If Brian Shin has a million supporters, I AM ONE OF THEM. If Brian Shin has a thousand supporters, I AM ONE OF THEM. If Brian Shin has one supporter, I AM THAT SUPPORTER. If he has no supporters, THEN I AM DEAD. IF THE WORLD IS AGAINST BRIAN SHIN, I AM AGAINST THE WORLD.

Take this man's class. He assigns a short, easy homework and a short, easy quiz once a week. His midterms and finals use questions that are extremely similar to the homework questions he assigns, and his lectures are closely based on the textbook. He also skipped a bunch of sections in the textbook and told us we wouldn't have to worry about them on the exams, which took a huge load off of us when studying.

maybe i'm js bad at math but this was awful for me. there was speculation that he made his class harder but im not sure now that im looking at prev reviews. either way the avgs for our exams were D+, C+, C-, no curve to my knowledge but he allowed for only one midterm to count if you did well & also had this rule for the final where if you got >90% you'd get at least an A-. homework and quizzes were also included in the grade and you had like 2 drops each(?). attendance was optional for both lecture & section. part of what made this class hard for me was that he didn't offer any explicit review q's before exams. it's just how well you know the textbook readings & homework. the first part of class was difficult for me conceptually & the t/f questions rly got me. the second midterm was easier to me because i walked through the textbook examples & the content was more math-y to me. final wasn't too bad, part of it was new content and then the other parts were very similar to each midterm. honestly i can't rly complain considering i ended with an A but knowing at least one other prof had an easier exams w higher avgs this quarter, i wouldn't take him again.

Brian was pretty cool. He was an extremely chill guy who clearly cared about his students, but his teaching style lowkey wasn't for me. There were two grading schemes. Grading scheme 1 was 15% HW, 5% Quiz, 20% each midterm (2 total), 35% final or Grading scheme 2 was 20% HW, 5% quiz, 35% Midterm (highest of 2) and 40% Final. The average for the first midterm was like a 68%, second was 80% and final was about a 73%.

Even though he was a really cool guy and was definitely approachable, his lectures were virtually useless. The best way to study for the class (in my opinion) is to do ALL the homework problems he assigns in the textbook and noting every single thing you used to complete that problem and that would be fair game on the exam. Tip: if it was overly complicated in the HW, you will likely not be asked to do it for the exam given time constraints. For the first exam, I did this as well and went to all the lectures and got a 70%. I should've locked in more. The turn off, though, was when we had an office hours prior to the first exam and he couldn't even like solve one of the questions asked so I was just kind of like bruh. For the second exam, I stopped going through lectures completely. Didn't even go through his posted lecture notes (however he was goated for posting them because I've never had a professor do this) and just did the problems with noting the importance of each problem (equations, tips, etc). I got about an 81% on this exam (started studying the night before) and I think this was pretty good given that I didn't go to lecture. Did the same for the final (started night before as well)and got an 88%. The class was extremely doable and Brian was not out to trick you.
Discussion sections were also useless to me so go at your own discretion.
TLDR; chill guy, use textbook for the class; lock in early cuz it's lowkey quite a bit; go to class if you learn better with someone explaining content to you verbally but I personally feel like it's not necessary.

The reason that Shin gets such good reviews is that you know exactly the difficulty of the questions on the test since the homework and assigned questions are the exact same difficulty and concepts that you can expect on midterms and the final. I wouldn't say the concepts are easy at start but they get more understandable (at least for me) once you get into the calculus section and out of the more geometric and vector based first third of the class. Shin is super nice and makes his lectures fun and engaging, a great guy and someone who you definitely want as a prof for any class.

I love Brian Shin, great professor!

Side rant:
Unfortunately, his TA this quarter was terrible. During an exam, I asked for clarification on a problem and he told me I did it completely wrong. I ended up panicking as I had no time left and tried to bs some work and ended up boxing something else as my answer. When I got my grade back, I actually had everything done correctly and would have gotten full credit if the TA had not said anything. It was quite frustrating as this quite literally was the reason I did not get an A in the class. I only got one point for that problem even with all my original and correct work, but since it was not boxed, I got zero credit. The TA also tried his very best to make sure I did not get any credit for his own ego which sucked as the professor seemed to be chill with giving me credit. I did fine on the final but that midterm score dropped me down and I ended with an 89.5%. Shin didn't round me up and ik that might not be valid to complain about, but given my situation it did really suck. I won't name-drop, but I hope that TA just learns to just accept when he's wrong lol.

Other than that, homework is doable, exams are fair and his grading scheme is fair. Shin is always willing to help, just don't doubt yourself and ask the TAs for help on an exam.

After a year at UCLA, Professor Shin is still the most engaging and thorough instructors I have had. Even though lectures aren't recorded, attending class was still enjoyable. In terms of difficulty, the midterm and final were not too bad.

Hot take but I think Shin is a little overrated. He is a good professor and really good at explaining concepts during lectures but he's not perfect. Although he is good at lecturing, the lectures do not cover all the information you need in the class and you need to do your own studying and reading of the textbook to supplement the lectures and he himself let us know during office hours. However, it would've been nice to know that without having to go to office hours. Despite this, Shin is still a really good professor and is extremely fair on his midterms and finals in my opinion. If you understand and can solve all the homework problems, you should be able to get a 100% on the tests (other than the multiple choice questions that are extremely conceptual).

Take Prof. Brian Shin if you can! Getting an A in his class is very manageable as his tests are based of the homework and textbook. The homework per week is also pretty light. In addition, he's a chill guy with a majestic beard and he probably plays League of Legends!

If every Professor in UCLA is as generous as Shin, every student who works hard will graduate with a 4.0 GPA.