Sure, Carey is fun. He is an engaging professor and puts a lot of effort into his slides and making class interesting. That doesn't go unnoticed.

But in all honesty - this class sucks. Never have I put such time and effort into a class for such little reward. It's brutal and there is little support. The projects take forever, the tests are extremely difficult, and class time is wasted for jokes and irrelevant stories so we were behind and had to learn a whole topic during our own time.

I think Carey has a bit of an ego. Instead of telling random anecdotes about his life, why don't we learn what will be on the exam?

I have never felt so defeated and stupid than I did in this course. I wish I would have taken it with Eggert (never thought I would say that!).

CS 131 with Carey! I personally didn't take CS 32 with Carey, so I was pretty hyped about this. And honestly, I think it lived up to the hype. The class did remind me CS 32, in terms of the type of content covered and the programming in the class.

As a disclaimer, a lot of these criticisms are probably because this was the pilot quarter for the course. Carey will probably improve most of these criticisms in future offerings.

The class material isn't difficult, there's just a lot of it. I thought most of it was interesting and cool, you really get a pretty good grasp about how different languages do things differently. His slides are very in-depth and good for self studying. But by the week 6 midterm, there was honestly so much content to review it was a bit of a struggle. If you study early and come prepared with notes (open note/book exams), you will be fine.

We have 3 projects in the class, each building off the one before it. The projects were basically implementing an interpreter for a made up language using Python. They did take quite a long time (15-20 hrs), but definitely doable and good just for practicing your programming/code design skills. In future courses, I think he might shorten them a bit or provide more starter code, since a lot of students seemed to take a while on them.

Overall very satisfied with the class, glad this course got reworked with Carey!

yall already know he the goat

Carey is extremely overrated and grades very harshly. Take it with Eggert.

If you're taking 131, take it with Carey. The material and tests are still difficult don't get me wrong, but the experience is much better compared to eggert. Our project was building an interpreter in python over the course of the quarter (split into 4 projects). Carey provided incremental solutions so if you didn't finish one, you could use his solution for the following project. I ended up using it for project 4 and it made it so much easier!! HWs are long but only graded on effort. My only complaint with this class is that there is so much material crammed into the quarter. Carey had to release an extra lecture for the last topic (logic programming) which then was 20% of our final exam. I definitely didn't understand that content as well and had to learn it on my own.

CS131 is a HARD class but Carey is probably the best one out there to teach it. We had 10% homeworks graded on effort, 30% projects (3 projects 10% each), 25% midterm, 35% final. The projects were extremely brutal, by brutal I mean spending more than 30 hours on each project, pulling your hair out and trying to find test cases that would break your code (getting edge cases). The projects build on each other and we basically build our own Interpreter (Brewin) using Python. The first project was the hardest because we had barely any skeleton code but the projects got progressively easier as he released his solutions for project 1 and project 2 for you to build on after the due date. The exams were difficult but not too crazy, the average of the midterm was about 65% ish and the final was about 70% ish. I would say just prepare yourself to spend a lot of time on this class, probably the most you would ever spend on a class. Take this class with easier classes so that you can dedicate the time to the enormous amount of content that this class has. It is very content heavy and extremely time consuming. On the bright side, this is only the second edition of Careys version of the class and it can only get better from here. All the best!

If you have to take CS131, definitely take it with Carey. This was the first quarter he taught it, so some imperfections were expected. Overall, Carey and the TAs (pre-strike) were all very passionate and helpful. They actively listened to our feedback and put in a lot of effort to improve the class.

Class website: https://ucla-cs-131.github.io/fall-22/

The homework (graded on completion) was initially very long, but they listened to feedback and made some questions optional. The projects were a bit more time-consuming than initially expected (maybe 20+ hours), but the autograder was insanely helpful to instantly see your score on Gradescope, and there was a subset of the test cases publically available. The exams (open book) were fair but challenging, and really tested your deep understanding of the concepts. The course material wasn't particularly difficult, but there was a significant amount.

Advice: (seriously) don't procrastinate on the projects! Try to keep up with the course content because it's really easy to fall behind. Attend lectures (he's entertaining and gives out snacks) - it may feel easy to ditch because he posts his slides, but he will explain things more clearly than if you skimmed through the slides yourself.

Had a great time with him. Lectures are very clear but move quickly as there is a lot of material to cover. The exams are close to what we cover in lectures but more difficult. But it's still good, at least the professor covers a lot and won't let you see the questions and have no idea what to do like Eggert's exam.

Very well organized class. F22 had three projects (which build on each-other) where you had to build an interpreter for a new language. Pretty heavy workload for these, but grading was transparent (through a Gradescope autograder). Carey's a good lecturer, as usual. Exams were pretty tough IMO, and the class ended with about 30% A's, 30% B's, and 30% C-F's. Best strategies would be to have the concepts down perfectly and get a lot of practice programming in the languages that you study that quarter (for us it was Haskell, Python, and Lisp.)