TDDE65 mid-term evaluation 2025

The course has been mid-term-evaluated by the muddy card method on 30/4/2025 during the 10th lecture.
10 students attended the lecture, and 10 cards were received. I summarize in the following the general outcome and main issues, and comment where appropriate.

Overall, the course seems to run well. A few cards pointed out some minor issues, which are included below.

Topic and Organization:
Where mentioned, the topic of the course is considered interesting and very relevant. The intro and visit to NSC was clearly appreciated. Working on a real supercomputer is appreciated on many cards.

Lectures:
Lectures are appreciated as interesting, well presented, clear and detailed. One card finds the lecture speed too slow and one too fast, overall the lecture pace actually appears to be quite right then.

Labs:
The labs are appreciated on many cards (well designed, fun, right level of difficulty).
Three cards found that MPI programming is challenging. (I agree!)

Two cards ask for more introductory information about Slurm and the lab environment. Please note that we do have detailed instructions for that, given both in the NSC guest lecture, in the introductory lab lesson, and in the Sigma quick reference sheet posted on the course web page. Not all of this is also printed in the lab compendium, which indeed focuses on the problems to be solved, but overall there is comprehensive documentation available. If you still find any concrete unclear points in the available documentation, please let us know.

One card explicitly praises the lab assistant. (Thanks, I will forward this information).

Examination:
One card asked for ready solutions of the demo exams. For pedagogical reasons, I generally do not do that. (When I once did it in another course, I later got too many verbatim identical answers in exams even where the demo questions were not asked at all. This is not the learning effect that I would like to achieve.)
Instead, we will, at the end of the lecture period, have a separate lesson where we will go through some old exam questions; we will give the ideas and instructions for solving, but no complete solutions here either. The final step is still yours.
Please also have a look into the compendium, where each chapter has a section with exercises.
Hint: for a significant part of the exam questions, the answers are actually given at some point IN THE LECTURES.
As one card asked about it: Please note that in TDDE65 we have an exam review session after the main exam in June, instead of a solution proposal. This is fully in line with the department's examination guidelines.

Thanks for all comments and suggestions!

Christoph Kessler, course leader TDDE65

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Last updated: 2025-05-05