The class was great up until the Final Exam. It still haunts me to this day. The only recommendation I would give is to be more explicit and detailed in the assignments. You will get a 50% if something assigned isn't perfect. Cool Professor and overall a nice dude who knows his shit. Would recommend.

Barreca was a very disappointing professor- he has a way of teaching that he believes to be best and he sticks to this, even after well-intentioned criticism from students who wanted a better way to learn. Unfortunately, while I entered this course with a lot of interest and high expectations, I left wanting and discouraged. He said he would teach the course as if you didn’t have economic experience, (or even statistical experience), but this was far from the truth, and he often breezed over more difficult concepts as if we had “intuition” on the subject while somehow also making other easy subjects overly complicated. I also love RStudio coding, but the way it was used in this class, particularly in the final project, was overly stressful and did not promote student learning. The R skills we learned previously in lab with our TA did not help us much on the final project, and most of it I wouldn't have been able to figure out had I not talked to the TA or other students, because the code needed to complete the assignment was NEVER taught to us. Also, since RStudio is a free application, there are not many reliable sources or databases for finding specific codes, so even if we were expected to find this out on our own it would have been unreasonable. This final project was also only over the last 2 weeks or so, giving us very little time to complete it. Overall, I learned the most in this class from my peers, and not from the professor.

Barreca did not seem to care about student learning. When students had brought up concerns in class, this instructor said her opinion was a minority opinion and said his vote counted for 81 voices whereas hers was just one. Although I don't think his comment were meant to offend, it was clear to me that he did not care about the student learning experience and the rest of the quarter seemed to prove this as well. Barecca on the first day of class had told us he would teach us like we had no prior experience in R, economics, or statistics which I don't think was reflected during the quarter. The only part I felt was taught well and from the basics was R, which was the responsibility of the TA anyway. Furthermore, for our final project, we were expected to know codes we had not yet learn in class. I understand Barecca had the intentions of being a great professor and was modeling the style of a certain teacher he had mentioned, however the quarter did not mirror his intentions. Therefore, I felt if multiple students had brought up concerns and feedback about his teaching styles, he should have considered them. Additionally, I understand wanting students to learn from experience, from trial and error, so I understand his emphasis on examples. However, I believe a certain amount of basic concepts must be taught in conjunction. Barecca taught primarily through examples and students were left to their own devices to figure out trends and concepts based on examples. I believe it would have been more effective if he had taught basic concepts and given us examples to apply our knowledge with. For example, in my past physics classes, professors taught us concepts in class with a few examples, and gave us many practice problems of varying difficulty to work with. I have never been in a class where I tried to learn by merely observing trends in the way the professor solved problems. I was very disappointed in this class especially since I was looking forward to it last quarter and over break. Even if Barecca wanted to teach through examples, I would have appreciated if he had assigned mandatory textbook readings or education videos to supplement the learning so we could learn about the concepts on our own time. I don't agree with Barecca's emphasis on intuition because it made many of his explanations confusing and hard to follow. In addition, when students had asked for further clarification on questions, he would attempt to explain based on intuition or phrases like "move this block of wood" which to this day is unclear and confusing to me. Most of the articles we read for homework were interesting but were but were used as applicable examples in class and again, still lacked the basic concepts we needed to understand everything. I consistently felt throughout the quarter that I had no knowledge of the basic concepts. I really do not recommend this class for anyone. I did end up getting an A- in the class, but really the students in the class had to teach each other.

I took this class during a pandemic and during the BLM protests. Instead of being difficult and self-centered, Alan made the last two projects optional and no harm. We were assigned 5 projects over the course of 10 weeks. We met once a week for 3 hrs (yes it is very long) and we had project check-ins every even week. We were assigned to groups and our class communicated through slack. From the beginning of the quarter, Alan made the final optional and no harm. He was very understanding if you didn't finish a check-in or didn't finish the project. He cared about your mental health and wanted you to understand how to code. Each project had a set of tutorials that walked through step by step of what to do and why you're coding this way. The projects usually took 3-7 hours a week and you could get most of the project tutorials done within class. He made the coding projects very straight forward (I suck at coding btw) and if you needed help, you could ask the class or your group (you could share your code with each other as well). I do not understand how Alan Barreca has a 2.0 rating on Bruinwalk, but I highly recommend his class!

Professor Barreca is one of my favorite professors at UCLA and I only say that about very few professors. Not sure why there are such bad reviews or experiences from other students, but I took his class online during the pandemic and BLM movement. He was extremely empathetic and flexible, prioritizing our learning and mental health, unlike many other professors during this time. He understood that the current events have an unprecedented and large impact on students ability to focus on academics and also saw an opportunity to practice the things we've learned in real life, and testing our knowledge through strict grading and rigidity was not necessarily the most productive nor the priority in such a momentous time in history. This was also the first time I felt like a professor really tried to make coding easy to understand and cared about students' learning rather than shoving us a bunch of code, not explaining anything, and expecting students to figure it out. I'm super appreciative of his approach and perspective on education as I was really worried about taking this class due to previous experience with stats and professors "teaching" R.

