Yes, 5760 is a grad level course, and this semester there was only one undergraduate taking it. As for the renumbering, it's just filthy politics. The course enrollment system was changed. The new system (PeopleSoft) was chosen because the founder has donated a lot of money to Cornell (there is a building named after him). Unfortunately, the fancy new system sucks, and couldn't handle courses unless they had four digits. So most classes were renumbered by just adding a 0 to the end of the original number. In true Cornell fashion, the students practically rioted over the change. And also in true Cornell fashion, it made no difference.

I don't think this argument is valid

• There are, after all, only two major FPGA vendors (Altera and Xilinx) out there. It makes sense to me in a learning environment to choose one and avoid spending extra time learning the quirks of two systems. That time would be better spent learning the course material.
• It is not difficult to move from one vendor to another once one toolchain has been mastered.
• I've heard from a 3rd party that Altera tools are easier to use than the Xilinx, which again suits an education environment. My experience at Cornell has been that the Altera tools are straightforward to use.
• Many companies provide their tools/software to students for free or at a reduced price, hoping that the students will become attached to them. Examples are MATLAB, Microsoft, and Cadence. This doesn't make it right, but it's not some crime particular to Altera.
• It is useful to a university to stick with one vendor for all the same reasons that it is useful for a company to stick with one vendor.

I'm in this class. I worked on the Speaker Recognition project. It was very hard. Some comments and responses to other posts:

• This is not a shitty program. In fact, it's probably one of the top programs in Cornell Engineering.
• Both this class and the microcontroller class are taught by Bruce Land, an excellent professor. He's been at Cornell forever and knows just about everything.
• Bear in mind that these projects were done in 4-5 weeks and this is only one of several courses that each student takes.
• No one goes to the library for books any more. In five years at Cornell, I've had to get a library book once to find something I couldn't find online.
• Wikipedia is an excellent reference. If nothing else, it is useful as a platform for finding the keywords necessary to more fully investigate a subject.
• Our project does reference "real" publications - these are easily found using Google Scholar.

If you have any questions about the class, I'd be happy to answer them.