After taking Professor Mazzocco’s nightmare of an Econ 11 class last quarter, I found this class similar but better. In my opinion, Silveira was a much better professor than Mazzocco and very easily the best economics professor I’ve had at UCLA. That’s not saying much, though.

The content of the class was—for a lack of better words—all over the place. I don’t attribute this to the professor but the nature of the class itself. We found ourselves switching gears constantly: we started off with monopoly and oligopoly; abruptly shifted to a diverse spread of game theory topics; and ended by spending the last week on uncertainty and risk topics that had nothing to do with the prior topics we had learned. Although the professor constantly attempted to demonstrate common trends between the topics, we only ever saw them in practice problems or exam problems.

The problem sets were much more challenging than Mazzocco’s and served as adequate preparation for the exams. The few practice exams he put out a week or less before each exam, however, were more helpful. Although there was a lack of practice exams given the fact that Bernardo has only taught this class for two quarters, I found myself prepared for most of the content on the exams. Becoming intimately familiar with the way in which he formats each question on the problem sets and practice exams is essential, especially those that slightly deviate from the examples in lecture.

The exams were some of the hardest I’ve had in UCLA economics, although—as I said before—that isn’t saying much. There were some problem types that we simply never encountered in the lectures or any of the practice materials that made it on the exams; at the end of the day, they just require some creative intuition because there is no good way to prepare for them. Just follow the strategy I give above, and you will do fine.

Being that its his first year at UCLA, it might be because he's still in his honeymoon phase. Nevertheless, it was truly a pleasure being a student in his class. He was passionate about the topic at hand and was always able to convey topics in a clear and succinct fashion. There is some math in the class but as long as you understand the concepts, the math becomes intuitive. Also demonstrates a lot of real life examples to help you bridge the gap between abstract concepts and practical applications. Stays ~5mins after class to answer questions. Also highly recommend his honors seminar ECON 189. We covered racial discrimination in ban-the-box, bail policy etc.

This professor is the best economics professor that I've had in my two years at UCLA. He previously taught at UPenn and WashU in St. Louis. His lectures are clear, concise, and very engaging. He gives a lot of real life examples which keeps me interested in his lectures. He puts out practice midterms and finals that are nearly identical to the real ones. All exams are multiple choice. With two midterms and a final, he chooses the grading scheme that gives you the highest grade. The only negative thing I have to say is that the homework could be very difficulty and take a few hours to complete and do well. It was graded, but didn't really help me on the exams. Overall, loved this class and professor!!

This class is notorious for being difficult, and it was, but Prof Silveria did a good job at teaching it. Our pre-recorded lectures were never too long or unclear. The only time there might have been uncertainty was during the q and a when someone asked a question he didn't know the answer to. While his lectures were really clear, the problem sets tended to throw curve balls and was quite hard. It is a bit hard to prepare for his exams because he has only taught the class once or twice before this quarter so there weren't too many practice exams to use. Overall, for being a new professor, I enjoyed him!

Professor Silveira is a nice guy who is a great lecturer for topics that are relatively tough and hard to imagine real applications for. He always uses examples of events to demonstrate how the concepts can be applied which is personally very helpful. He also puts a lot of his personality in the practice questions, which makes the learning of it a lot easier to take in.

There are 2 grading schemes to the class, one which splits the midterms and finals 30 each, and one which splits the higher of the 2, and the final 40-50. The remaining 10 is from the problem sets which are generally a great indicator of what the tests will be like. There were 7 problem sets total, but only 3 counted since some problem sets were released as practice for the midterms/final instead of a grade. Additionally, the lowest one was dropped, so you only needed to get 100% on 2/3 problem sets to get the full homework grade.

The grading curve for professor Silveira is not an enforced bell curve like other professors, if the whole class does well, everyone gets an A, putting less competition in the class which is good for stress levels.

As for the tests themselves, he releases around 5-6 practice midterms/actual past midterms for us to use as practice. They are generally indicative of what types of problems he’ll put on the midterms and finals, though some topics are not covered (there was no long question about price discrimination for example). The first midterm went quite well, while the second I bombed, similar to many others in the class. Because of this, he curved it by 10% and made an unnecessarily long apology for making the midterm too difficult.

It’s obvious that professor Silveira wants the best for his students, and even though I finished the class with a B I’d take a class with him again in a heartbeat.

