I took Kadambi in Spring 2020 so it was completely online. He was a really fun and nice professor and his annotated slides are really good. He follows the philosophy of offering hard classes with easier/relaxed grading. The homework was pretty hard and I spent multiple days on it every week. But the midterm and final were actually easier than the HWs (median for the midterm was 91.5). He made both the midterm and final 24 hours long before the quarter even started. He does this because he sympathizes with the difficulty of the UC system compared to private schools (he went to Berkeley for undergrad and MIT for his PhD). Overall, really fun and cool professor and I personally would take this class with Kadambi again if I had to!

Professor Kadambi is a fantastic professor, and even though he's fairly new to the whole professorship spiel, his lecturing was concise and engaging. This quarter, the class was taught online, and his method of administering the course was recording the lecture, having us watch it on our own, and letting us ask questions (office hours style) during Wednesday "lecture" - so a flipped classroom. He also annotated slides which were uploaded in both un-annotated and annotated form. Additionally the TAs would upload discussion worksheets with solutions including all the work to get to the solution, and this helped immensely with figuring out how to approach the homeworks.

All in all, I would take another class with this professor if I could.

Best professor I have ever had. He's awesome, super caring for his students, and genuinely just loves teaching. Take any class with Professor Kadambi and you will not regret it that is a guarantee.

One of the most interesting class I've taken at UCLA so far! grading is stress-free, material is super interesting, and the professor is very fun!

Material is interesting. Office hours are fantastic and definitely worth attending.

Nice, fun, pretty stress-free easy class. Just go to lecture and take the quizzes seriously and you will do well.

This is an excellent class, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. He is incredibly passionate and cares a lot about the students. Was very generous and understanding. I would also recommend that this class by cross listed as both a CS and EE course.

Syllabus can be found at tiny.cc/ucla113. The class is poorly structured although I expect it to improve since prof takes feedback quite seriously. The lectures are engaging although he often goes on tangents and talks about industry, which I still find confusing. The biggest problem I had was that his quizzes, homework and review sessions were not representative of the kinds of problems on the test. I also feel like prof does not have much time for the class and nor do the TA's(although not their fault). Speaking of TA's there is only one at a time, which is kind of strange. Professor is also strangely obsessed with grades and decreasing randomness.

All that being said, it's not that bad if you go in with a more open mind, I think you can learn a lot from the class, and I would take it with him rather than the other professors for this class.

Alright take my review with a grain of salt because you are in for a wild ride if you're taking this class. Kadambi is a fine professor but this was his first time teaching 113 and I found the class really unorganized.

At the start of the class, we learned that we only had one TA (budget cuts in the ece department?? idk), which was not anyone's fault. But this meant that our TA would not be holding any live discussion sections, and instead posted a video every week. The homework that was assigned was pretty straightforward and lined up with the content of the midterm (taken sometime around week 5). I did pretty well and felt on top of the material. Then, we learned we would have a completely new TA starting after the midterm.

I will say, Kadambi takes class feedback pretty seriously. He seemed pretty overwhelmed this quarter and even took a whole class period to explain how some students believed the class should be more applied, so he would be adding some Python assignments to the homework (fine, whatever). Tbh I found the Python assignments pretty interesting and applicable.

However, when we started thinking about the final exam, that's when things got messy. Solutions to many HW assignments weren't posted until VERY late (maybe the Sunday before our Wednesday week 10 exam?) so we didn't have a lot of time to study. Practice problems were posted around the same time. Usually I'm the type that takes at least a week to learn and ask about the practice exam, so this wasn't really my favorite thing. Kadambi told us a few days before the final exam that there would be an open alternative exam date date during the scheduled final during finals week because our final was the week after Thanksgiving lol, but I personally had another final that day so I chose to take the earlier exam.

Walk into Wednesday. That exam was HARD. Not at all like the practice problems and very applied. I don't think we had enough practice for this kind of material during the homework, and when I talked to other people after the exam they agreed that they didn't know what they were doing. I thought the exam would be curved because of this so I wasn't too worried, but got my grade back later and found my grade dropped from a B+ to C+. Tough. I'm not sure if there was any difference between the week 10 and finals week exam distributions, but a lot of people I know got Bs or lower who took the earlier exam. There was no curve.

Anyways, if you take this class, be prepared for it to be messy. I think if I had more solutions to homework and practice solutions earlier I could have done a lot better, but if you're the kind of person who needs time to understand things be prepared to self advocate a lot. Kadambi doesn't like to release solutions and our HWs were graded very late. Maybe we just had a messy quarter and hopefully you have a better experience, but yeah good luck the material is interesting but this class structure wasn't great.

The class's grading structure was 20% homework, 10% participation, 30% midterm, and 40% final. Every week, there was what the professor liked to call a milestone. With the exception of week 5 (midterm) and week 10 (final) milestones taking place during the last lecture of those weeks, a homework assignment was assigned the previous week's Friday and made due the following Friday (so 7 homeworks total). There was no textbook, which is both a blessing and curse depending on if you prioritize saving money on textbooks or having solid references for the material beyond the slides.

Everyone gets full participation points unless you do something outrageous to piss the professor off (ex: throw an egg at him)

The homeworks were very time consuming (especially since the grader my quarter was pretty strict), but manageable if you make a homework group (Kadambi in fact encouraged the creation of homework groups provided that you don't just share your whole assignment with your group or blatantly copy off of your groupmates) and have access to the previous years' homeworks' solutions (which only kind of varied from 2020).

The exams were on a whole new level. The mean score for the midterm was around 59% percent (which was 10-15% lower than the professor expected) with a standard deviation of 21%, and the professor designed the final exam with the intention of the mean score being a 50%. That being said, he promised to curve generously for as many A's and A-'s as possible (although no B+'s C+'s, which confused me but I only remembered him explicitly saying that there will be no B+'s) and replace our midterm exam score with our final exam score. I scored around a standard deviation below the mean on the midterm but somehow got a B- in the class (most likely because of both the midterm dropping policy and the curve).

Overall, good material to review your math, hard/time consuming homeworks, wack asf exams, and quite a good curve.