As of 2020, this class is pretty much new, and top it off with relaxed/optional grading policies from the COVID-19 quarantine and BLM protests, I think it's safe to say I didn't experience this class as it was intended to be. However, from what I experienced, this class was just alright to be honest. Professor Barreca is a really chill and understanding guy with a really lenient grading policy. His final is no-harm (it was like this even before the protests), and although it was initially listed as an exam, he changed it to be a project. He also has 2 free passes for projects, where you can turn two of them 2 weeks late no questions asked (although pretty much all of our projects had this extension because he was writing the tutorials throughout the quarter and usually didn't finish on time). Even more, he has some policy where if you did bad on one project, he'll replace it with the score of the next project if it's better. And lastly, he does a GPA scale instead of a 100 point scale, so if you get a 50% overall, then you actually just got a 2.0/C-, since merely "coding is half the battle." Your grade pretty much just depends on 5 projects + check-ins (sort of like halfway marks in completing the projects), as well as multiple choice quizzes that correspond to the check-ins. Not gonna lie, the quizzes weren't bad, because they were almost exactly based off of the tutorial text, but you really have to be careful, because they're typically "which is the right code for this outcome" type of questions, so you might miss a parenthesis or capitalization and choose a "mostly" right one, but wrong one nevertheless. Also, the later quizzes were "mark all that apply," where you had to check all the errors in some code, often using concepts from other tutorials. Once again, these quizzes were based on a 4.0 grading scale, usually with 4 questions, but you still get 0.5 points for every wrong answer (so like 3/4 would be 3.5/4.0, or a B+/A-).

As mentioned in another review, lectures are once a week for 3 hours, which can get pretty long, but he actually starts 10 minutes late on purpose and lectures for about 30-40 minutes (with the exception of like the first lecture), and the rest of the time is left for you to follow his R tutorials. During lecture, he sometimes makes you do some brief exercises drawing out graphs with paper/pencil or Google Drawing, and you share them with your assigned groups. Most of the communication between groups, the class, and professor/TA's is done on Slack, although I'm not entirely sure if this will continue, since it seems that this was a virtual platform accommodation (although Professor Barreca also purposely did this so that we'd be familiar with a common industry platform). I honestly stopped going to lecture halfway through the quarter because most of the classtime was used for independent work, and even the in-class activities weren't actually graded, but were good nevertheless to immerse yourself into the material. Professor Barreca also has this philosophy where sharing code is part of the collaboration process, so he would actually encourage students to share their entire code for projects with their groups on slack.

As for the tutorials and content, Professor Barreca makes it clear that he hates how the stats classes teach R, so he teaches his own approach, where you kinda work backwards and try to understand what your message is with data qualitatively, and then use R/coding/graphs to make that possible. In theory, it sounds great, but during a lot of his lectures, he made pretty abstract analogies to reinforce this idea that didn't quite make sense in all honesty. His tutorials are listed to take around 20 minutes (although I always took double the time personally), and as long as you actually followed them in R as you went through them, you would pretty much have the final projects ready to submit once you finished the tutorials. The earlier ones are pretty much a step-by-step process to making the projects, but the last few are more vague and require you to do more of the thinking. Overall though, I felt like we were handheld a little too much, as we were basically given all the code in the tutorials, but this was probably more a result of my personal approach to the class. If you actually took the time to make a doc with common code and understand the logic behind the tutorials, then the class will serve you well; however, you honestly can get by just as easily by just copying and pasting the code. The tutorials also had a ton of really neat GIFs that make you grin, so I gotta give Prof. Barreca credit there.

The actual grading for the projects is pretty much just dependent on coding notation/format (like commenting everything you write), as well as your choice of design for the graphs that you create (you compare the default graph that his code creates versus changes you make yourself). You don't really make original code on your own, so that's not really grading criteria. It reminded me a lot of Geography 7, where we were being judged on aesthetics, rather than our ability to code logically. Also, pretty much all of the projects have an extra credit opportunity worth 0.2 points (out of 4.0), and although I didn't do them all, I feel like this is where you get more opportunities to make your own code.

Overall, the class was kinda hectic, since it was all new to everyone, but over time, Professor Barreca mastered the ins and outs needed to put the class together. He's a great, understanding, and cheesy professor with a lot of cool stories, and I was able to take away a handful of really good habits in R. However, don't expect to become a coding master through this class; unless you really take time to understand the logic of the code and piece together the projects yourself, you'll find this class as more of a graph-making/ggplot2 class.

This class was super easy, it was basically just the labs portion of STATS 13 but just that for a whole quarter. We had 5 total projects, with an optional "no harm" final exam, which wasn't really needed since the projects were really easy to complete by following the directions. Alan was really excited to teach the class, and was super enthusiastic the whole quarter!