Review posted on Thu 01 Jul 2010
Course(s) Taken: Electrical Engineering: 121B

Professor Woo simply doesn't care about the undergraduates. His lecture slides are the mathematical derivation of the semiconductors formulas. if you go to his office hours he will intimidate you in many ways and he never discuss and grade related issues. His lectures are hard to follow he out too much in your plate and expects you know everything. BUT he is a fair grader if you try hard for this course you will get a decent grade.

Review posted on Fri 02 Jan 2009
Course(s) Taken: Electrical Engineering: 221A

Avoid if you can, the course should be named "Mathematics of semocondutors" not "PHYSICS of semiconductors" Lecture notes are basically mathematical derivations of every single equations with minimum physics. One more thing to note is that your grade will depend on whether you have the past exam scripts, not how much you know or understand.

Review posted on Tue 06 May 2008
Course(s) Taken: 121B

Avoid at all costs. It's only half-way through the course, but I have to leave a review already in case I don't survive. I appreciate his passion for the course and material, but the combination of his teaching style, the difficulty of the material and how boring the material actually is do not spell well. Despite the fact that he will spend a good 30 minutes reviewing what he's gone over in previous lectures, the extra time will not help you understand what he is talking about. If you don't hear every word he says and make sense out of every sentence, you'll be pretty fucked. He will repeatedly tell you to look something up from your EE2 notes (which I took 2 years ago... not a good idea) because he doesn't have time to review it, even though he will review past lectures for 30 minutes and babble on about his colleagues for another 30 minutes and still manage to let you out 30 minutes before the 2 hours of class are up.

Review posted on Wed 28 Jun 2006
Course(s) Taken: EE2

I have just taken EE2 from professor Woo and when there's only about a 30% enrollment in the class, you know something is wrong. He expected us to know subject material that was beyond the scope of the class (ie. how to program in matlab). His homework questions weren't very clear and no text was used for the class. The only material that he told us we should buy was a course reader (text book under EE2 at bookstore was a complete waste of money, didn't use it). Even though we have a course reader, his questions on homework and tests were beyond the covered material. Attendance of his classes were useless and his notes were abridged to say the least and sloppy. His final was unfair. The question that had the most points assigned to it used material not covered in the course material. (If you care: He had a question on find properties of a diode with an intrinsic region between the extrinsic regions of the diode. This was not covered in the class or reader and we were expected to derive equations and solve them) Overall a bad teacher and I don't recommend him and neither did a TA for the class...

Don't take him, but if you so desire to be brave, best of luck to you.

Review posted on Wed 28 Jun 2006
Course(s) Taken: EE2

I wouldn't exactly recommend him, but don't avoid taking EE2 just because he's the only one teaching. I scored the second or third worst on the first midterm (the one everyone failed + he gave an optional retake), and I finished the course with a B+.

Yes, he moves quickly, but if you pay attention, ask questions in discussion (the TAs are very sympathetic and knowledgeable), and actually study you'll be fine. You may laugh now, but you'd be surprised how many people complain about the course when they put in no work of their own.

Above all, despite being a difficult teacher, he's a nice guy. He actually offered us a midterm retake not so much for the grades, but to make sure we actually understood the material. He came in on the weekend before finals (and a day before his departure to Hawaii) to have a review session. And occasionally, he can be funny.

You'll think it's hell during the quarter, but it'll be fine. Also, don't forget that 75% of the people who write on here are the ones that get Cs or lower in a class.

Review posted on Thu 01 Jun 2006
Course(s) Taken: EE2

Woo is one of the hardest professors I have ever taken. He taught at a rapid pace and assumed we knew a lot of material that we didn't. He spent most of his time deriving equations instead of explaining the concepts to us. In fact, he would often just give us an equation and just tell us to "believe it" without any explanation of what it means. He never went through any examples in class until we repeatedly asked him to. In the examples he did go through, he just gave us an incomplete answer which did not help much. Nobody in the class really had a good understanding of the course material; the average of 35% on the open book midterm proves this. It seems that Woo teaches straight out of the course reader and has a hard time answering the questions we ask him. Often times he gives an "evasive" answer like "you should've learned this material in another class" or he states some irrelevant facts that just serve to confuse us more. The homework problems, examples, and test problems are all taken straight from old textbooks with the numbers changed around. I sometimes get the feeling that Woo just memorizes how to do problems and does not have that great of an understanding of the material himself. He even said himself, in the beginning of the quarter, "Don't try to understand the material. You won't get it. Even the top scientists in the country have not fully figured out this stuff. Just treat this like it's magic and believe that it really works." Of course if you follow Woo's advice then you will surely fail the class. If you are able to avoid having to take Woo then PLEASE do so by all means.

