Professor

Maria Cha

AD
4.2
Overall Ratings
Based on 119 Users
Easiness 4.0 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Workload 4.0 / 5 How light the workload is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Clarity 4.2 / 5 How clear the professor is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Helpfulness 4.3 / 5 How helpful the professor is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

Reviews (119)

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June 12, 2022
Quarter: Spring 2022
Grade: A

There is a reason why this professor is so highly reviewed. She was a wonderful lecturer and valued student participation. She was very sweet and understanding of students' circumstances. She was also very approachable, so if you ever have an issue, communicate with her and she will probably be able to accommodate you. Because there were so many students, it sometimes felt intimidating to speak up but the class was great nonetheless. The grade is composed of 10 online quizzes (lowest two dropped), 5 lab assignments (lowest one dropped), two exams, a final project, and extra credit.

Online quizzes: These quizzes opened on Fridays and closed on Sunday nights. They were all open book and multiple choice. If you had your slides in front of you, had good notes, and understood how to work through the problem, it was not too hard to get 100%. I will admit that the quizzes did get somewhat harder towards the end of the quarter but that was to be expected. Also, if you got a bad grade on one of the quizzes, it would be dropped. I think the quizzes were really fair and I appreciated her dropping two of them.

Lab: Labs were entirely guided by the TA. During lab, you learn how to code using R. Personally, I thought everything was well-paced and if I ever fell behind, I could just rewatch the lab section (my TA recorded his lab section). I also found it helpful to go to my TA’s office hours if I had any questions about the lab. From what I know, most stats 10 TAs are good at getting back to/helping students. The labs are due every two weeks and are definitely not the hardest part of this course. As a person who has never used code before, I think it wasn't too bad (especially because the TAs were so helpful).

Exams: The highest scored exam is worth 30% of your grade while the second best score is worth 20% of your grade. The exams were definitely the hardest part of this course. On both exams, I only missed 4-6 questions and ended up with B’s. The exams usually consist of only 30-36 questions, so missing one can already take a toll on your grade. However, what I think really helped was having 15 pages of notes with me during the exam. The exam was not open book or open note, but she allowed you to print 15 pages (double-sided) of information to bring with you for the exam. As for any advice, I would suggest getting a reliable calculator and taking thorough notes from the slides. Even though I got two B’s, I still ended the class with a pretty good grade.

Final Project: You can work in a group or you can work alone. I would suggest working in a group because, even though it is not too much work, I think it’s more efficient. The project is based on your understanding of R so getting advice from a TA would be very helpful.

Extra credit: The ec can give you a 1% grade bump. You get 0.1% extra credit every time you answer a clicker question during lecture. It doesn’t have to be the right answer, you just have to show that you participated. Doing this is what bumped my grade from an A- to an A so I highly recommend doing it.

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STATS 10
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 11, 2020
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+

Professor Cha is amazing!!!!! this class is SO SO SO easy especially if you've taken ap stats. this class is literally easier than the ap stats I took in highschool. Professor cha is a really good lecturer and always willing to reteach topics and answer questions during the lecture. I took this during covid so the recordings are recorded and uploaded right after lecture. You do have to attend lecture cuz participation is worth 20% but if you can't attend lectures live she gives you other ways to participate. Participation in live lectures is just answering poll questions and you don't need to get them right lol and you're also allowed to miss lecture 2 times. As far as exams go, there's two of them and each is worth 20%. The exams are basically 2 midterms one in week 4 and one in week 10. The second one isn't cumulative so that was nice, you just had to know stuff after the first midterm for the second one. However, the second one is definitely harder than the first one since the material on the first midterm is pretty easy. The other 20% are weekly quizzes that are open notes and untimed, she drops the two lowest ones. Those are also really easy so another free 20% lol. Lastly 20% is for the lab assignments where you basically just copy the code the TA gives you so yeah another free 20%, she also drops the lowest lab. Oh yeah, to ease stress level due to the pandemic she offered 2% extra credit for just filling out her personal evaluation form so honestly this class is literally a free A and 10/10 recommend it.

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June 16, 2019
Quarter: Spring 2019
Grade: A+

Relatively easy class, but the instruction was unfortunately unclear and section did little to improved my comfort with the material. Cha is super nice and means well but I needed a couple hours with Khan Academy to feel like I understood what was actually happening in the class. Textbook is optional, but it might have helped because I didn't get it and felt behind for much of the class. Minimal week-to-week work, but I highly encourage doing practice problems on the regular.

