If you have the option take this class with anyone else. The only redeemable quality this class has is the workload is blindingly easy(this is a problem for later). The Prof is quite nice, and if you go to office hours with him he genuinely cares about trying to make you understand the material. That's where the positives end. The homeworks are usually 8 question canvas quizzes, that are blindingly easy. (Expect for half of the questions were poorly worded misleading you to choose the incorrect answer, also the answers were often incorrect and required the TA's to go back and change them again). The projects (3 of them), are not that long. They require about 30% coding and 70% debugging, so it will take you several hours/days just to figure out what is wrong with your program, and why it won't pass the autograder. Project 2 has extra credit opportunity for 2 points(2 percent basically more on this later). But I do feel like they incorporate what we are learning during lecture well. The midterm was online, (in person), and people probably cheated. Even with that, the average was 65%(before regrades) and 67%(after regrades). This comes to the final.. It was the worst final I have ever taken, while at UCLA. The disconnect between lectures and exam was crazy. With no real practice even with doing all of the homeworks again, and discussion questions. I was looking at the exam going what is this even talking about. I was not the only one, as everyone around me looked very confused, and some people were literally crying. However I had comfort knowing that the class would be curved and that everyone would be in the same boat as me. Coming back to the curve.. The final average was 50% so the "curve", was a 2 point increase for everyone in the final. But the issue is, instead of adding 2 points to whatever score you got i.e 10 pt raw curved would be 12 pt out of 20. It was simply made out of 18. The issue is, you now did barley any better this way. I.e it was only a 5% curve really. (And this was the ONLY curve of the class). Also the 2 points of extra credit that you spend many hours on for project 2, weren't really extra credit and simply got absorbed into the overall grade. Not boosting your grade much either. This is a big problem, especially considering that the averages on both the midterm and final were so low. This being said the midterm and final collectively were 40% of the overall grade. With 35% being projects and 5% being homeworks. This is the only way that you could have done well in this class.

I did decent on the midterm scoring a 16.5/20 a couple standard deviations above the average. And I got a 14.5 / 18, also a couple standard deviations above the average. And I had a 95% as my final grade. So this is really a gpa killer if your not lucky..

Overall, take it with someone else trust me. Unless you want to have the lightest workload class of 151/116 possible, but then getting completely screwed on exams.

Shoutout to the TA's though, they seriously tried their best to make it work, but the way the class is currently structured is not correct IMO.

He's an ok m151b professor. Just some comments:
- The homework is autograded bruinlearn quizzes, and 20% of our grade. I highly recommend crashing office hours to confirm answers. Most were averaged around 90-95%.
- Projects were really cool imo, and decent amount of support was provided, in addition to execution debug traces to help with debugging the projects. It does require reading a bunch of code someone else wrote to figure out how to do things (definitely use an IDE with autocomplete!), but they were fun! One project had an extra credit component that was fairly easy to do.
- Lecture attendance is mandatory! He uses a google form + codeword system, which can easily be gamed if you have someone who does attend, but really sucks for a 6-8pm class (at least this quarter)
- Exams were similar to homework, but nothing directly copied from it. Averages are fairly low due to the ambiguous multiple choice and calculation questions for 90% of the points with no partial credit, but the exams are a total of 40% of your grade and I suspect he will curve.

TL;DR take this class with Nader if you can in the Fall, but not the end of the world if you have to take with Tine.

Grading
- 20% HW: 10 Canvas quizzes, one per week, with 8-10 questions each. Very easy especially if you cross-check answers with other students.
- 35% Projects: 3 C++ projects covering different parts of a RISC-V CPU pipeline implementation. You work on these in groups of 2 and they were generally very straightforward compared to projects in other classes (especially after going to TA office hours and the like).
- 20% Midterm: Reasonable based on the homework and projects but still difficult as a lot of the questions relied on exact numerical accuracy. Closed notes, taken in-class but on Gradescope. IIRC this exam had around a 65% average.
- 20% Final: Hellish. Open-note pencil and paper exam despite the syllabus stating that the format would be the same as the midterm. Also, while the professor specified that the final would focus on the latter half of the course, at least half of the exam (if not more) was dependent on you remembering all of the pre-midterm content to a T. 55% average. I would definitely rank this among the most difficult finals I've had in my 4 years as a CS student.
- 5% participation: You scan a QR code at the beginning of each lecture to sign in (different login code each time). You can leave after the first 5 minutes if you'd like. Campuswire participation counts as well.

The professor didn't respond to at least 2-3 emails I sent him over the quarter and very rarely responded to Campuswire questions (despite that being a primary form of communication in the class). In addition, despite promising a curve to offset the low exam averages, the only real curve we got was the final being graded out of 18 points instead of 20 (so the average was an 11/18 instead of 11/20. Oh joy).

The provided lecture slides were generally pretty clear; however, recorded lectures were somewhat difficult to follow considering that at least a third to half of them had no audio and often times froze towards the end of the recording. The professor's handwriting is unfortunately not legible enough to make out what he's writing when unaccompanied by a spoken explanation.

Anyways, please don't take this class. I was baited by the 4.0 rating from three students last year and it should tell you something that the current rating is a 2.2 from 11 students. Communication was basically nonexistent throughout the quarter and the final hit us all out of nowhere (i.e. practice questions and homework were nowhere near as difficult).

Please take this class with another professor.