Review posted on Sun 30 Apr 2006
Course(s) Taken: EE2

First of all, I would like to say that this professor is probably the worst you can get. Avoid at all costs. Sadly, I am currently enrolled and have no other choice, so onward with the review. His teaching style is extremely fast-paced; his intentions is to get through the entire school outline for the course. Most good professors wouldn't even dream of it. He does indeed ask for questions at the start and end of lecture, but due to the rapid pace, no one has any understanding whatsoever of the material to formulate a question. His equations come about by "magic", or so he says (at least 5 times per lecture) and his explanations are condescending in the way that you should have understood it the first time around. He is unfriendly, he doesn't respond to emails, his life story is a broken record playing over and over, and he likes announce that he is taking his shirt off in class to show a disturbing build in body. His homeworks are out of random textbooks and they consist of impossible to solve problems, and also include the occasional computer programming part which no one has any idea how to do. Ironically, the TAs who sit in class say he has no idea what the hell he is talking about. As a teacher/professor, you learn absolutely nothing. NOTHING! He expects you to know formulas you have never heard of, derivations of them, and of course applications. He loves to sound smart and esoteric, do not fall for it, a person who is smart who can't convey knowledge is useless. The midterm is graded by himself, since most students in their right mind will not enroll in his class (thus the population is small). My gpa is about to go into shambles, so I write this message to you to warn you.

Review posted on Fri 01 Apr 2005
Course(s) Taken: ee 121b

Woo is straight up ridiculous. His teaching style makes sense to only himself. He speaks at lightening quick speeds, which is only matched by his lightening quick scribbles. During lecture you have just enough time to copy notes from the board before they are erased in a blaze of glory. Add to that a thick accent which makes comprehension in class pretty much impossible. He is horrible at answering questions in class and does not allow the proper amount of time to let the material sink in. By this point in EE it takes more than a glance over to comprehend the new material, something Woo does not understad. A positive is that the notes are very good and complete. When looking over the notes later at night after reading the book, they begin to make better sense. The best part of this class is the book, which is online so you dont have to pay the 100 bucks for a typical science book. The book is very clear and easy to follow and actually makes pretty good sense. Without it, I would have been lost in this class.

The homeworks are pretty chill seeing as tho there were only 4 for the quarter. The exams were very difficult. The mean for the midterm was 40% and on the final I got a 39 and only dropped 3 places in class rank. Be prepared to start writing from the moment u get into the test and not be finished by the time class ends. Woo likes to throw problems on the tests that "expand" on what you've already seen. They are hard, you gotta put in the hours for this class but I would recommend another professor.

Woo has a lot of useful knowledge about what fields to go into once you graduate (although he thinks everything is looking bleak), although he does not help to learn this class. Also if you still have your ee2 reader, read through that before this class starts.

Review posted on Sun 11 Apr 2004
Course(s) Taken: None

his final is very hard, it does not have anything to do with the material in the text book. he taught a lot of stuff beyond the scope of the text book, and that's what he concentrated too. even i finally got an A in this class, i don't know what i've done in the final

Review posted on Fri 09 Apr 2004
Course(s) Taken: EE 121B

About the only thing good about him was that the homeworks wasn't too much (5 for the
entire quarter, although it was supposed to be 6). Does he care about students? Well, he
seems eager to answer student questions during lecture. He comes off as rude because of
that certain style/speech/accent from his native country.

He always starts off with a 15-20 minutes recap of what he had in the previous lecture. He lectured on the material, and I didn't think he strayed off topic as frequently as mentioned on this site. Unfortunately, the material is so unbearably thick that it's hard to understand what he's talking about. EE 121B is like EE2 except 10 times worse, and taking it with Jason Woo makes it another 100 times more painful because of the tests.

Midterm: The one he issued out in 03 seemed manageable, but the one we received this year
contained alot of derivations and basically problems that we haven't quite seen, to say the least. Looking at it now, the problems actually provided hints. (i.e. After telling us to derive a formula, it'd say "Consider the such-and-such equation and remember that this equation is etc." ). Unfortunately I had no idea what was going on so it wasn't much help. The average was some 40%, and there were people in the 90+ range. And that's even when the last question (worth 30-40 points out of the total 100) was "beyond the context of the course", as the TA put it. I was told that the students this quarter was much smarter than previous years, and the same thing was mentioned by Abidi for the EE 115B class during the same quarter (i'm assuming there are some overlap in students between 115B and 121B). Unfortunately for me, this was a double whammy since I was particulary terrible with semiconductors in this more-competive class. Personally, i thought the test was much, much harder than what the average indicated.

Final: I thought the midterm was bad, but final was even worse. I was hoping that he'd have
hints again, but none this time. Again, there were derivations, and as the person on 4/6
said, there's some rather "creative" twists to diagrams he threw at us, noticeably more
impossible than the problems in the midterm. By the way, the tests were open book and open notes, but that wasn't much help, if any. In the end, some of the few points I managed to scrap for on the final was probably becaues of the knowledge I had in EE 115A.

On a somewhat positive note, he has policy that the final will be 100% of the grade if it'll help your grade. Of course I don't recommend that you count on that to happen though.