Welcome to emotional damage, the class. There's so many things wrong with this class that I'm not sure where to start. Take any other capstone, this one sucks.

The capstone project is the dumbest fucking thing ever. For an entire quarter all they had us do was market research and product development, with a ridiculous amount of unnecessary work. They had us come up with NINE ideas for projects which all had to address similar things and search for scientific papers and market research for each one. The way it was set up though, they wouldn’t accept any specific concepts until halfway through the quarter, forcing us to go into extreme detail on slightly different technologies and applications concurrently without being able to finalize an actual design. This ended up with nobody having a project that they wanted or enjoyed, since all we would be doing was researching technologies and applications that were far beyond the scope of a college level project. We had to do a presentation EVERY FUCKING WEEK on the market research, doing shit like giving market pitches and presenting to investors. This entire past quarter was basically a business class for our engineering capstone.

The instructors can eat my entire ass for the way they organized the class. For some reason, our MAE capstone is combined with the EE capstone with Prof. Mehta Ankur, another extremely poorly rated instructor. We have 9-person groups split between MAE and EE students with different sections that don’t align, forcing us to spend even more time outside of class to get any project work done. During the sections that don’t align, we basically wasted our time listening to lectures from TAs on topics that we’ve already learned in other classes and had zero relevance to what we were currently doing for the project, leaving us with 2/6 class hours to actually get some work done. They attempted to have us work on a separate lab involving a mini wood-bot, which they dropped halfway through the quarter probably realizing how pointless it was.

The professors have absolutely zero respect for their students’ time. They give very little notice for the actual requirements for our weekly presentations, forcing us to work the day before to grind on it. One week they released the guidelines at 7pm the day before it was due, when they literally spent class the day before talking about geometric tolerances (yet another topic that we’re not using and should have already learned before). On the day that I’m posting this review, they had us show up to the first section and wait 15 minutes before telling us that they had nothing planned for the entire day, when half our group commuted an hour to get there. They don’t bother communicating with students in a timely manner, and didn’t even bother announcing that both sections were canceled.

TLDR: Fuck you, you can eat my entire fucking dick for the way you’re ruining these last two quarters.

His class is hard but masked by a veil of simplicity, though overall Rosen just isn't a chill dude. He has a sign-in sheet and attendance accounts for part of the grade but people only show up to sign in (or well to sign in their 12 friends) because his lectures are near impossible to understand through his disorganization. He allows you to resubmit homework assignments to correct mistakes, but as the workload piles up each week it becomes hard to finish the assigned homework in the first place. The homework heavily relies on matlab, but that isn't even part of the curriculum and you're expected to learn it yourself. His exams are open note open book, but they are still extremely difficult and the take home midterm legit takes around 24 hours of straight work to solve. Overall the worst thing is that he submitted half of the class to the dean for cheating on the take home midterm with 0 basis and delayed the grades. Clearly, if he truly believes that half the class cheated on the assignment then something must be wrong.

The other reviews tell the full story, but leave out the subtle bites that make this class truly special.
Professor Rosen's class is Jack Daniels' whiskey. Bold label, burns your nostrils off at first contact.

Just like the other reviews state, the class is an ineffective, roundabout grasp at teaching systems engineering and business planning. There are no hints for team lead organizations, nothing about how to appropriately delegate tasks. These skills are either prerequisite or learned *despite* the class. It's either an ineffective way to teach management or an extremely effective way to waste my time.

We open with a sad story. The syllabus features notes and hints on each project and assignment...
but all the hyperlinks are broken. The *crucial* tips are missing. Hmm. This bodes well.

From there it doesn't get much better.
More often than not, each class was a charcuterie of short presentations from each group. In up to four consecutive hors at a time, we sat through our classmate's identical presentations. I'm not saying I've slept through this class, I'm promising it. And after each presentation(which could last up to thirty minutes per group), the professors gave minimal feedback. Each week effectively became an exercise in futility, with assignments often posted *two days before due*.

Furthermore, the class did not have example slides or help on any assignment- if the TA or professor was asked for input they would devil's advocate your work into the god damn ground. Even if they admitted your project and work was solid. It was like they were sniffing for cracks to hit. I'm sure that some people thrive in this class, and I'm also sure that those people would be better off working in business. I cannot emphasize enough how little I have learned from this class.

In a little anecdote, in order to make class on time I skipped a performance review with my boss, paid $10 for parking...
And then found out that we were slated to "do group work". This happened four times. Each pointless meeting is a waste of my time and money.

Another time, we had a "shark tank" style presentation where other professors would query our presentations and concepts. They also had only one minute to ask questions, and they chose to ask inane questions about their fields of expertise. We didn't get any valuable feedback, and that was a wasted week of work and research.

The worst part? I'm now *less* of an engineer for this class.
Do you have any background in CS/CAD/SysEn/PCB layout? It doesn't matter here. What this class seems poised to teach is... branding. How to sell your project. Internal politick. Bleeding requirements from a stone.

That's valuable and useful, sure. Anyone looking to be project lead or work in the cutting edge needs this lesson sooner than later. But god damn it Rosen, can students at least have their last vestige of soul remain intact?
We assign tasks and give people work on a vague understanding of their skills because the actual engineering deliverables are so far off that we spend our time worrying about the best graphic to put on our slide deck.

