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5

This must be an incredibly difficult course to try to teach in six/seven weeks. There's a ton of material to cover and I appreciate that the course touches on all of the basics of crypto that are actually in use.

My only complaint is that some of the questions on the quizzes were really repetitive week-to-week. In particular, every week features a question (usually #3, if I remember correctly) that had you choose which constructions out of five choices were "secure" as per the definition of security for that week's topic. The problem was that the correct and incorrect answers were always similar, even though the security concept for each week was different! In other words, there are some things that will NEVER be secure for any crypto system. Every version of the question had several choices that fell into this category. It got to the point that I usually got the question correct on the first or second attempt without even trying that hard. In reality, that question should have required a lot more brain power from me because those security challenges are actually sometimes very subtle and difficult.

But that's truly my only criticism. I loved the course and the programming assignments. I'll be keeping an eye out for any more courses taught by Dr. Boneh.

The theoretical part of the course, though dense and fast paced, was very informative. Being recorded it had the advantage for the student of being pausable and repeatable. The great disappointment was the programming part of the course, which I was very much looking forward to, in which the problems were great and have great potential to help the student learn something, but help was minimal (rather tautological, unrevealing, or plain condescending). Fortunately, the programming assignments were option and did not count towards the final grade. But I repeat, they do seem immensely valuable in their topic and difficulty as a learning experience, but guidance in a programming part of the course would be welcome for a change.

Overall, a great course! There's always room for improvement. Certain complex and critical concepts were glossed over way too fast in the lectures (with speech compression in the recordings to boot), while other introductory material was gone over too slowly. There is an answer string evaluation problem in the Q's & A's where the required answer must contain a bullet dot to represent multiplication (an 'x' is not accepted) but the standard computer keyboard does not contain a bullet symbol, you have to be in a word processor to create that. Also, there are correct alternative answers for Q#'s 6,9, &12 in the Week 5 Quiz that need to be re-evaluated.