Purdue study guides, course by course
Purdue West Lafayette is an engineering- and STEM-heavy flagship where the first two years are built around large, standardized gateway courses: common exams, curved grades, and a freshman-through-sophomore CS core (CS 18000 through CS 25200) with a national reputation for rigor. The calculus, chemistry, and physics gateways run at huge scale with their own folklore — PHYS 172's unconventional curriculum, MA 16100's five-credit pace — so steady weekly preparation beats talent here more reliably than almost anywhere.
Purdue's main campus uses five-digit course numbers — CS 18000, MA 16100, CHM 11500 — though students routinely shorten them in conversation (CS 180, MA 161) and some courses are still searched by their old three-digit form, like CS 159 and PHYS 172. We list each course under the form students actually use.
Fennie is independent and not affiliated with Purdue University.
Use Fennie at PurdueComputer Science
CS 18000 — Problem Solving and Object-Oriented Programming
CS 18000 — universally called CS 180 — is Purdue's first course for CS majors: object-oriented programming in Java, from control flow and methods through classes, inheritance, interfaces, exceptions, file I/O, and concurrency basics. It's the famous freshman gauntlet that sets the tone for the entire Purdue CS core, with labs, projects, and exams that include writing real code.
CS 18200 — Foundations of Computer Science
CS 18200 is Purdue's discrete math course for CS majors — logic, proofs, sets, functions, induction, counting, graphs, and basic complexity — usually taken alongside or right after CS 18000. It's the course where CS stops being programming and starts being mathematics.
CS 24000 — Programming in C
CS 24000 teaches C to students who already know Java from CS 18000 — pointers, memory management, structs, dynamic allocation, and the machine-level view of data — as preparation for the systems half of the Purdue CS core. Homework is programming-heavy and exams test C semantics in detail.
CS 25000 — Computer Architecture
CS 25000 covers how computers actually work, from transistors and logic gates up through combinational and sequential circuits, datapaths, assembly language, and memory hierarchy. It's one of the two sophomore-core courses (with CS 25100) that Purdue CS students take after the freshman sequence.
CS 25100 — Data Structures and Algorithms
CS 25100 is Purdue's data structures and algorithms course — lists, trees, heaps, hash tables, graphs, sorting, and algorithm analysis — and the most notorious course in the CS core. It gates the upper-division CS curriculum and its exams have a campus-wide reputation for difficulty.
CS 25200 — Systems Programming
CS 25200 is Purdue's systems programming course — C at scale, processes, memory allocators, shells, concurrency, and networking — famous for lab projects of unusual size and a workload that dominates the semester it's taken. It completes the sophomore core and is the closest thing Purdue CS has to a professional bootcamp.
CS 159 — C Programming (Programming Applications for Engineers)
CS 159 (officially CS 15900) is the C programming course for Purdue's first-year engineering students — problem solving, control structures, functions, arrays, pointers basics, and structured program design. For most engineering majors it's the one required programming course, taken at large scale alongside the rest of the first-year engineering core.
Mathematics
MA 16100 — Plane Analytic Geometry and Calculus I
MA 16100 — MA 161 to students — is Purdue's five-credit Calculus I: limits, derivatives, applications of differentiation, and the start of integration, required across science and many other majors. The five-credit format means more class hours and a faster effective pace than most universities' Calc I.
MA 16200 — Plane Analytic Geometry and Calculus II
MA 16200 continues Purdue's main calculus sequence: techniques and applications of integration, sequences and series, parametric and polar coordinates, and vectors. It carries the standard Calc II reputation — widely considered the harder half of the first-year sequence.
MA 26100 — Multivariate Calculus
MA 26100 is Purdue's Calculus III — vectors, partial derivatives, multiple integrals, and vector calculus through Green's, Stokes', and the divergence theorems — required for engineering and most physical science majors, usually in sophomore year.
MA 26500 — Linear Algebra
MA 26500 is Purdue's linear algebra course for engineers and scientists — systems of equations, matrices, determinants, vector spaces, eigenvalues, and diagonalization — typically taken in sophomore year, often alongside MA 26600.
MA 26600 — Ordinary Differential Equations
MA 26600 covers first-order equations, linear second-order equations, Laplace transforms, and systems of differential equations — the standard ODE course required across Purdue engineering. It leans heavily on the calculus sequence and touches linear algebra in its systems unit.
Chemistry
CHM 11500 — General Chemistry
CHM 11500 is the first semester of Purdue's general chemistry sequence — stoichiometry, atomic structure, periodicity, bonding, thermochemistry, and gases — with a lab component, serving engineering, science, and pre-health students at huge scale.
CHM 11600 — General Chemistry
CHM 11600 is the second semester of Purdue general chemistry: kinetics, equilibrium, acids and bases, thermodynamics, and electrochemistry, with the lab continuing alongside. It's required for chemistry-adjacent majors and pre-health tracks, and the material is noticeably more conceptual than CHM 11500's.
Physics
PHYS 172 — Modern Mechanics
PHYS 172 (officially PHYS 17200) is Purdue's calculus-based mechanics course for engineering and science majors, taught with the Matter & Interactions curriculum: a small set of fundamental principles — momentum, energy, angular momentum — applied from atoms to orbits, with computational modeling in Python alongside labs and recitations.
PHYS 272 — Electric and Magnetic Interactions
PHYS 272 (officially PHYS 27200) is the electricity and magnetism sequel to PHYS 172, in the same Matter & Interactions style: fields and potentials built up from charge distributions, circuits from microscopic principles, and magnetism through to Maxwell's equations, with computational modeling continuing throughout.
Economics
ECON 251 — Microeconomics
ECON 251 (officially ECON 25100) is Purdue's introductory microeconomics — supply and demand, elasticity, consumer and producer theory, and market structures — taught in large lectures and required across Krannert business programs and many other majors.
ECON 252 — Macroeconomics
ECON 252 (officially ECON 25200) is Purdue's introductory macroeconomics — GDP, inflation, unemployment, aggregate demand and supply, fiscal and monetary policy — delivered in large lectures with multiple-choice exams carrying the grade.
Statistics
English
First-Year Engineering
Studying at Purdue?
Upload your course materials and Fennie generates Daily Plans paced to your deadlines — plus chat, flashcards, and quizzes built from your own courses.
Get started free