You should disregard some of this review since I got a shitty grade partly responsible to other obligations like signing up for a Diff Equ class during week 2 that gave me triple the amount of homework for a typical math class making it very hard to keep up in my other class. For example, I showed to the first midterm for 101, very sleep derived barely studied and bombed expectedly because I had spent most of my time ketchuping in Diff Equ. Unfortantuely, he made the next exam harder thanks to everyone execpt me doing really well on it so I got hit too the face with a truckload of true/false. I was also hilarously sleep derived for the final-- but anyways my point is to do really well on the first exam if you wanna succeed you may not get another opportunity to catch back up seriously it is the easiest by a long shot I just made the dumb decision of adding a diff equ class to my schedule like 12 days before the midterm. You're unlikely to do that so you should be chilling. The practice exams are extremely accurate to the actual exams execpt for the 2nd midterm where there was a lot of true/false for some random reason. Its not hard to pass given he does a nice curve at the very end, I did find it harder than 11, but I think I'm a rarity. I typically do better in harder class for some reason so disregard what I said. If I hadn't added my diff equ class I would have gotten in B range for this class, unfortunately I didn't pass either class ugghh so be it. Anyways this guy is the goat. Go to his office hours the TAs are very lost and confused for some reason. I had to teach the TAs how to do some of the practice exam questions and I didn't even pass the class so the quality of TAs this quarter was pretty bad. Silveria was amazing tho wish I had attended his office hours more often but unfortnuately it conflicted with a history class.

I took Professor Silveira’s class in Spring 2025–a bit hesitantly, I must admit, as it was directly on the heels of a rather character-building Econ 11 class (a story for another time). But my skepticism shortly turned to delight, as I almost immediately realized the typo tally was about to far surpass that of my previous economics course.
It felt too good to be true.
It…wasn’t.
Nonetheless, if you are considering taking Econ 101 with Professor Silveira, I will rain some anvils of truth upon your heads—take them ass you will.
* There are two midterms, week 4 and week 7. The first one is a cushion in case you screw up the second, which you inevitably will.
* Tests are all multiple choice, which is good if you like multiple choice.
* Only 3 of the 6 problem sets were actually required, and the rest were extra practice. The lowest score of the required sets is dropped. (I made a slightly risky decision and didn’t do the optional sets, instead choosing to play more Minecraft.)
* Professor seemed tolerant of people being obnoxious in class. I naturally seized the opportunity to do so.
* Timing is such that I finished the final in half the allotted time, giving me plenty of time to draw a poorly executed walrus driving a Camry on page 19 of the final.
* We were given almost all the tests from previous years as practice tests. They are very accurate indicators of what material will be on yours. If you are not doing well on the practice exams, you are screwed.
* that being said…he threw a curveball at our class and gave us an assload of true/false questions on midterm #2, which most people missed. He felt bad afterwards and added 10% to everyone’s midterm grade.
* In the quarter I took this class, only one of the several TAs actually knew what he was doing. Mine did not. I had to explain concepts to her…multiple times. If this happens to you, lecture notes provide a much more thorough explanation than a confused human can.
* Don’t hesitate to go to the Professor’s office hours for clarification. Because if you do hesitate too long everyone’s gonna crowd in there right before the final and make the Professor quite grumpy.

TAKE THIS CLASS IF ITS WITH THE GOAT BERNARDO. He is honestly such a kind soul and stays behind to answer every student's questions. He is very communicative and provides so many practice midterms and finals to help you out. My only gripe would be that his lectures are sometimes confusing, but they are recorded, and you can easily supplement your learning by having AI explain concepts if need be. He literally gave everyone an automatic 100/100 on a problem set because it was nearing finals and wanted to be nice. Take this class with him!

Did worse than a lot of people on the first midterm which was considered to be the easiest out of the 3 exams but got an A on the final which saved me. The final ate me up, needed the entire 3 hours or however long we were allowed but as long as you can memorize all of the equations and methods you'll be fine. It wasn't hard in the sense that we were given problems we had never seen, it was just a daunting amount of problems with a bunch of steps required for each problem. One tip is to be as organized as possible when solving each problem on the final and you should be good.

professor silveira is a super nice person and a great lecturer. his slides are very organized and makes class recordings available in a timely manner. i wish I went to more office hours because he does his best to explain tougher concepts and is willing to explain things over and over again.
there were the protests on campus happening during this quarter and when students felt unsafe to go to the second midterm, he changed the grading scheme to make it essentially optional and when the scores came back a lot lower than the first midterm he attributed it to having to transition to asynchronous learning for a couple of weeks and gave everyone 2 points back (a 10% increase). he and the econ dept also changed the final to be online (ppl could still go in person if they wanted) to accommodate to some alarming events happening on campus.
other than that, the workload of this class wasn't too bad. we had weekly problem sets which was good practice for the final. it can take a while to complete those esp the trickier problems so it's good to work w other people or be active on the class groupme. the tests were really tough; midterms weren't too bad but there were some questions that weren't exactly shown in class and required creative reasoning. the final though was kinda crazy. he said he didn't change the questions when switching to the online format but the questions were so much harder than what I think most of us were expecting. all of the tests were also on a time crunch and multiple choice so that for sure made them so much harder. luckily the class was curved relatively generously. all in all would take prof silveira again if he decides to teach other classes.