Fuck Guani Wu. Easily the second worst professor I've had at UCLA (only slightly beaten by Gabriel Freiman) which is saying a lot considering the race to the bottom at UCLA. Lectures are completely incomprehensible with Wu spending significant amounts of time either reviewing previously discussed material or going off pointless tangents. We also ended up not covering all the material (Gibbs sampler). Homeworks were often vague and confusing. Weekly quizzes are required which require the use of Lockdown browser which makes reviewing the quizzes inconvenient while doing nothing to deter cheating. Exams are complete bullshit - Wu gives you way too many questions, most of which involve concepts not taught in lecture or homework. More specifcally, the midterm had around 25 questions requiring a lot of calculations which was a time crunch considering we only had 75 minutes to do the exam. The average for this exam was in the 40s, and Wu doesn't let you review the exam outside of office hours. Meanwhile the final was filled with very theoretical questions unlike anything covered in homeworks, quizzes, or the midterm. I expect the average to probably be even lower than the midterm.

Tl;Dr Don't take this class. Anyone that thinks Guani Wu is an acceptable professor is either delusional or a massive UCLA dick-rider.

I took this class the summer of 2024 and it was a complete dumptster fire. Initially, about 40 people showed up to his lectures, but after quickly realizing that we were not learning anything, it dropped to about 6. Guani has a very dry, monotonous, and hard to follow along with teaching style. Additionally, his lectures focus heavily on theory which would not be an issue if that is what the homework and tests were about. HOWEVER, that is not the case as you will soon see.

The homeworks are very programming based, much of which you don't actually learn in class. There is much self learning to be done in this class as there hardly any resources provided to help you. Then we proceed to the worst part of the class. The tests. I believe the median of our midterm was a D, which means atleast half the people in our class failed it. Additionally, the highest score in our final was a 58 out of a 100, and the median was like a 35. So literally every single person in the class failed the final.

Both the midterm and final were on Lockdown browser and required an extremely strong knowledge of programming which was never taught in the course. You are only allowed one sheet of scratch paper front and back which can only contain formulas, not examples, so you can't just fill it up with code. Obviously with this much fuckery and poorly planned test taking where we did not have anywhere near enough time to take the tests, it ended with bad grades.

He is also going completely off the rails by not following the traditional grading distribution and just giving everyone shit grades, including my friends who scored in the top 20 - 25 % of the class.

Please avoid this sorry excuse of a professor at all costs. You won't learn anything and your GPA will get fucked.

The class was online for the summer quarter. I never interacted with the professor, but he seems like a nice guy who wants the best for his students. He recaps previous material and asks several times during the lecture if everyone understands his delivery of the material. Unfortunately, I found him quite unclear and thought he made seemingly simple topics more complicated. Though he follows a slide deck, I found his lectures to be unstructured and hard to follow. I would listen to a lecture and leave more confused on the topic, not knowing what the main objective of the lecture was. After a couple of weeks, I stopped watching the lectures and just read the book that he used to make his slides.

For both exams (esp the midterm), it was hard to study, because we did not have access to answers for the quizzes, nor was there any study guide outlining what to expect on the exam.

As far as grading goes, HW was graded very generously, with average scores of 95+ on each hw. Quizzes are based on completion, so for the quizzes graded at the time of this post, I have received fair grades. Our midterm exam had a pretty bad mean (62%), which is typical for this professor. Not sure what the final exam scores will be, but I am expecting around the same, if not a little better.

TDLR: Nice guy, seems like he's chill but thought that he was not a good lecturer at all. Poor exam averages, but fair grading on homework and quizzes. Would try to avoid him and take another professor, but not the end of the world if he's the only option.

102C is one of my favorite classes here at UCLA. I feel like the Bruinwalk review does not do Guani justice. It is true that his lecture clarity are not as good as many of the lecture focused professors (shoutout to Mike, Miles and Linda! Loved those classes), but Guani is definitely way above a 1.9 rated professor in my opinion. His classes are curved with a fair scale (30%As, 30%Bs, if I remembered right) and it's a "if everyone did good, everyone get good grades" type of curve. He is helpful during office hours and gives homework extensions. He can be funny during lectures and tries to make them engaging for students.

I can tell that he definitely cares about his students and definitely wants everyone to do well, however I must also agree that he can be difficult to understand during lectures. (Man is just not that good at explaining theoretical concepts, but being the research professor as he is, all the lectures are theory heavy.)

Guani deserves a rating around 3.2~3.6 in my opinion. His homework is coding based, difficult but doable, exams are theory-focused like lectures. He usually gives a good amount of review and hints before the exams so that you can prepare well. If you attended all his lectures and go to office hours for anything you don't understand, you will get a good grade.

If grades is not all you care about, I also think that his lectures are worthy attending just for the theoretical concepts alone. 102C goes over some of the foundation of grad-level statistics, so I think its good for it to be theory heavy. You get to practice the theories with coding in homework, so don't worry about application either.

Anyways, don't be scared if you didn't get in Mile's 102C. I know Guani gets a lot of hate in the Stats department but I genuinely thinks that he is a good person and want you to do well. Best of luck and I hope you 102C end up being fun for you!

I am honestly shocked about the current rating that this course has. Professor Wu is my favorite professor at UCLA and goes out of his way to be accommodating to his students. This course was challenging and you will need to work hard, but it is by no means impossible. Professor Wu has a more theoretical teaching style, but if you have questions and you go to office hours he will take the time to help you understand. He really is a great guy. Good luck!

This can be considered as a general comment for the entire 102 series taught by Professor Wu. I had A-/A/A for 102A/B/C.

To start with, Professor Wu is a really nice person, he often jokes in class and answers whatever questions students have. Having taken three classes with him, I guarantee you that he really likes teaching, and he is in fact one of the few Professors in the Stats department who wants to teach you something...

As for the class, I have seen many negative comments on Bruinwalk, and I was also worried at first, but it turned out to me that it's an easy A as long as you pay attention in class, read through his notes, do the homework by yourself, and perhaps ask questions in OH. I got A- in 102A bc it was online and I didn't really attend the classes much...

He focuses a lot on mathematical (or theoretical part of) statistics, so you will see lots of derivations, proofs and the math heavy stuff in his class. If you don't like the theoretical part of statistics, then you probably will suffer in Wu's class, and I would highly recommend you to take Miles Chen or other professor's classes instead. However, if you plan to pursue a graduate degree in statistics or go for academia or really want to master statistics, then you have to learn these stuffs and taking Wu's class will be truly helpful. I personally likes the theoretical stuffs he taught, so I enjoyed...But if you aimed for practical application alone, then nope, it's gonna be a nightmare like the other comments have detailed.

In general, I feel like the stats department divides into two tracks (application and theoretical) based on professors. Christou, Wu, etc. are extremely theoretical based; whereas Miles Chen, Lew, Mike, etc. favor application of statistics. (just some personal opinions...)hope helps