This class was difficult, but Professor Shoarinejad really cares about teaching and made some adjustments to deadlines throughout the quarter based on student feedback.
Lectures were ok. The professor just went through pre-written notes, but I would recommend at least watching through the recordings, as his explanations help clarify some concepts.
The class was heavily based on concepts from ECE 102 (Systems and Signals). It consisted of weekly homework assignments, two labs, a midterm, and a final. The homework assignments take a long time but with learning the material. The labs aren't too bad, just some coding in Python. The midterm was 24 hours and the final was 48 hours. They took me a long time and were very difficult in my opinion, but they were graded fair and the curve for the class was generous.

Overall, the main thing I didn't like about this class was how boring the material was. The homework was difficult but still doable. The midterm was insane - not sure how anyone could've done that test in three hours. The lecture style could definitely have been improved. It felt like Professor Shoarinejad was reading a textbook in class. I could never get through an entire class, meaning I had to rewatch lectures and review them multiple times which took up way too long. I think the professor expected a lot more out of us than I was prepared to give to this class, but to be fair the grade scale was way lower than any class I have ever taken so I do believe he wanted us to learn more than worry about grades or anything.

All of that being said, Professor Shoarinejad is definitely one of the most helpful professors I've had at UCLA. He gave us an option to choose our preferred method of communication in the first class and nobody objected to discord. He answered all questions almost immediately with detailed explanations. He was available every single day from early in the morning to late at night. He answered emails quickly and he effectively explained the things I needed clarification on. Although I don't agree with his method of lecturing and exams, he was extremely dedicated to us and the class and I appreciated that very much.

Overall, if you are interested in controls and want a challenge, I would recommend taking this class with Professor Shoarinejad. If you think studying controls isn't for you (like I do now), taking this class won't be the end of the world but it may be draining. Luckily there are a lot of videos/articles/helpful websites out there on the fundamentals so it's not too difficult to find methods for solving problems outside of what we learn from lecture.

While I found this class very difficult, I believe that is in large part due to the current virtual learning environment. Professor was (in my opinion) incredibly helpful. I did enjoy the material but I do agree with the previous comment that the workload is a bit heavy. This is more due to the sheer quantity of material covered rather the individual assignments. Typically after reviewing notes and lectures I was able to do the homeworks without too much difficulty, but it often took a while to review all the necessary notes because there are a lot. If the course started with the material of week 2 (week 1 i believe had mostly been covered in previous courses) and ended before LQR topics I think the workload would have been significantly improved. The last few topics were a very complicated addition to the course to learn just before the final.

Overall I'd say if the scope of the class could be lessened a little, and if the notes could be condensed some to make room for more detailed examples the course would be significantly improved. I believe that given the circumstances professor did a pretty good job.

I found this course to be very difficult, though I admit that it was hard for me to stay on pace with the virtual setting. The homeworks, midterm, and final were very time consuming and difficult to complete each week. I would say this was one of my heaviest classes I've taken in terms of amount of material. I think it was clear that Professor Shoarinejad is very dedicated to teaching the material and is always available to answer questions on discord. He will seriously respond to questions late into the night which is very nice. Though I do usually prefer Piazza for questions, Discord gave off a nice casual vibe and talking to the professor almost felt like talking to a peer who could answer any questions you could think of. I was a little disappointed by the course material. I came into the class expecting it to be about one thing and it just wasn't really what I was imagining. This led me to lose some interest and fall behind. Overall, I wasn't a huge fan of the class material but I think the professors dedication goes a long way. I wish I got to learn from prof Shoarinejad in person because I think he obviously knows the topic well

TL;DR: For those that have taken ECE 2, and ECE121b, I would consider those course (control systems & feedback)to be analogous to if you are a new student with no semiconductor knowledge going into ECE 121b before having fleshed through fundamentals and less in depth examples in ECE 2.

Before I mention anything, I think I'm somewhere around an A- maybe higher maybe lower not how much partial credit I will get on the final...
Overall, from the perspective of course material I though this course was quite interesting and from a higher level the techniques were covered quite well, however as other's have already mentioned the fundamentals that the Professor expects us to quickly catch on hinder a lot of the deep level learning as to why certain techniques and methodologies are being used. That being said the homework although time consuming and difficult did force students to review their material that was covered very quickly during the lectures. I think a big part of this has to do with the fact that the Professor had already pre-written notes and was simply reading through material and going from line to line which didn't give student's enough time to mull things over in their head before a new topic or idea was introduced. I hold nothing against the Professor regarding all the material that was covered as he seems very passionate and knowledgeable but from the lens of this being someone's first exposure to control systems it was very fast paced. Most of the true learning was done while doing the homework and that's where things truly began to click in my head at least. As for the midterm once again with new problems being thrown at us, many students had to go back and refresh themselves which is what I believe led to the exam taking well over 12 hours for many students. The project itself albeit difficult and time consuming I think was still fair but as other people have mentioned the Professor could behave a bit condescending once again as he expects us to understand the foundational things when only mentioning them once and/or skipping them in his lecture notes during class. And as many students were spending a lot of the last two weeks finishing up on the project the addition of new material in the form of LQR mainly but also discretization with the Z-domain and not being able to fully flesh out that knowledge through homework (there was optional hw assigned, but I feel people mainly just reviewed the solutions and didn't have time to spend on that as they were working on the project). With this sentiment being held by another review I also feel that if some of those new topics were omitted and instead we spent more time focusing on fundamental concepts and stretched the 8 weeks of material into 10, we could still have a very insightful view while also slowing down the pace making things clearer for students and more manageable.

I am coming back to say do not take this class with Prof. Shaorinejad UNLESS you have taken ECE110, even though it is not an official requisite.

I am currently taking 110 and it would have saved me a lot of pain if I had learned about Sinusoidal excitation and phasors, AC steady state analysis, AC steady state power, network functions, poles and zeros, frequency response, mutual inductance, bode plots, application of Laplace transforms to circuit analysis BEFORE taking this class.

I wish I could go back and relearn those concepts from 141 with my new background knowledge..