Jonathan Kao is my favorite professor at UCLA. Highly recommend this organized, fair, and passionate lecturer.

Going into this class I was expecting a chill A after hearing from numerous sources about how amazing Kao is of a teacher. He's an ok teacher, nothing more, nothing less. Just because he teaches with a smile and is respectful when asked questionsdoes not, in my opinion, make him an exceptional teacher. The course material is very math heavy and too put it bluntly very boring. The homework wasn't too bad and I found it to be the best way to understand the concepts after listening to 4 hours of lecture each week. The midterm was slightly harder than expected but then the after being told by Kao that the final would be easier, we received the most ridiculus piece of s***t of an exam I've ever seen. While the past finals took me less than 2 hours to complete with straight forward questions, this final was impossible to complete within the 3 hours as each problem either required knowledge of some little "trick" or would take a significant time to complete. As the other recent reviews said, most people did not do very good on the final and yet the graders still decided to grade as harshly as possible.

I will start this review with the facts, then my opinion.

The midterm had a mean and median of 75.33, 79.0 (out of 100), whereas the final had a mean/median of 65.6, 66.3 (out of 100). Here is Professor Kao’s final announcement regarding the grades in the course: “I relaxed the overall final grade scales as follows. 89-100 (A), 86-89 (A-), 82-86 (B+), 79-82 (B), 76-79 (B-), 71-76 (C+), 68-71 (C), 65-68 (C-), 60-65 (D+), 57-60 (D), 54-57 (D-), lower than 54 (F). Under these relaxed grade scales, the median grade in the course was a B+.” Kao has the following grading allocation: 40% HW, 25% MT, 35% Final, & 2% extra credit for a survey and piazza contribution. This is the Fall 2024 course.

My overall review of the course is not the greatest. I’d like to first start off by saying that Kao truly is an AMAZING professor. The downfall of this course comes from the exam designs and grading scheme, which are all things the TA’s have control of. I don’t like the TA’s and that mostly has to do with the fact that they SUCK at making exams. The midterm was pretty fair in my opinion despite me not doing the greatest (a tad above median). However, it’s the way the TA’s grade that make it awful. They are EXTREMELY strict on grading and remove points for the dumbest little things. Because of how badly people performed on the midterm, Kao promised that he would replace the midterm grade with the final grade if people scored higher on the final and also said that the final would be easier than the midterm. With that being said, you would expect that the final might be roughly the same difficulty as the midterm, if not easier. WRONG. The final was so insanely brutal as you can tell from the stats of the final that he had to “relax the grades” as he likes to say, to the scale shown above. Although I performed significantly better than the mean/median of the final, I honestly felt like I was having a heart attack during that test. It was trully a mentally extruiating pain that did not sit well for me. The content on the final was just stupid. Simple as that. For one, they made multiple problems on an extremely niche topic on Fourier that we literally only saw once in one part of one HW, and left out actually important stuff like mod/demodulation of singals. Also, the TAs were weirdly obsessed with putting the exact same proofs that we went over in class on both exams. If you went to the review sessions, the TAs would “hint” that there were some proofs from the lecture that you “should know how to derive” for the exam, which were the same ones that actually showed up on the exams. IMO this is not okay as it makes it really unfair to students who can’t make it to review sessions and OH, as those who had the proofs on their cheatsheet had a huge advantage over those who didn’t.

Discussions were worthless and office hours became infested with students holding up the line to check every single one of their HW answers which was very annoying. It’s okay to check one or two answers but some students would hold up the line and check every single problem which is just a little side thing that the TA’s tolerated. Again, this makes it very unfair to those who can’t make it to those OH’s. If you want to get an answer to a question its more efficient to ask on Piazza because the TA’s do have a very fast response time on there (I’ll give them that). This course is very math heavy, and I am not the greatest in my math ability, but I did manage to get an A. It is feasible. My advice to you: Ask tons of questions on Piazza and do all practice midterms/finals. Doing those practice exams will prepare you for ~80% of the exam content because they always make brand new tests. The other 20% is fair game. Good luck.

