Dr. Garfinkel was a great professor with a lot of passion on his new method of teaching statistics. While Stats 10 or Stats 13 may have been easier classes to take, I think you can learn something more valuable with this class (problem with the generally accepted concepts of statistics).

Both the midterm and final were reasonable and fair exams. You are allowed a double-sided flashcard cheat sheet for the final. Our midterm was online and open note due to the protests so it may be different in the future.

The only con with this class is that you really need to be careful with the homeworks. They have graders that are quite strict and homework is graded on correctness. But as long as you put in the work everything should be okay :)

I'll be completely honest, I only took this class because there were a ton of seats available and Stats 13 completely filled up during my enrollment time. Although I wasn't great at coding in LS30A/B, which made me hesitant to take this course, they've completely reorganized the structure of this class from previous quarters which has made it a lot more manageable. The labs are graded on completion, homework is graded on accuracy but is fairly straightforward and consists of both coding and conceptual questions (they are a little stringent on points for homework so I would recommend attending office hours), and the midterm/final were just like the practice exams. In addition to a final exam, we have a data analysis assignment (which is basically a coding final) but we could use all of our notes and had around a 5-day window to complete the assignment, which made it fairly easy. Overall, I would recommend this class even if coding isn't your strong suit. Garfinkel is a super engaging professor and the class is fairly easy.

Garfinkel is a great, engaging professor and you can tell he is really passionate about the subject. His lectures were interesting and as long as you pay attention, you will be successful. The labs were coding on CoCalc and they were helpful for understanding the content of the class. There was one homework per week and they were somewhat long, but doable. I recommend this class with professor Garfinkel. The workload is not too bad, the content was interesting, and if you go to lecture you will do well. Also, I had never taken a stats class before this and did well, so prior knowledge is not necessary.

Dr. Garfinkel was a really great professor and I really enjoyed this class. It's not really a standard statistics class, but more of an overview of some problems modern science has with statistics + alternative statistical methods to help address said problems. Overall, a great class, and one of the handful of classes I've taken so far that really made me glad that I came to UCLA.

The grading scheme was as follows:
Participation through iClicker 3% (drop 2 lowest)
Homework 12% (drop lowest)
Quizzes 15% (drop lowest)
Midterm 20%
Final 30%
Team Data Analysis Assignments (x2) 20%

I wish that I could leave separate reviews for Professor Garfinkel's lectures and the rest of the course (the homework and labs), because they were like night and day.

Professor Garfinkel is extremely intelligent, funny, and personable. He explained how modern statistics was made to justify racist, eugenicist views and how the downfall of good statistics led to the downfall of good science (meaning that almost all research findings are irreproducible). He was very engaging in lecture and helpful in office hours, and if the entire class was just sitting in lecture and listening to him talk, I would have gladly had 4-hour lectures.

What made the class so unpleasant was the coding. Professor McCully is the new coordinator for the LS30/LS40 classes, and I think it is largely her influence that contributed to the excessively long homeworks, labs, and team data analysis assignments. I spent at least four hours on the homework by myself and two hours in office hours seeking help on the homework every week. As another review noted, sometimes even the TAs weren't sure what was expected for the code. This culminated in a 118-point homework assignment that was designed to be extra long because "we hadn't had homework in two weeks" - because we were taking THIS CLASS'S midterm and midterm data analysis assignment.

The midterm and final were extremely conceptual (almost no actual math). This could be a good thing, except the midterm was graded extremely harshly. If you didn't have exactly what they wanted (which often included answering unasked questions), they'd take off points, which really started adding up. In office hours after the midterm, there were so many red marks on everyone's Gradescopes that it looked like Christmas.

Near the end of the quarter, we started getting two labs per lab section - that's right, labs A and B. We couldn't finish them during our discussion section, which then made completing the homework (and then the data analysis assignments) very difficult. We get it - it's difficult to check code on Campuswire, but many of McCully's responses were downright rude.

I know I shouldn't be complaining too much since I got an A+, but they didn't input grades until Spring Quarter had already started (and, I believe, ran out of time to grade the final data analysis assignment as harshly as they'd graded the midterm data analysis assignment).

Professor Garfinkel is great, but he is very little of the time you actually spend on this class. The homeworks and team data analyses were designed like LS40 expected itself to be the only class you're taking this quarter - I genuinely don't know if they thought we could code faster or if they just didn't care how long it took us.

Alan Garfinkel is one of the best professors I've had at UCLA. He's an extremely caring and empathetic professor who is genuinely passionate about the material that he teaches. This is the second class I've taken with him and he's been consistently good across the board.

Don't get me wrong. LS 40 isn't exactly an "easy" class. The content is a lot more conceptual and you'll need to focus on really learning and understanding what's going on in order to do well. You'll also need good Python skills that you've hopefully developed in LS 30A/B.

The exams are pretty fair imo, I Garfinkel doesn't do "trick" questions or ask anything that's outside of what you learn. If you follow the lectures you'll be fine.

Summary: This is a great class with a great prof. The skills you learn are really useful for getting research positions too (ie. p-val NHST, Confidence interval testing, Bayesian stats). Come and be inspired.