"致郁“

2022 spring, I'm currently stats102B with Wu. Wu is not posted as a professor for stats102B, so I'll leave some comments here.

1. Wu's lectures usually composes of the following: 25 mins of review of last lecture, 5 mins of new stuff, and 20 mins of stuttering.

2. First week of lectures, if you thought that you are taking math 115, then you are in the right stats102b class. Wu starts out the first two weeks talking about linear algebra, but he doesn't tell you why.

3. You are expected to master linear algebra. He will do a simple review of it in the first week. You are responsible for knowing every math proof by heart.

4. Wu does not set up any official Q&A forum such as Campuswire or Piazza. So, do not expect any online hw help from professor. He won't reply you in time

5. Wu's lectures don't have the big picture. If you wonder what a big picture is, go checkout Miles Youtube lecture on stats102B. It's public, and first or second class he tells you what the big picture of machine learning/optimization/modeling is.

6. Wu's lecture notes gives no example R code, but all homework is in R.

Take 102a with another professor if you do have choices.

Terrible. Just terrible. Gives a lot of arbitrary extraneous specifications for the homework that are either easy to miss or incredibly unclear such that if you fail to meet those specifications (and it's all to easy to do so), you'll get heavily penalized. In addition, grading for the homework was screwed up and a regrade had to be done, but even the regrade was screwed up. Incredibly unresponsive to emails. Goes through the most difficult topic of the syllabus two days before the exam, and sets up over half the questions in the exam to test that topic. I have never ever hated a module more in my whole academic life. I legitimately got anxiety from this mod. Do yourself a favour and skip this module/prof if you value your sanity and mental health.

Exams and quizzes were generally not easy. You need to watch every one of the discussion videos and to browse campuswire twice a day in order to finally get the details for your assignments clear. (what is desired is often not well specified in the spec) Despite all these, the course has really generous curve.

Very mid. Prof wasn't that good. The slides alone are honestly as good as lecture (or better). The class is very closely related to Math 151A like root finding, floating point (which are good topics), then it goes into R's classes which are different from C++ and regular ones, so it's pretty annoying. There is some useful data manipulation and regex.
The homeworks were fairly long. And the tests are pretty tough. Our final had ~40% average. We did obviously have a fat curve. But he says the tests are similar to the quizzes, which is a lie. They are scaled in difficulty by a lot and more specific on details, I see they are similar but tougher. The cheatsheet imo is pretty important, and it's crucial you have a good one.
The math and programming part is nice, the R classes portion is weird and annoying.

Wu is a very nice man, but a terrible professor. He often begins class with a joke or story, or asks us how we are doing, and when he notices he is 致郁 he will say "I know from experience there is nothing I can say to make you guys feel better". He does not respond to emails at all. The TAs are often just as clueless as the students when it comes to homework expectations. My TA said they had to "push back" against the professor on some of the homework specs when they were too vague or too difficult.

Grading scheme: 5% quiz (based on completion), 35% homework (coding), 25% midterm, 35% final. Quizzes were easy enough, timed in lockdown browser. Homework was very confusing, because the hw specs were often not specific, so the TA would email us 3 days before it was due to clarify how the autograder and student graders will score us. Averages on the homeworks were all over the place, between 75% and 90%, but grading was usually pretty generous (or I got lucky). Due every 2 weeks, 5 overall, so each one was worth a substantial amount of our grade.

Tests: Midterm and final were the hardest tests I have ever taken. Averages for midterm was ~55% and average on the final was ~40%. No curve on individual assignments, but there was an end of class curve of about 25% (so D- became B-). No study guides, and lecture notes are pretty confusing, so pay attention in lecture (not recorded, slide notes posted, but for the latter half of the quarter he taught on the chalkboard, not using posted slides). Midterm was all MC, Final was half MC half free response.

I do not think Wu wanted to teach this class. He often expressed resentment on the topics he had to cover. The last chapter was barely covered in class, but still covered pretty extensively on the final. Some things on the final were not even part of the course curriculum and never covered in class.

Discussion sections were optional, essentially homework help and quiz review.

Nice guy but workload is heavy (each hw took anywhere from 5-15 hrs) and exams are brutal. Curve is super generous so most people get decent grades but you don't really know your standing until the end. Class was hard but not impossible, just took a lot of time.

The most difficult concepts were taught right before the midterm and final. He does curve, but the exams were so difficult and I would not take them again. He is helpful in explaining the concepts, but the problem is that the difficulty from quizzes and in class examples to exam questions is quite a jump. I suggest looking up YouTube videos on how to do IEEE-754 conversions (extremely helpful) and any of the algorithm content.
As for the homework, they were mostly manageable, given that you go to office hours (his or the TA's) and get help. Note: you can't work on the homework together, so office hours is the only way to get help. Also, you don't get to drop any homework assignments. There was one extremely difficult homework assignment, so I suggest starting on homework as soon as possible so you can get help right away.

Miles is god, take Miles. That't it.