- Home
- Search
- Akram M Almohalwas
- All Reviews
Akram Almohalwas
AD
Based on 159 Users
DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT. IF YOU VALUE YOUR SANITY AND YOUR LIFE DO NOT TAKE STATS 10 WITH THIS DUDE.
You will NEVER LEARN IN LECTURE. This dude goes on loud yelling tangents and most of lecture he is talking about R-studio which he NEVER tests us on. The way he explains material is so confusing. He doesn’t even record his lectures and his jokes he throws in can be inappropriate sometimes. You can’t even understand him half of the time because when he speaks it just sounds like garbled garbage. ALL HE DOES IN LECTURE IS SHOUT RANDOMLY. ALL HE DOES, like he’s scolding us or something. And if u think “my ta can maybe help me”, NO. Even the Ta’s for this class are absolutely horrible so I wouldn’t bet on your TA carrying you. They don’t know how to explain everything in a way where you can learn the material. They just expect for you to know as if you’re not already wasting money on this CRAP. I would rather eat a dead bug than ever see or take this prof again.
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.
Personally, I didn't find this class to be enjoyable as it doesn't provide much to improve data science skills, at least compared to other stats classes. This class mostly covers different experimental design and when to use them. Think of it as a sequel to 101A, but covers specifically on categorical variables. If you want to go into research, then I could see this class being helpful but otherwise, it lacks applicable skills. Now specifically for Almo's class:
Pros:
- Amazing guy. He's very enthusiastic with the content he teaches, and you can tell he loves his work. His lectures provide deep insights into how each concept works and he even puts in some humor as if to not bore us for too long. He also has so much care for his students because he wants to see us succeed not just in this class but in the future.
- Lenient grader. Bro gave us a take home final open notes and no time limit. On top of that, he adjusted the grading scheme because he saw many people struggling on the midterm. Homeworks were also free points as it seems like it's graded by completion. He was a little more harsh on the project, but as long as you listen to his feedback, you won't fail.
- He records pretty much everything. Lectures are record but even if he has to miss class, he will set up a recorded lecture for us to watch and even provide us an additional video for homework help.
Cons:
- Slides are a mess. Every lecture has over 100 slide that he skims over. He may be a good lecturer but the way he presents it is very unclear. Don't use the slides for help as it's more helpful to take notes on what professor yaps about.
- Exams are confusing. The way its structured is nothing like the homework. Yes it was take-home but it took me probably around 6 hours to complete the final. He doesn't have a practice final, but instead has a bunch of practice problems that he only gives solutions to without an explanation.
- Content he goes over feels redundant. This is a 101B class yet we had to do many concepts from 101A. He still made us to diagnostic plots, factor diagrams, or even flow charts that I haven't done since highschool. While they are easy concepts, it's just busy work that does NOT need to be covered again.
First off, I'm surprised by the older reviews. I think he had a really good class this quarter, since I really enjoyed taking this class.
Now, there were some struggles. For one, the structure of this course was not that easy to follow. He supplies a TON of extra resources on bruinlearn and it can get a little overwhelming. The lecture slides are also like 100 pages long so they're difficult to study. He also neglects to use the announcements page on bruinlearn, so everything important is only ever mentioned in class.
But, here's the thing: he let us do a freaking take home exam! I think due to the protest disruption and strike. But besides that, he practically explains exactly how to do all of the homework assignments in lecture, even showing the code and saying "that's the answer to problem 2 on the homework, I just gave it to you." He also recorded all of the lectures this term, and graded our homework based on effort and completion.
So the class was really easy, it's just not always easy to follow. But the recorded lectures and the TA were super helpful, and if you're into this kinda stuff, then he actually provides ton of great resources for you to learn more. Plus, he's pretty damn funny.
This class was a mess. Tests were fair, labs weren't too bad (TAs generally gave us the R script we needed), and he dropped the lowest quiz and lab grades, which helped. However, his lectures were all over the place, and he would go off on random tangents and rants. He even threw in a fairly inappropriate joke before we took our final. Overall, the class was pretty easy, but if I had any enjoyment of statistics before the class, it is now long gone.
I took him for Stats 101B and Stats 101C, and honestly, I don't think he's that bad. He is definitely an unclear lecturer, but supplies an abundance of slides (which lack adequate information), so you know what to study (I looked in the textbooks to solidify my understanding of the material). He is unresponsive, but TAs can usually answer most of your questions about homeworks and projects. For 101C, we had a midterm (in-person, VERY fair), a final (take-home, easy), and a group project on Kaggle where teams were ranked by performance (we were around 13/32 and got an A+, so I don't think grading was very harsh). We also had 6 homeworks, which varied in difficulty (all on R). At the end of the day, his tests are pretty easy, his projects are graded nicely, and he cares about his students doing well in his class. Although he is a bad lecturer, don't be afraid to take him!
So disorganized, which made everything confusing for students. Useless class, honestly it was a lot of waffling/blabbering. I feel like it is very extra and not needed. Skip if you can.
If you've taken AP Statistics before then this is a breeze. We only covered one prop, one mean, two prop, two mean, chi-square, and linear regression in this class which made things a lot simpler than AP Stat. The labs do involve R which was pretty daunting to me as someone who's never coded before, but we basically just copied the code from the TA during lab. Therefore, the labs were very easy as long as you type fast enough to keep up with the TA's code in the lab section. The mean for the Winter 2023 final was 86% after the professor curved it, which is relatively high compared to other classes. The professor is a little hard to understand and he does go on tangents often, but the content is fairly easy so that wasn't a problem
DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT. IF YOU VALUE YOUR SANITY AND YOUR LIFE DO NOT TAKE STATS 10 WITH THIS DUDE.
