Great survey in topics related to IT/Digital security, cryptography, and major security events. fair bit of reading or reference videos to watch w/ discussion items. but nothing longer than an hour of work in total. programing assignments are well documented, well supported by the python ecosystem, and with plenty of course specific and public references. start assignments early as they can vary massively in scope and length which may need scheduling around other life / work events. Most assignments are under an hour long at least one was a 3hr slog. not a difficult course, easy to pair with another class. This is not a deep dive class, more of a survey of related topics and cryptography you will need to be familiar with to work in industry. treat it as such and its an easy pass. otherwise uneventful and easy break from more difficult courses. would dare to say it was fun.

Submitted Tue Jul 29 2025

Lots of busy work. Nothing really explained well and everything is presented all over the place. Sometimes concepts line up, other times they don't. You shouldn't do projects on the due date since some projects (brute force, etc.) will take hours to finish. The DVWA project was a shit show of needle skip conceptually to no info or guidance. Telling students to use AI isn't helpful when your being paid to teach, but like everything in this program, teaching seems to be the last thing anyone wants to do.

Submitted Thu Jul 11 2024

Each week there are 2-4 hours of lectures, and short repeatable quizzes that are pretty easy if you watched the lectures. There are also weekly discussion that typically involve reading a few articles, posting a few paragraphs, and replying to 2 other posts. These were mostly easy, except for the regrettably named "chinese whispers" discussion, which is a fun idea, but executed very poorly and was pretty frustrating. Every two weeks there will be a project due, these determine the bulk of your grade. Expect to spend somewhere around 5-10 hours on each. These projects are poorly specified, and do not have clear grading rubrics, so we needed to use EdStem frequently to nail down requirements. Thankfully grading seemed pretty lenient. The final was challenging, but only worth 10% of my grade, so I didn't put too much effort into studying for it. The instructor, Bram Lewis, is not great. He doesn't seem to have much interest in improving the course, but will write long screeds in edstem about how the poorly specified assignments are a "feature" since it prepares us for the real world. He seems to be widely disliked as an instructor https://www.reddit.com/r/OSUOnlineCS/comments/ux38vo/cs372_thoughts_on_bram_lewis/

Submitted Mon Dec 05 2022

There is a lot of writing in this class

Submitted Sun Aug 14 2022