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Dec. 26, 2019
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: B+

I was actually pretty shocked going into this class as to how inaccessible the content was for me. I had taken AP calculus in high school but never stats, so I was excited for this class because I thought I would do really good and learn something new. I actually wound up getting a C+ on the midterm to my surprise because I really thought I understood the concepts. I guess the questions were just really tricky. The class does deal with such a wide range of content that I found it very hard to keep up. I also felt like I didn't have as many rights as a student because I didn't have time to go to office hours and find out what I did wrong, so I'll never know. Also, nobody really wanted to speak up in class because it's just such an awkward atmosphere with like 200 people in the room. This was by far my toughest class this quarter, and I guess it made me realize math just isn't for me. I bet a lot of math majors take this course and so they wind up doing well, but I thought I try my hand at it being an arts major, and I guess it was my mistake. It was too fast for me and there was just too much going on. Perhaps if there was less going on, then I would've done a lot better. I'm not sure how this really applies to anything I'm doing but I really tried in this course and that's more than most people can say. There are weekly quizzes which are simple and straightforward and the labs are pretty easy as well, just make sure you go to discussion. It's the two examinations that are tough since each is weighted 30% and there are only 29 questions which means you can't miss a lot. You do get a sheet of paper to write down the formulas but you also want to make sure you write the definitions of the concepts. The slides are pretty dense, so make sure you understand the content on their as best as you can. Another qualm I had with this class is that the professor's voice is pretty annoying. She can't help it, but to me it sounded like an alarm clock that would not stop. I felt bad for her because she must have vocal fry after speaking with that much inflection over time. Overall, this is doable if you are inclined to pursue STEM. It just wasn't for an arts major like me.

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STATS 10
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
June 10, 2021
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: C

If you don't like coding, this is not the class for you. I thought this class was literally just going to teach stats but I was in for a rude awakening

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March 24, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A

The only criticism I have for this class is the exams. The exam questions themselves are reasonable; the format of the exam is what's unreasonable. The exams are worth 60% of the grade in total (30% each), and each exam only has 30 or less questions. Essentially, if you mess up on a few questions, you'll be screwed.

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March 24, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A

If you pay attention to lecture material and do the weekly quizzes, you'll be fine. Test questions are very similar to those as well as the examples Dr. Cha goes through in class.

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April 17, 2022
Quarter: Spring 2022
Grade: NR

Ms. Cha is not a very good instructor of statistics, usually coming from a purely quantitative angle and lacking context or motivation for her lectures. I always get a bad vibe around her. Ms. Cha’s voice is rather shrill and students would get frustrated by the slow pace of the course (e.g. constructing box plots is tested). I don’t know if it’s true of the stats department in general, but if this any indication of quality of teaching and content in the department’s offerings, stats at ucla sucks. Ms. Cha’s spoken and written communication are both difficult to understand and lacking in sophistication. I feel like she lacks a deeper knowledge of the field so I’m surprised she’s in college faculty. Her doctorate from UCLA statistics was perhaps obtained at a lower level than bachelors programs in the US. I’m shocked ucla students find this class valuable and her instruction good; a sign of the deteriorating quality of enrollees in stats courses, I presume. With so many lecturers in stats at UCLA who graduated from their PhD program, ucla stats needs a big rework as soon as possible. I wanted to change my section late in the quarter and sent multiple emails to the administrators—Laurie Leyden, Chie Ryu, and Michael Kang—all of whom I met with supercilious responses. I do not recommend stats 10, and by extension any other stats course at ucla. Stay away haha.

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STATS 10
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Feb. 16, 2022
Quarter: Fall 2021
Grade: A

Cha was an incredible professor who clearly cared about her students. The class was composed of a midterm, a final, and a final project with extra points available for clicker questions. While she did not post her lecture recordings, I felt as through the slides themselves were enough to stay on track even if I missed a class. In class, Cha did a great job of explaining concepts. I personally did not enjoy using R Studio and felt as though it was a bit of a waste of time to be told what to code, but never really learn why or how, but that could just be my opinion. Overall, a great and easy class that I would recommend.

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STATS 10
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
March 21, 2021
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A+

Note: COVID-19 review

Grading: 15% participation, 20% quizzes, 20% labs, 15% Exam 1, 15% Exam 2, 15% project. The lowest 2 quiz scores are dropped, the lowest lab grade is dropped, 2 lectures can be missed without losing participation points. Extra credit is offered for filling out 2 surveys about the class

Professor Cha is amazing and a solid choice for Stats 10. In the first lecture, she was very kind and made it clear she cared about our physical and mental health, and she said to talk to her if we had any such issues. As you can see from the grading scheme, she drops the lowest scores in most of the categories. Her lectures are very clear and she does a lot of examples to make sure you understand the concepts. The last unit on Hypothesis Testing is a bit harder to get, but with enough practice you’ll get used to it. I’m a freshman who’d never taken a stats class before and found this class very easy to follow, and if you’ve taken AP Stats it’ll probably be even easier. This quarter for online learning she did half synchronous lectures (on Tuesdays) and half asynchronous lectures (on Thursdays). I liked this format as it allowed for some flexibility for the Thursday lessons and also made it so we weren’t doing the same thing over and over for every lesson each week.

