Take advantage of the discussion board and student Discord/Slack/Teams/whatever. My classmates were very helpful. Read the textbook early since it's free (Joy of Cryptography). Brush up on set theory including proofs. If you haven't sorted LaTeX out for yourself by now then it's time to do that before the term starts. Probably more than half the time will be spent trying to do the problem sets in the homework, which often includes LaTeX work. The actually difficult exam problems were similar to homework problems so study those. There were over 70 grades in this class that involved answering questions about the material, so if you plan on getting feedback from a professor or TA about one of them, I'd try to plan that nearly a week - yes, a week - in advance. The professor and TA were virtually catatonic during my term and the whole class had that "pulled from a hat" feeling you've probably bumped into several times by this point in this program. You'll essentially be paying a couple thousand bucks to certify that you read Mike Rosulek's book and sort-of understand it - no proverbial whipped cream, sprinkles, or cherries on top, if you're expecting anything by the way of actual service. As others have said, there isn't so much as an answer key for anything you'll ever do, and it often felt like the staff weren't exactly sure of the right answer either.

Submitted Mon Mar 27 2023

This is a super interesting course but its basically the work of a semester crammed into a quarter with very little guidance from the professor/TAs. The homework and quiz questions (open note) are good at gauging your understanding of the material, but there are no answers anywhere, so if you don't understand something or are confused you got something wrong you HAVE to go speak to the prof/TA. The class is really theory-based so I'm not sure how practical it is in the real world, but it's very interesting and helped me with my analytical thinking, plus it's not as hard as people make it sound as long as you keep up with the work.

Submitted Sun Mar 26 2023

Honestly, just read the textbook online, all this class is is having the book problems graded by a TA. It's very interesting material, but a waste of $2k for an unresponsive professor.

Submitted Mon Jan 16 2023

Very interesting coursework, but very difficult assignments. You cannot miss a single assignment, or else you might have to worry about a fail grade. The exams were easier than the assignments, but not by much. I saw much gnashing and wailing of teeth in this course. Even as someone who enjoys math and theoretical topics like these, I found that the course didn't really prepare you all that well for the assignments. Had an awesome TA but there's only so much they can do. Good luck!

Submitted Thu Mar 24 2022

This is a difficult class that needs to be reworked. The material is interesting, however the course structure is terrible. They give you a textbook and that is all. The are no practice problems, no supplemental teaching material, and no lectures with additional information (there are summary videos for each textbook chapter, but they don't provide any new information). The midterm and final are each worth 20% of your grade and are closed book, closed note, proctored exams. The instructor and TA were very helpful, but they need way more TAs for this class, right now there is only 1 which is crazy. This resulted in 0 feedback on our homework assignments, so you have no idea what you did wrong when you were docked points.

Submitted Wed Mar 23 2022

Create a discord, post it on ed discussions, read the textbook early, start the hw early, ask your classmates, TA, and professor for help.

Submitted Mon Mar 21 2022