Officially the course moves into core data-structure and algorithm design work, and student threads repeatedly describe it as a major step up from CS111.

The current Rutgers site lists weekly labs, an autograded programming assignment, recitation quizzes, and multiple in-person exams.

Students are given about a week after each topic for labs while the course keeps moving through linked structures, trees, hashing, and graphs.

The official workload is coding-heavy through labs and assignments, but the public course site points to shorter repeated programming work rather than a long capstone-style project.

Rutgers assigns two in-person exams plus three in-person quizzes, and student discussion often singles exams out as a stress point.

Big-O and algorithm analysis matter, but the published material is still more code-and-structure focused than math-proof focused.

Student advice consistently emphasizes drawing structures and tracing operations, which suggests understanding matters more than pure recall.

The course sits in the middle ground where students must reason about invariants and tradeoffs, but still through very concrete structures and operations.

Both the official synopsis and student preparation advice make clear that weak CS111 skills in Java, recursion, arrays, and asymptotic thinking will hurt quickly.

The public Rutgers materials put most of the effort into problem solving, labs, assignments, and exams rather than sustained reading-heavy preparation.