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Achuta Kadambi
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Based on 29 Users
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.
Took it his first quarter teaching (Spring 2020) and he's a solid prof. He definitely made an attempt to cover things thoroughly and make everything understandable, although I didn't love how he spent more time than he should have on the first half of the class and sped through some things at the end. Homeworks could be pretty tough at times (way more than exams) but I don't think any harder than from other ECE 102 profs. Exams were pretty fair and 24 hours (bc of COVID of course), and he even made the final no-harm (i.e. can only help your grade) in the end.
All in all, I'd definitely recommend taking Kadambi for 102, though I did find videos on youtube from MIT to be better for learning than some of his lectures (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL41692B571DD0AF9B).
Kadambi is pretty cool prof. Gives cool grad student vibes. His tests could be a bit confusing, but I thought he taught pretty well. His quizzes were stress-inducing and he seemed strangely attached to justifying their existence and use. Also loved his rant about how much money he has from selling his startup (in response to an anonymous student review saying he needs to touch grass and work in industry). We literally had to watch a recorded make-up lecture afterwards to cover the material because he spent like 40 minutes talking about how much money he made and how many patents he has which was hilarious.
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.
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.
Took it his first quarter teaching (Spring 2020) and he's a solid prof. He definitely made an attempt to cover things thoroughly and make everything understandable, although I didn't love how he spent more time than he should have on the first half of the class and sped through some things at the end. Homeworks could be pretty tough at times (way more than exams) but I don't think any harder than from other ECE 102 profs. Exams were pretty fair and 24 hours (bc of COVID of course), and he even made the final no-harm (i.e. can only help your grade) in the end.
All in all, I'd definitely recommend taking Kadambi for 102, though I did find videos on youtube from MIT to be better for learning than some of his lectures (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL41692B571DD0AF9B).
Kadambi is pretty cool prof. Gives cool grad student vibes. His tests could be a bit confusing, but I thought he taught pretty well. His quizzes were stress-inducing and he seemed strangely attached to justifying their existence and use. Also loved his rant about how much money he has from selling his startup (in response to an anonymous student review saying he needs to touch grass and work in industry). We literally had to watch a recorded make-up lecture afterwards to cover the material because he spent like 40 minutes talking about how much money he made and how many patents he has which was hilarious.
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.