MATH 170S
Introduction to Probability and Statistics 2: Statistics
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, one hour. Requisites: courses 31A, 31B, and 170A or 170E or Statistics 100A. Not open to students with credit for Statistics 100B. Introduction to statistics. Topics include sampling, estimation (maximum likelihood and Bayesian), properties of estimators, regression, confidence intervals, hypotheses testing, analysis of variance. P/NP or letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - Grade Composition: 45% Midterm + 25% HWK (Assigned weekly from Week 2 to Week 10; 9 in total) + 30% Final The Professor was very willing to help during his Office Hours. He did give clues to challenging homework problems. The distribution of easy, medium, and hard questions on the exams was around 50%, 30%, and 20%. The only thing I disliked about this class might be that my TA could hardly speak English. I simply skipped discussions and hardly took advantage of any resources from her. Fair Professor and pretty tough class for me, so definitely requiring some hard work.
Winter 2021 - Grade Composition: 45% Midterm + 25% HWK (Assigned weekly from Week 2 to Week 10; 9 in total) + 30% Final The Professor was very willing to help during his Office Hours. He did give clues to challenging homework problems. The distribution of easy, medium, and hard questions on the exams was around 50%, 30%, and 20%. The only thing I disliked about this class might be that my TA could hardly speak English. I simply skipped discussions and hardly took advantage of any resources from her. Fair Professor and pretty tough class for me, so definitely requiring some hard work.
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2022 - Avoid this professor. All other reviews for 170s were during online quarters due to COVID, ie 24 hour exams. I took this class fully in person with timed exams, and I would say it is the worst math class I have taken here (even compared to math 115a in person). The grade is only composed of quizzes and exams, where quizzes are 24 hour and easy, but do not reflect difficulty of exams and are very surface level. The first midterm and the final were completely unreasonable in terms of difficulty. The mean for midterm 1 was around 50. He gives optional homework which are just book problems and does not provide any solutions or explanations to check with, so if you don't have Chegg you are out of luck. His lectures/lecture notes are just the textbook summarized and often contain errors in formulas. Even if you were to solve all textbook problems (as he recommends for outside study) you would not be prepared for his exams. He also does not plan to curve the course at this moment (I am still waiting for my grade). It is just appalling that this lazy professor managed to make a class which is normally regarded as one of the easiest math upper divs a complete nightmare.
Spring 2022 - Avoid this professor. All other reviews for 170s were during online quarters due to COVID, ie 24 hour exams. I took this class fully in person with timed exams, and I would say it is the worst math class I have taken here (even compared to math 115a in person). The grade is only composed of quizzes and exams, where quizzes are 24 hour and easy, but do not reflect difficulty of exams and are very surface level. The first midterm and the final were completely unreasonable in terms of difficulty. The mean for midterm 1 was around 50. He gives optional homework which are just book problems and does not provide any solutions or explanations to check with, so if you don't have Chegg you are out of luck. His lectures/lecture notes are just the textbook summarized and often contain errors in formulas. Even if you were to solve all textbook problems (as he recommends for outside study) you would not be prepared for his exams. He also does not plan to curve the course at this moment (I am still waiting for my grade). It is just appalling that this lazy professor managed to make a class which is normally regarded as one of the easiest math upper divs a complete nightmare.
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2025 - There isn't a listing for his MATH 171 class but I'll leave this here. TA (Kadar K.) was great, I went to his office hours all the time both to confirm HW answers and talk about other math and ML stuff. Though Prof himself limits his office hours to a 15 minute zoom call. Pretty slow-paced course, lots of time to go off on tangents, tell jokes, and throw shade at the worst students. But that gives Prof time to make absolutely sure everyone understands every concept, which I like. Interesting concepts with many computations and not many super rigorous proofs. He writes hard tests but makes sure the class gets a B+ average, which I also like because it becomes less about being super careful and more about understanding things. No extra credit, but gives reasonable partial credit. You can't drop exams, but you can drop a homework (which the other TA (forgot her name) graded kind of brutally). I also appreciate how I've talked to prof for 15+ minutes after class before and he still tries to help, and also he keeps his email open to students. Unless you're pretty capable, you'll have to show up to class, but you can be late. He gives you an oral exam if you don't show up to enough randomly selected ends-of-classes (like half of them or less), and you lose 10% on your final (worth 50%) if you do poorly on that, but that bar is set pretty low. That could also end up as a double-punishment since your homework average is then capped at 1.5 times your final exam score. If you can't show up, you could dig through the free textbook or make some friends to try learning everything for the oral and written exams. Unfortunately that's a bit hard when there isn't a Piazza or Discord for the class. Anyway, that class was fun. I'll miss Prof Yin a lot.
Spring 2025 - There isn't a listing for his MATH 171 class but I'll leave this here. TA (Kadar K.) was great, I went to his office hours all the time both to confirm HW answers and talk about other math and ML stuff. Though Prof himself limits his office hours to a 15 minute zoom call. Pretty slow-paced course, lots of time to go off on tangents, tell jokes, and throw shade at the worst students. But that gives Prof time to make absolutely sure everyone understands every concept, which I like. Interesting concepts with many computations and not many super rigorous proofs. He writes hard tests but makes sure the class gets a B+ average, which I also like because it becomes less about being super careful and more about understanding things. No extra credit, but gives reasonable partial credit. You can't drop exams, but you can drop a homework (which the other TA (forgot her name) graded kind of brutally). I also appreciate how I've talked to prof for 15+ minutes after class before and he still tries to help, and also he keeps his email open to students. Unless you're pretty capable, you'll have to show up to class, but you can be late. He gives you an oral exam if you don't show up to enough randomly selected ends-of-classes (like half of them or less), and you lose 10% on your final (worth 50%) if you do poorly on that, but that bar is set pretty low. That could also end up as a double-punishment since your homework average is then capped at 1.5 times your final exam score. If you can't show up, you could dig through the free textbook or make some friends to try learning everything for the oral and written exams. Unfortunately that's a bit hard when there isn't a Piazza or Discord for the class. Anyway, that class was fun. I'll miss Prof Yin a lot.
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