Needless to say, Prof. Kao is an amazing lecturer. His teaching style is the best I have ever seen in the entirety of my undergrad career. But you already knew that. This is the third class I have taken with him, but unfortunately, it was the worst one. The class size (>500) made everything unbearable, as people were constantly asking questions. This demonstrably hindered lecture progress, as we ended up about 4 (?) lectures behind. These sometimes came in the "trying to appear smart in front of Professor Kao" flavor - thank you sweaty CS majors. Piazza, which is our class discussion forum, went from okay to terrible over the course of the quarter. Besides the fact that participation is hard to get because the average response time is under 5 minutes (thank you again to the literal hundreds of sweaty CS majors), people ended up mass posting random things effectively begging for participation points after the midterm. This midterm was more difficult than past years' exams, and it was changed from 30% of the grade to 50%. The midterm grades were noticeably lower, but not enough to warrant a curve which is completely fine. I just think the exam format should not be half of the grade, and it shouldn't be dependent on how much of the content from the TA's review sessions can you stuff onto your cheat sheets. I talked to a fair amount of people after the exam, and they all said that they were able to do well only because the exam questions were almost carbon copies of the TA review session questions and that they put them onto the cheat sheet.

I'm sure this class was much better with 30-200 people. ECE C143A and 102 supremacy.

The professor and TA's are AMAZING, and I learned a lot from this class. However, words cannot explain how severely I disagree with the syllabus and logistics of this course. I think it was a bad idea to have a midterm be worth 50% of your grade. I understand that they changed it from 30% to 50% to even out the distribution or whatever, but it doesn't really make sense to up it by 20%. I feel like 40% would have been a lot more fair. Other than that glaring issue, this course is great and Prof Kao is extremely helpful and kind and approachable. I'd recommend this course to anyone interested in ML.

I imagine this class was much better in the past, but this iteration was just awful. Unenforced prerequisites led to a massive class (over 400!) of folks who weren't familiar with linear algebra/matrix calculus asking questions about course prerequisites NONSTOP, and Prof Kao having to explain these. We ended up falling behind by 8 lecture hours (4 lectures of 2 hours) compared to last year's iteration because of this.

Additionally, it seems Prof Kao experimented with asking more open ended exam questions this year compared to the last few. This is totally fine, except he added a closed solution rubric?? Exam average this time was low 80s (worth 50% of the grade => the grade distribution will be MUCH lower this time), and led to Piazza being spammed endlessly for students seeking additional 1.5% extra credit (no, I don't want nor need an Excel spreadsheet to calculate my course grade; stop posting this on a Q&A board). This is not how you run a class, this was a mess and easily one of the biggest wastes of time for anyone who has taken M146.

If the department doesn't enforce prerequisites nor cap the class size next year, DO NOT TAKE THIS.