[gulato]

How much knowledge of CS did you have prior to taking these classes? What takes the most time? Are lectures long? Are there a lot of homework? Big team projects/labs?

Previous CS knowledge -> If you gave me a design with some business requirements I could kludge something together that worked in Java. If you told me to code a linked list, traverse it, delete from it, explain A*, explain probability properly, explain any of the core design paradigms, programming paradigms, or any of the other (really trivial) core CS concepts, I could not. At my uni anyway, most classes met two times a week for 1.5 hours per meeting. Completing the homework in 2 hours may have been possible in 1st year during the intro classes, but that just simply wasn't enough time for me during algorithms, linear algebra, or discrete math classes. 3-4th year classes had lots of group projects, and it took over 2 hours a week just getting the group focused and on task in a coordinated way. This doesn't include the time to revise, understand the content, or actually code something for submission. Additionally, my degree had electives. I tried to pick things I found interesting, but writing papers on Pliny's views on mining, (and other somewhat interesting but unrelated to CS stuff,) took time =)