Professor Kao was honestly a little overhyped. In terms of teaching it was pretty standard he would just go over proofs during lecture that often became math heavy. He seemed nice and considerate after our midterm with an average "lower than expected" and let us replace the midterm grade with our final. However, he only gave us false hope; the final was alot harder than the midterm with an average being around 20 percent lower. I felt like the question asked on the final were obscure and a little unfair given the last four years finals had similar format. Alot of the final also depended on thinking about a specific application that wasn't really emphasized. Also the grading rubric for the test was a bit questionable as it wanted us to solve the questions in a very specific way. Class was pretty interesting getting to learn about filters was pretty fun.

This class was enjoyable and interesting up until the final. Kao is a very good teacher. The midterm was relatively easy and the homeworks took a while but were doable if you went to the discussions or reviewed the discussion material. However, the final was impossible, with an average of 65. The curve was not enough to account for the horrendous final.

The class is good overall, and Kao is indeed a good professor. Kao’s lecture is very clear and well-paced, and he often has time to answer any questions people may have. At the beginning of the class, Kao warned us about the workload of the class, but I found it pretty manageable. The concepts of this class are very well explained, and Kao even manages to go over some real-life applications (including his own research) to make the class less “theoretical” than it is. I have been to Kao’s office hours only once or twice, and he mainly just went over the HW problems. The piazza of this class is pretty well organized and the TAs are very responsive to questions.
However, I would only give this class a 4 out of 5 overall due to two things: the grading scheme and the exams. Let’s first talk about grading. Kao uses an absolute grading scale, which means that he doesn’t curve unless the class performs really badly overall. This is great in theory because it means that no one is competing against each other. However, in reality, they definitely cannot run a class where everyone gets an easy one, so they inevitably have to try to control the class grade distribution by the exams. But the problem is the TAs kinda just suck at designing exams. The midterm according to Kao and the TAs was designed to be fairly easy, but the median score was lower than what they expected. Honestly, I did feel like the midterm was easier than I thought it would be, but a lot of questions were just so easy that they essentially became trivial. For example, for some questions, you can just tell the answer by inspection, so you wouldn’t try to solve it the way they want you to do it. Anyway, I got 5 points back after fighting for regrades. Because of how badly people performed on the midterm, Kao promised that he would replace the midterm grade with the final grade if people scored higher on the final. So then you would think that the final might be roughly the same difficulty as the midterm, if not easier.
The final was extremely difficult and surprising in terms of content. It was so bad that people were still talking about it on piazza after the exam. Content-wise, “modulation”, a concept that showed up on every single final from past years, was not covered. Instead, we got multiple questions about a really niche concept of Fourier Transform that showed up only once on the HW. Also, the TAs were obsessed with putting the exact same proofs that we went over in class on the exams (both midterm and final). If you went to the review sessions, the TAs would “hint” that there were some proofs from the lecture that you needed to know for the exam, which were the same ones that actually showed up on the exam. I don’t know how I feel about this, to be honest. Maybe the TAs were doing this to make certain parts of the exam easier, but I feel like this was really unfair because people who had the proofs on their cheatsheets obviously had an unfair advantage over those who did not. And you didn’t even have to actually understand the proofs, you just had to be lucky enough - or sensitive enough to their hints - to copy down the proofs. In the end, they gave out a very generous curve and basically raised everyone’s grade by 3%.
Also, your HW is worth more than everything else (40% of your grade), so whether or not you get 100% on it affects your grade significantly. For instance, even though I got a 96/100 on the midterm, because my HW average was only ~95%, I still had to get close to 90% on the final to get an A in this class, which was pretty ridiculous. Also, something that nobody tells you is that you can go to the TAs’ office hours and literally ask them to check your answers with their HW solution manual. Again, I don’t think this is fair for people who cannot make it to office hours or simply don’t know about this hidden secret. So if you are taking this class, make sure to take advantage of this.