TL;DR: A start-up experience for the discerning consumer. Honestly I'm tired of thinking about it. Just be prepared for 0% engineering- one truly cannot stress how awful this class is.

The other review posted here pretty much sums it up. Take any other CAPSTONE class unless you don’t actually want to do any engineering and also hate yourself. Bonus points for Rosen being completely unable to project his voice during lectures and also not having a microphone. I couldn’t even hear him when he was sitting across the same table as me - this is not sarcasm. Great TAs though, best part of the class.

Rosen sucks. He's a terrible lecturer. He talks really quietly and doesn't explain things well. He just copies his notes from the slides onto the board, and they have a lot of mistakes. He takes attendance though so you have to go to lecture and discussion, even though they're useless. I ended up doing really well in the class mostly because I had old tests. He lets you take in whatever you want into the tests, and repeats a lot of test questions. However, he has been mixing the questions up a bit so they're a little different than previous years. For the final he told us exactly what would be on the test, so just study that really well and you'll be fine. Also, he scrutinizes cheating a lot. Tons of kids got zeros on the take home midterm because they copied code. Make sure you write your own code - you'll get caught if you don't! The homework and projects take a lot of time but most of the solutions are on Slader or Chegg. He also lets you correct them to get points back. Overall, Rosen doesn't teach very well so you won't really learn differential equations. Just spend a lot of time on the homework and projects and come in somewhat prepared for the tests and you'll be good.

A blemish on the academic standard of UCLA. A poor class, yet an even worse man. He is unclear about everything, dishonest, and never admits to making mistakes. Quite literally a 1st grader in a grown man's shoes.

Professor Rosen makes this class horribly painful. He reads straight off of his notes (which are hundreds of slides long) so its not helpful or condensed and he's really monotone. The only reason some people showed up was because of the sign in sheet, which he stopped half way through the quarter. The class is quite a bit of work, every week theres a 10 or so problem homework and a project, which can sometimes be quite difficult or time consuming. Because Rosen was such a slow teacher, he often only finished teaching the material on the homework the night before it was due. The only reason I did well on any of the homeworks is because he allows corrections with access to the answer key for full points back. His exams aren't overly difficult, they are open book and he says whats going to be on them. He isn't helpful in office hours, he often told me to just go see the TAs or read his notes. Although this class is a pretty easy A, its a fair amount of work and frustration. If you can get out of taking 82, I wouldn't take it.

Although this course was somewhat mentally taxing at times, I think that in retrospect it was definitely worth the effort. Whatever else may be said about Professor Rosen, he is strict but fair in his class policies, and has an extensive understanding of the subject matter.

This course is somewhat inaptly named; it is essentially differential equations (MATH 33B) in an engineering context, with introductory control theory and system design involved as well. As such, it involves concepts not covered in 33B, including the Laplace transform, complex-plane analysis, and system stability.

When I took the course, the workload was rather heavy; since then, it would appear that this has changed in response to student feedback. It is now possible to choose one of four homework plans, with different weights placed on different components (homework/projects/exams); this allows students to tailor their work in this class somewhat, based on their strengths, which I believe is beneficial.

One quibble which I continue to have with the course is the lack of a strict MATLAB prerequisite; several projects and a portion of the take-home exam involved the use of Simulink to simulate system behavior, and this topic is not at all covered in the course. As a result, students are forced to learn Simulink "from scratch", which negatively impacts the quality of work.

Overall, I would recommend this professor for the comprehensive nature of the course, if not his teaching style; while this course will challenge you, you are likely to get a good grade (A/B) at the end.

Rosen is a pretty bad lecturer. Most of the class ended up being self-taught, but the exams are open note so it works out. Also it must have a crazy curve because I did not think I would end with an A-. If you're taking this class you probably don't have much of a choice, so just be ready to read through the textbook and figure everything out via the homework.

STRENGTHS: None

WEAKNESSES:
- Let me start off by saying this is one of the worst classes at UCLA that I have taken, and this is the type of class that makes engineering seem like a joke at this school.
- Class lectures were an absolute mess. Rosen's lectures were incomprehensible half the time. Half the class would fall asleep or leave every lecture.
- The midterm had a one hour long algebra problem. It tested nothing and taught us nothing. It was purposefully designed to just be long for the sake of being long. And to make things worse, after the midterm Rosen would rag on the class constantly saying that we hated algebra and that we thought we were masters at algebra since we complained about the midterm problem. NO ROSEN. We just don't expect hour long algebra problems where we learn NOTHING as engineers.
- Homeworks and Projects were the worse set of problems I have ever encountered. They are all horrendously long and you end up learning nothing. Resubmittions are the only thing that kept people from failing all the homeworks because we could just copy the solutions and resubmit.
- One of the TAs had terrible communication skills.
- This class is a drag. It seems like it is designed just to add another class to make students stay an extra quarter so that they have to pay more to this school. It is a pointless and redundant class that overlaps with 33B by a huge margin. Very few other universities require this extension of math beyond differential equations. You learn nothing. You struggle with the terrible assignments. You waste your time with the long 2 hour lectures. What is the point?
- If engineering is serious about becoming a top 15 school, you can't treat the students with this kind of education.
- STUDENTS. please, please, please stop passing up this class for an easy A and start actively voicing your opinion that this class is pointless so that we can add another GE or engineering elective and actually LEARN something.