You will NEVER LEARN IN LECTURE. This dude goes on loud yelling tangents and most of lecture he is talking about R-studio which he NEVER tests us on. The way he explains material is so confusing. He doesn’t even record his lectures and his jokes he throws in can be inappropriate sometimes. You can’t even understand him half of the time because when he speaks it just sounds like garbled garbage. ALL HE DOES IN LECTURE IS SHOUT RANDOMLY. ALL HE DOES, like he’s scolding us or something. And if u think “my ta can maybe help me”, NO. Even the Ta’s for this class are absolutely horrible so I wouldn’t bet on your TA carrying you. They don’t know how to explain everything in a way where you can learn the material. They just expect for you to know as if you’re not already wasting money on this CRAP. I would rather eat a dead bug than ever see or take this prof again.
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.
Personally, I didn't find this class to be enjoyable as it doesn't provide much to improve data science skills, at least compared to other stats classes. This class mostly covers different experimental design and when to use them. Think of it as a sequel to 101A, but covers specifically on categorical variables. If you want to go into research, then I could see this class being helpful but otherwise, it lacks applicable skills. Now specifically for Almo's class:
Pros:
- Amazing guy. He's very enthusiastic with the content he teaches, and you can tell he loves his work. His lectures provide deep insights into how each concept works and he even puts in some humor as if to not bore us for too long. He also has so much care for his students because he wants to see us succeed not just in this class but in the future.
- Lenient grader. Bro gave us a take home final open notes and no time limit. On top of that, he adjusted the grading scheme because he saw many people struggling on the midterm. Homeworks were also free points as it seems like it's graded by completion. He was a little more harsh on the project, but as long as you listen to his feedback, you won't fail.
- He records pretty much everything. Lectures are record but even if he has to miss class, he will set up a recorded lecture for us to watch and even provide us an additional video for homework help.
Cons:
- Slides are a mess. Every lecture has over 100 slide that he skims over. He may be a good lecturer but the way he presents it is very unclear. Don't use the slides for help as it's more helpful to take notes on what professor yaps about.
- Exams are confusing. The way its structured is nothing like the homework. Yes it was take-home but it took me probably around 6 hours to complete the final. He doesn't have a practice final, but instead has a bunch of practice problems that he only gives solutions to without an explanation.
- Content he goes over feels redundant. This is a 101B class yet we had to do many concepts from 101A. He still made us to diagnostic plots, factor diagrams, or even flow charts that I haven't done since highschool. While they are easy concepts, it's just busy work that does NOT need to be covered again.
First off, I'm surprised by the older reviews. I think he had a really good class this quarter, since I really enjoyed taking this class.
Now, there were some struggles. For one, the structure of this course was not that easy to follow. He supplies a TON of extra resources on bruinlearn and it can get a little overwhelming. The lecture slides are also like 100 pages long so they're difficult to study. He also neglects to use the announcements page on bruinlearn, so everything important is only ever mentioned in class.
But, here's the thing: he let us do a freaking take home exam! I think due to the protest disruption and strike. But besides that, he practically explains exactly how to do all of the homework assignments in lecture, even showing the code and saying "that's the answer to problem 2 on the homework, I just gave it to you." He also recorded all of the lectures this term, and graded our homework based on effort and completion.
So the class was really easy, it's just not always easy to follow. But the recorded lectures and the TA were super helpful, and if you're into this kinda stuff, then he actually provides ton of great resources for you to learn more. Plus, he's pretty damn funny.
This class was a mess. Tests were fair, labs weren't too bad (TAs generally gave us the R script we needed), and he dropped the lowest quiz and lab grades, which helped. However, his lectures were all over the place, and he would go off on random tangents and rants. He even threw in a fairly inappropriate joke before we took our final. Overall, the class was pretty easy, but if I had any enjoyment of statistics before the class, it is now long gone.
I took him for Stats 101B and Stats 101C, and honestly, I don't think he's that bad. He is definitely an unclear lecturer, but supplies an abundance of slides (which lack adequate information), so you know what to study (I looked in the textbooks to solidify my understanding of the material). He is unresponsive, but TAs can usually answer most of your questions about homeworks and projects. For 101C, we had a midterm (in-person, VERY fair), a final (take-home, easy), and a group project on Kaggle where teams were ranked by performance (we were around 13/32 and got an A+, so I don't think grading was very harsh). We also had 6 homeworks, which varied in difficulty (all on R). At the end of the day, his tests are pretty easy, his projects are graded nicely, and he cares about his students doing well in his class. Although he is a bad lecturer, don't be afraid to take him!
If you've taken AP Statistics before then this is a breeze. We only covered one prop, one mean, two prop, two mean, chi-square, and linear regression in this class which made things a lot simpler than AP Stat. The labs do involve R which was pretty daunting to me as someone who's never coded before, but we basically just copied the code from the TA during lab. Therefore, the labs were very easy as long as you type fast enough to keep up with the TA's code in the lab section. The mean for the Winter 2023 final was 86% after the professor curved it, which is relatively high compared to other classes. The professor is a little hard to understand and he does go on tangents often, but the content is fairly easy so that wasn't a problem