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.

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.