades which sucked as well. I also never attended a single lecture because of the conflict mentioned before and I never bothered to watch the recordings. The first time I had ever heard this prof’s voice was in the review seminar before the final (oh yeah no midterm only a final). I would credit no credit this course, but you can’t if you’re using it for the degree writing requirement which I was.

Overall, the course was pretty easy though and the final was very fair despite popular opinion. It took memorization, and if you didn’t study (I assume most people didnt) you were kinda guaranteed to do bad, hence the C average. I also had one of the weirdest experiences in the exam hall where I got yelled at by who I thought was the professor for cheating by starting the exam early. Apparently for this exam, writing your name and student id was starting early?? idk the course was a fairly easy A that’s about it.

CSCB07 | Software Design - B

Took this one with Rawad Abou Assi, not much to say except wtf. Being a Rawad superfan, I was initially really excited for this course, but damn. It was hella boring, the beginning was all basic high school Java stuff. As that was my only 2 hour lecture that day, I slowly lost the desire to go to lecture (it only took 3 weeks). I was chilling in this course until they dropped a bombshell of a group 5-6 man project.

This group project was cooked, I only knew a couple other people in this course, but we managed to scrap together a group of 6 with me knowing only 2 of the other 5. The project was an android app that tracked asthma for children, with very specfic requirements (annoyingly so). I think this was assigned before reading week, but everyone had midterms so I had to start a week early and I did. Because holy shit, we needed a database, authentication, github version control, all bundled into android studio.

Starting off, I was somehow the only person in my group that knew how to use Github. Which was suprising given a good amount of us were in cs and if you have done any project before, you would likely use git. This made me very worried for the project and so I started early to try to figure out the database stuff for my group members so that they didn’t have to. This left us with 3 weeks to complete the project. But the reason why this course ended up not being a C, is because I was pleasantly suprised by my group. Everyone ended up pulling their weight, these people were dependable and ended up learning the database stuff on their own anyways. All of them were pretty goated group members, and the final day of submission is probably gonna be one of my most memorable days at UTSC. We all went to uni to grind it out on the last day together in person, and we submitted at 11:59 with us starting to work from around 4pm. The relief from submitting that project and going out to have popeyes freddy fazbear meal at 2am was so fire. Great vibes in the project and I met some good people.

Aside from that, labs were annoying midterm was alright and so was the final, very close final grade of A though.

CSC236 | Introduction to the Theory of Computation - D

I “took” this course with Amir Reza Peimani, and by “took” I mean I stopped attending after the second lecture. Bros lecture was at 7-9pm and I had to commute downtown for it. First few lectures were pretty bad, he (and clearly the teaching team) were super disorganized and his presentation style was hard to listen to. My friend wanted to give him one last chance one week and ended up seeing a lecture with like 8 people total. Guess it wasn’t just me.

Aside from this horrendous lecture, the grading scheme was among the worst ones I have ever seen. 5 tests and 1 final. The first test being 5% and the rest being 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% based on how good you did on the tests 1-4. On paper it sounded pretty nice because they were probably just easy quizzes so it wasn’t so bad. But I guess I was wrong because man is it tiring studying for a test every 2 weeks. Even worse the content was completely uninteresting. Just not very fun to study for at all.

If it wasnt bad enough with the content, and the lectures, the course management was terrible too! They were making homework questions and readings in real time, these guys were writing their own tests on how to create readings for CSC236, and by the looks of it, they definitely failed. Stuff was given to us super late and we would only have a couple days to study somethings before we were tested on it. Test 2 marks came back before test 1 marks did. Readings were unnecessarily convoluted, and they would mention that the lecture isn’t enough to get a good understanding of all the content. The difficulty balance of all the tests were all over the place (test 3 had like a median of 57 and test 4 had like a median of 100 iirc).

There really was not a single redeeming thing about this course. At least I had an excuse to hang out with utsg friends every so often, so that was pretty cool I guess. Also got to bump into the top 1 tetris player in Canada in the tutorial before mine (I later found out he was waiting for me somedays after I stopped showing up :C ). Oh yeah and I got absolutely touched on the final, worst final of my career icl. Fairly easy A again (I’m pretty sure they curved).

MATC44 | Introduction to Combinatorics - S

The only saving grace for me this semester by the one and only Michael Scott Cavers 🥰. I yapped a bunch this post, and it was all because I could not contain the bad things I had to say, but I’m glad it’ll be the opposite for this course. Also yay first 3rd year course.

This course was just a whole lot of fun, and I was definitely excited going in know that Mike was teaching it as well. We covered so many combinatorial concepts and things that I didn’t even know existed as things under the realm of combinatorics like graph theory. It was always presented in an interesting way that made the lectures pretty engaging. The content was pretty fun to learn and the lectures + material just elevated that. This man gave the entire class the sticks of starburst just so we could play nim, too fire.

The assignments were also really well designed. They always covered everything we covered in lecture at least once, in an intesting way that really needed you to think. Mike also encourages collaboration on the assignments unlock some other profs, which made them way more fun to do with my friend. Each assignment was also sweet and short, with every question being graded (yippee!). He even gave bonus marks on one of them.

The midterm and final was super fair, and the final itself was probably one of the most enjoyable test taking experiences I’ve had partially because of how it turned out. The midterm I choked pretty hard, but he ended up curving for absolutely no reason, the average was going to be around a high 60 or low 70 if he didn’t, but I’ll take it. The final however, lengthwise was almost as long as the midterm suprisingly, but the questions were hard. I told everyone at the time this, but if you asked me how I was doing on the midterm, I would’ve had 3 different answers depending on the time. 30min in, I’d tell you I’m cooked, 1hr 30min in, I’d tell you I’m killing myself, 2hr 30min in, I’d tell you I cooked. The final was designed in a way where you had hard questions, but also had the time to think them through. I skipped like half of the final initially, but at the end, I feel like I got all of them except for the last one on steiner triple systems which I hadn’t really studied for.

For those reasons above, Mike gets another S and I get a nice and shiny A+

Conclusion

To: conclusion of utsc course tierlist 2

yeah bro this semester fucking sucked