Participation in synchronous lectures was easy, you just had to answer poll questions she presented during class and you didn’t even have to get the answer right. With the asynchronous lectures, you had to answer questions intermittently throughout the lesson on CCLE, and these also felt pretty easy to me. Quizzes were untimed, multiple choice, and fairly similar to her examples from the lecture. Labs were easy as long as you followed along with your TA as they coded in R to answer the questions. The exams were completely multiple choice, 30 questions long, non-cumulative, and reasonable to complete within the time limit. The project was a new assignment she was trying for this quarter and it took a bit of effort, but since you were allowed to work in groups of up to 5, it was easy enough to spread out the work. If she keeps doing the project in future quarters, make sure you pay attention to labs/rewatch the recordings of labs/save your code from labs as you do have to use R on the project. Even if you weren’t an expert programmer, it was fairly simple to figure out what code to use in my opinion, as you could reference your labs and easily figure it out from there.

Overall I found this class to be fairly easy, and Professor Cha to be an excellent teacher. Whether you need to fulfill a science GE, need a basic stats class for your major reqs, need a stats class for your minor reqs, or simply want to learn the basics of statistics, I highly recommend this class.

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STATS 10
Quarter: Spring 2022
Grade: A
June 12, 2022

There is a reason why this professor is so highly reviewed. She was a wonderful lecturer and valued student participation. She was very sweet and understanding of students' circumstances. She was also very approachable, so if you ever have an issue, communicate with her and she will probably be able to accommodate you. Because there were so many students, it sometimes felt intimidating to speak up but the class was great nonetheless. The grade is composed of 10 online quizzes (lowest two dropped), 5 lab assignments (lowest one dropped), two exams, a final project, and extra credit.

Online quizzes: These quizzes opened on Fridays and closed on Sunday nights. They were all open book and multiple choice. If you had your slides in front of you, had good notes, and understood how to work through the problem, it was not too hard to get 100%. I will admit that the quizzes did get somewhat harder towards the end of the quarter but that was to be expected. Also, if you got a bad grade on one of the quizzes, it would be dropped. I think the quizzes were really fair and I appreciated her dropping two of them.

Lab: Labs were entirely guided by the TA. During lab, you learn how to code using R. Personally, I thought everything was well-paced and if I ever fell behind, I could just rewatch the lab section (my TA recorded his lab section). I also found it helpful to go to my TA’s office hours if I had any questions about the lab. From what I know, most stats 10 TAs are good at getting back to/helping students. The labs are due every two weeks and are definitely not the hardest part of this course. As a person who has never used code before, I think it wasn't too bad (especially because the TAs were so helpful).

Exams: The highest scored exam is worth 30% of your grade while the second best score is worth 20% of your grade. The exams were definitely the hardest part of this course. On both exams, I only missed 4-6 questions and ended up with B’s. The exams usually consist of only 30-36 questions, so missing one can already take a toll on your grade. However, what I think really helped was having 15 pages of notes with me during the exam. The exam was not open book or open note, but she allowed you to print 15 pages (double-sided) of information to bring with you for the exam. As for any advice, I would suggest getting a reliable calculator and taking thorough notes from the slides. Even though I got two B’s, I still ended the class with a pretty good grade.

Final Project: You can work in a group or you can work alone. I would suggest working in a group because, even though it is not too much work, I think it’s more efficient. The project is based on your understanding of R so getting advice from a TA would be very helpful.

Extra credit: The ec can give you a 1% grade bump. You get 0.1% extra credit every time you answer a clicker question during lecture. It doesn’t have to be the right answer, you just have to show that you participated. Doing this is what bumped my grade from an A- to an A so I highly recommend doing it.

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3 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
STATS 10
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+
Dec. 11, 2020

Professor Cha is amazing!!!!! this class is SO SO SO easy especially if you've taken ap stats. this class is literally easier than the ap stats I took in highschool. Professor cha is a really good lecturer and always willing to reteach topics and answer questions during the lecture. I took this during covid so the recordings are recorded and uploaded right after lecture. You do have to attend lecture cuz participation is worth 20% but if you can't attend lectures live she gives you other ways to participate. Participation in live lectures is just answering poll questions and you don't need to get them right lol and you're also allowed to miss lecture 2 times. As far as exams go, there's two of them and each is worth 20%. The exams are basically 2 midterms one in week 4 and one in week 10. The second one isn't cumulative so that was nice, you just had to know stuff after the first midterm for the second one. However, the second one is definitely harder than the first one since the material on the first midterm is pretty easy. The other 20% are weekly quizzes that are open notes and untimed, she drops the two lowest ones. Those are also really easy so another free 20% lol. Lastly 20% is for the lab assignments where you basically just copy the code the TA gives you so yeah another free 20%, she also drops the lowest lab. Oh yeah, to ease stress level due to the pandemic she offered 2% extra credit for just filling out her personal evaluation form so honestly this class is literally a free A and 10/10 recommend it.

