Professor
Akram Almohalwas
2 of 3
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2019 - Professor AA is very nice and helpful. He indeed cares about students . However, his class is not clear at all, and the structure is really not organized. His Power Point are kinda messy as well. His homework is doable. The project is a good way to apply the skills we learned in the class. But we have to manually collect data which took a very very long time. Professor AA is indeed a good person and helpful outside class, but I don't recommend his class.
Spring 2019 - Professor AA is very nice and helpful. He indeed cares about students . However, his class is not clear at all, and the structure is really not organized. His Power Point are kinda messy as well. His homework is doable. The project is a good way to apply the skills we learned in the class. But we have to manually collect data which took a very very long time. Professor AA is indeed a good person and helpful outside class, but I don't recommend his class.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2024 - The professor is super cool and (at least in lecture) tries his best to keep students engaged. It's obvious that he's really knowledgeable and enjoys what he does. While the content itself can be complex, he structures the class so that it is (in my opinion) easy to get an A. To put this into perspective, I'm a Cogsci major who took this class as an elective and have only took one other Stats upper div, and I managed to get a high A. I still had to put in some effort, but I honestly feel like Stats majors/minors could probably do well in this class with minimal effort. To get an A+, I scored around the average on the homeworks, final, and Kaggle project and around the upper quartile for the midterm. While caring, the professor was often unclear, and the class itself was extremely disorganized. For some of the slideshows with ~100 slides, he only went over about half of the slides while skimming over the rest. Sometimes information given by the professor and the TA would conflict. While the final project was fun and applicable overall, the professor gave very little guidance for the presentation and the paper--only providing a single "sample" of each from previous quarters. Grading itself was not overly strict, yet it was slightly confusing. On some of the homeworks and the final, grades were reposted multiple times--sometimes going up or going down with little explanation as to the rationale for the changes. As this was my first machine learning class, I found the content very interesting. It's basically a survey of a whole bunch of supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods. You don't go super in-depth on specific topics, but you do learn a lot. So overall, poorly structured class but cool content and professor.
Fall 2024 - The professor is super cool and (at least in lecture) tries his best to keep students engaged. It's obvious that he's really knowledgeable and enjoys what he does. While the content itself can be complex, he structures the class so that it is (in my opinion) easy to get an A. To put this into perspective, I'm a Cogsci major who took this class as an elective and have only took one other Stats upper div, and I managed to get a high A. I still had to put in some effort, but I honestly feel like Stats majors/minors could probably do well in this class with minimal effort. To get an A+, I scored around the average on the homeworks, final, and Kaggle project and around the upper quartile for the midterm. While caring, the professor was often unclear, and the class itself was extremely disorganized. For some of the slideshows with ~100 slides, he only went over about half of the slides while skimming over the rest. Sometimes information given by the professor and the TA would conflict. While the final project was fun and applicable overall, the professor gave very little guidance for the presentation and the paper--only providing a single "sample" of each from previous quarters. Grading itself was not overly strict, yet it was slightly confusing. On some of the homeworks and the final, grades were reposted multiple times--sometimes going up or going down with little explanation as to the rationale for the changes. As this was my first machine learning class, I found the content very interesting. It's basically a survey of a whole bunch of supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods. You don't go super in-depth on specific topics, but you do learn a lot. So overall, poorly structured class but cool content and professor.
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Most Helpful Review
He started off the quarter at an extremely slow pace, spending weeks reviewing the basic material that was pretty much a repeat of EE131A or equivalent probability courses. This caused him to go waaay too fast when covering the new concepts later on, in order to make up for lost time. You get no more out of the lectures than if you were to stay at home reading the textbook, and to top it all off the TA was not helpful at all either. Take at your own risk.
He started off the quarter at an extremely slow pace, spending weeks reviewing the basic material that was pretty much a repeat of EE131A or equivalent probability courses. This caused him to go waaay too fast when covering the new concepts later on, in order to make up for lost time. You get no more out of the lectures than if you were to stay at home reading the textbook, and to top it all off the TA was not helpful at all either. Take at your own risk.
Most Helpful Review
This guy cares about his students. In his lectures he sticks strictly to his elaborate powerpoint slides. He posts those online. I never looked them over before going to lecture so I never knew what the big paragraphs said because I was busy trying not to fall asleep. Don't get me wrong, this guy knows what he is talking about and he will answer all your questions. My personal opinion is that his lectures were not effective. My learning style might just not be compatible with his method of teaching. Great class. You'll learn a lot.
This guy cares about his students. In his lectures he sticks strictly to his elaborate powerpoint slides. He posts those online. I never looked them over before going to lecture so I never knew what the big paragraphs said because I was busy trying not to fall asleep. Don't get me wrong, this guy knows what he is talking about and he will answer all your questions. My personal opinion is that his lectures were not effective. My learning style might just not be compatible with his method of teaching. Great class. You'll learn a lot.
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