Midterm was a copy of the review, and because the median was so high, the TAs made the final extremely difficult Class overall was a lot of work, but Prof. Kao explained the material very well and in a simple matter. Homework was pretty difficult too, and it took a long time to finish.

Like everyone said, Kao is probably one of the nicest professors I've ever met. While some professors care only about research, it's clear that Kao genuinely cares about teaching. He wants us to learn in an intellectually honest way and grasp the material conceptually. He encourages everyone to come to office hours, he encourages people to ask questions, and he is so super approachable. He has a forgiving late day policy and will give class wide extensions if the class expresses a need. He wants everyone in the class to succeed. The material is challenging but he makes it super accessible and it's super interesting.
The class is 40% homework which sounds nice but I found the homeworks to be harder than the tests because they were long and they had us work on content we literally just learned. You MUST start early. I would say to start immediately, as homeworks are usually assigned Thursdays, do as much as you can over the weekend, and then go to the TA's or his office hours during the week to answer questions. It is very possible that you won't be able to do a lot of the homework alone/when you first look at it, but he and the TAs are VERY helpful and will guide you to the right answer. I like to think I'm not an idiot, and I absolutely could not have done these homeworks without going to office hours.
The rest of the class is 25% midterm and 35% final. After the midterm, he said that if we performed better on the final, he would replace our midterm score with our final score (he's super supportive and on the student's side!). As more Fall 2023 reviews come in, I expect people to say the midterm was easy and the final was hard. I don't know that I will completely agree. The midterm was extremely straightforward, as the TAs held a review session before the midterm that had problems that were almost identical to the real midterm. Thus, many people left after 40 minutes, and the median on the midterm was a 92. I think Kao reacted appropriately and adjusted the difficulty of the final to make it more challenging. I also think a lot of people were expecting the final to be just as easy and it was not. The content on the final is just in general more challenging, but we also weren't spoon fed the entire final like we were the midterm. Thus, many people freaked out after the final and said it was super hard, and I don't think this is super accurate. The final did have a much lower average than the midterm (in the 70s I believe) but I just feel like a 92 median is high in general. There was not a single question on the final that was completely out of left field -- I genuinely believe every question was fair game. Thus, main point is: go to office hours, go to TA review sessions, do EVERY SINGLE practice midterm/final/discussion/homework. And make sure you KNOW the material from a CONCEPTUAL STANDPOINT. To study for the final, I went through every single discussion worksheet, homework, and the past 4 years of finals (he provides them god BLESS) and made sure I understood everything. Also, on your cheat sheet, do NOT just put formulas. The tests test HOW YOU APPLY THE CONCEPTS. He will NOT just be like "State the convolution theorem :D (10pts)." So look at the midterm and final answer keys copy solutions of different types of problems, it will really help you out. Good luck, and really take advantage of what an amazing teacher he is!

The other reviews pretty much sum him up well. This class is really, really hard, but I don’t think anyone else in the department can teach it better than him. So, I’d highly reccommend

A fantastic class with an outstanding professor. Kao is literally the goat of EE department at the moment. The class is genuinely one of the toughest one I will take at UCLA but Kao tries the best to make it easy to understand using intuition. Using intuition is the most important part of his class and you must learn his way to better grasp the concepts.

Attending his lectures are so worth it. I never missed a single lecture because I knew its impossible to learn the same way online in his recordings. Make good notes and cheat sheet for the exam. You should attend Rakshith's discussions and office hours if you are ever struggling. Trust me in the coming years he's gonna have a big name in EE TAs. Hes the most kind and respectful and works beyond his hours to teach you more about the content.

The exams are tough. Make sure you practice from the previous years papers to be better prepared. If you mess in the midterms, Kao allows replacing it with final upon a better performance. Take this class and you will actually fall in love with the title "Systems and signals". Good Luck :D