Poll
Why Software Engineering? I've got a lot to complain, but that's because of the way it is done this year. Last year I heard a lot of people found it fun to do, but taxing. Algorithms and Datastructures in C may be sort of the worst for AI, but for CS it's quite enjoyable
I would rather see IT business practice/“Critical Issues in the Computing Profession”. What a dreadful course
I'm 'glad' to see a certain mentality in this poll: it looks at courses that might be difficult, but are also somewhat useful (except for Philosophy of Cognitive Science). Wouldn't it be more reasonable to look at useless courses, instead of those that you consider difficult? What are you trying to say with this poll? :)
~ Arnoud
PhilCog, there's barely any philosophy at all, it's pretty much all just history. It would be interesting if it would actually be about the philosophy/ethics behind AI.
Also think WBV (BSS nowadays) was a really bad course 3 years ago, but it has improved over the years. Still think it's pretty arbitrary to have datamining as such a big part of a course that's meant to learn you how to conduct research and write about, not to learn how to perform datamining, but I suppose some sort of research had to be chosen that was easy to setup and evaluate.
Also, 'Lichaam, brein en geest' is a total joke. You can literally do nothing and attend no lectures for the entire course and still just pull some smart-sounding banter out of your ass on the exam to easily pass it. But it's only a philosophy course that's optional, so I don't know if it counts.
From the CS point-of-view:
Calculus is fine, maybe a bit too deep for what you actually use in your bachelor's and master's though.
A&DinC is, and has always been, a bad idea. Learning C is good and all, but not something you should combine with something as complex (and fundamental) as A&D.
Software Engineering is a fucking hard course, and something most people don't like, but is actually one of the only business-related course in the curriculum.
Now if SE were replaced by IT-beroepspraktijk (dunno what that course is called nowadays) then we'd have a clear winner.
Picked "Something else" because I somehow managed to attend most of the Statistics lectures and yet to learn next to nothing before I read the book (although the same was undeniably true for calculus). It felt like a large amount of basic information was just missing from the course (which was less true for calculus).
In addition, BSS mostly felt like a waste of time. Most of it I already knew and the data-mining part indeed required too much hard work for an arbitrarily chosen field of research.
I do agree that PhilCog was one of the most disappointing subjects, since it contained far too less true "philosophy". But perhaps that's just due to the nature of philosophy of cognitive science? I dunno.