ECE210 with ECE220
Relevant Course Reviews
Who should take them?
Both courses are required for ECE majors. CompE majors typically take ECE220 in the spring semester of their freshman year and ECE210 during their sophomore year, while EE majors typically take both ECE210 and ECE220 sometime between the spring of their freshman year and spring of their sophomore year. Both courses are prerequisites for many of the 300/400-level ECE courses, and ECE220 is a prerequisite for CS225. If you wish to take higher level ECE courses earlier, getting these two courses out of the way early on is key. It is also worth noting that both these courses are required for junior eligibility status. ECE210 focuses on circuit analysis concepts and basics of signal processing such as frequency response, Fourier transforms, and convolution, whereas ECE220 focuses on assembly language features such as stacks and subroutines, and programming basics such as functions, arrays, pointers, recursion, simple sorting algorithms, and basic data structures in C (and a brief overview on C++ in the final weeks of the course).
Workload
In terms of coursework, ECE210 has a weekly homework assignment, biweekly labs starting halfway through the semester, 3 midterms, and a final. Homework assignments usually contain around 5-7 problems that need to be solved. For labs, there is usually a 2-page prelab and then a 4-page lab report alongside the required circuit construction. One can expect to spend around 3-6 hours on these assignments. Homework and exams are the main focus of the course, and so will be what most students dedicate their time and effort to. The homeworks take a significant chunk of time to complete, and students are advised to start working on them as early as Thursday if the homework is due on Monday/Tuesday. Erhan Kudeki's textbook is an excellent resource for this course, and students are advised to review it before exams.
Meanwhile, ECE220 has weekly MPs (12 in total), labs (1 for each MP), 6 quizzes, 2 midterms and a final. The lab is typically due on Sunday, and the associated MP is due the Thursday after. Labs are optional, and can be completed for 10% credit back on the MP, with extra credit being capped on the maximum score for all the MPs (meaning doing the labs will not make up for points lost in a midterm). One can expect to spend around 0-3 hours per week on the simpler MPs, and 3-6 on the more difficult ones (the second MP on assembly calculators and the 10th MP on linked lists come to mind). The quizzes are relatively trivial and rarely take more than 20 minutes to complete of the allocated 50 minutes. The midterms do require some level of preparation, and it is recommended that students review lecture notes in the days before the exam.
Recommendation
Students taking these courses together will usually also be doing MATH285 and/or MATH257 together. While it is not a walk in the park due to the lack of an overlap between ECE210 and ECE220, the alternative would be to take only one of these at a time, while the latter course is taken in a later semester along with higher level courses, which would be even more challenging. As such, it is strongly advisable to take ECE210 and ECE220 together if you meet the prerequisites, have space in your schedule and are interested in both the software and hardware routes within ECE.
Note that ECE210 can be a time sink, and is often seen as a significant step up in difficulty from other classes, such as ECE110, ECE120 and ECE220. However, as mentioned previously, while taking these classes together can be daunting, it might be even worse to take them alongside harder technicals such as ECE391 or ECE385 instead.