Inconsistent difficulty scales

[slackingfred]

Some documents marked the course difficulty out of 5, notably Introduction to Machine Learning (PhD) and Introduction to Deep Learning (implicitly). Others marked it out of 10, for example, Introduction to Computer Systems and Modern Computer Architecture and Design.

This had misled me to believe that Intro to DL is not very hard (because the document reads "5"). I learned it the hard way later. Contrastingly, the ICS/FCS document claims difficulty between 6 and 8, while it turns out only moderately challenging for me (just 12hrs+/- per week).

To help future students, should we scan the documents and ensure the difficulties are on the same scale? I feel an urge to do this because there are many more MS-SE students here (in SV) this semester compared to previous years, and many of them will use this repo.

[mikinty]

This is a good point. I think we can standardize the difficulties now. It would be nice if this was automated, but I don't have the funding to get some sort of bot to check the PRs. I guess I can just do it.

Can you help me look through the existing documents? And submit a PR from your findings

The other thing about difficulties is they are super subjective. I wish I could capture the tip of the bell curve, but I am unsure how to do that without data collection. And...yea this is meant to be lightweight. I don't want to get rid of the difficulty though, because I do think with enough review, especially from people like you, we can sort of get a living "difficulty number"

But yea thanks for bringing this up

[slackingfred]

Maybe I am not the best person to update these numbers, since I only took four CS/ECE courses (11785, 15513 [18613 equivalent], 17636, and 18646).

Speaking of bots, will a script to crawl course evaluation data be useful? You know, there are "hours per week" data collected from students. But that would still be subjective because of the varying backgrounds of students taking each course. Also there is a difference between "hard" and "tedious" (and yet another between "hard [in materials]" and "difficult to get an A").

If we're to standardize the difficulties, I suggest using the 5 scale instead of 10, so as to "flatten out" the noise -- generality by being rough. 5←consistently hard and tedious, 2←one or two challenging tasks, something like that.

[mikinty]

crawl course evaluation data

Where is this data from? How do you collect it from students?

For difficulty standardization, sure I would propose it with whoever is mostly running this repo now...should be the folks at HKN. I'm a full generation removed from school now so I don't have much motivation to do this, but feel like there's gotta be some people like you and some others that can make this a thing. I can review the PR