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STATS 10
Quarter: Spring 2019
Grade: A+
June 16, 2019

Relatively easy class, but the instruction was unfortunately unclear and section did little to improved my comfort with the material. Cha is super nice and means well but I needed a couple hours with Khan Academy to feel like I understood what was actually happening in the class. Textbook is optional, but it might have helped because I didn't get it and felt behind for much of the class. Minimal week-to-week work, but I highly encourage doing practice problems on the regular.

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2 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
STATS 10
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: B+
Dec. 26, 2019

I was actually pretty shocked going into this class as to how inaccessible the content was for me. I had taken AP calculus in high school but never stats, so I was excited for this class because I thought I would do really good and learn something new. I actually wound up getting a C+ on the midterm to my surprise because I really thought I understood the concepts. I guess the questions were just really tricky. The class does deal with such a wide range of content that I found it very hard to keep up. I also felt like I didn't have as many rights as a student because I didn't have time to go to office hours and find out what I did wrong, so I'll never know. Also, nobody really wanted to speak up in class because it's just such an awkward atmosphere with like 200 people in the room. This was by far my toughest class this quarter, and I guess it made me realize math just isn't for me. I bet a lot of math majors take this course and so they wind up doing well, but I thought I try my hand at it being an arts major, and I guess it was my mistake. It was too fast for me and there was just too much going on. Perhaps if there was less going on, then I would've done a lot better. I'm not sure how this really applies to anything I'm doing but I really tried in this course and that's more than most people can say. There are weekly quizzes which are simple and straightforward and the labs are pretty easy as well, just make sure you go to discussion. It's the two examinations that are tough since each is weighted 30% and there are only 29 questions which means you can't miss a lot. You do get a sheet of paper to write down the formulas but you also want to make sure you write the definitions of the concepts. The slides are pretty dense, so make sure you understand the content on their as best as you can. Another qualm I had with this class is that the professor's voice is pretty annoying. She can't help it, but to me it sounded like an alarm clock that would not stop. I felt bad for her because she must have vocal fry after speaking with that much inflection over time. Overall, this is doable if you are inclined to pursue STEM. It just wasn't for an arts major like me.

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STATS 10
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: C
June 10, 2021

If you don't like coding, this is not the class for you. I thought this class was literally just going to teach stats but I was in for a rude awakening

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STATS 10
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 24, 2020

The only criticism I have for this class is the exams. The exam questions themselves are reasonable; the format of the exam is what's unreasonable. The exams are worth 60% of the grade in total (30% each), and each exam only has 30 or less questions. Essentially, if you mess up on a few questions, you'll be screwed.

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STATS 10
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 24, 2020

If you pay attention to lecture material and do the weekly quizzes, you'll be fine. Test questions are very similar to those as well as the examples Dr. Cha goes through in class.

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2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
STATS 10
Quarter: Spring 2022
Grade: NR
April 17, 2022

Ms. Cha is not a very good instructor of statistics, usually coming from a purely quantitative angle and lacking context or motivation for her lectures. I always get a bad vibe around her. Ms. Cha’s voice is rather shrill and students would get frustrated by the slow pace of the course (e.g. constructing box plots is tested). I don’t know if it’s true of the stats department in general, but if this any indication of quality of teaching and content in the department’s offerings, stats at ucla sucks. Ms. Cha’s spoken and written communication are both difficult to understand and lacking in sophistication. I feel like she lacks a deeper knowledge of the field so I’m surprised she’s in college faculty. Her doctorate from UCLA statistics was perhaps obtained at a lower level than bachelors programs in the US. I’m shocked ucla students find this class valuable and her instruction good; a sign of the deteriorating quality of enrollees in stats courses, I presume. With so many lecturers in stats at UCLA who graduated from their PhD program, ucla stats needs a big rework as soon as possible. I wanted to change my section late in the quarter and sent multiple emails to the administrators—Laurie Leyden, Chie Ryu, and Michael Kang—all of whom I met with supercilious responses. I do not recommend stats 10, and by extension any other stats course at ucla. Stay away haha.

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2 3 Please log in to provide feedback.
STATS 10
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2021
Grade: A
Feb. 16, 2022

Cha was an incredible professor who clearly cared about her students. The class was composed of a midterm, a final, and a final project with extra points available for clicker questions. While she did not post her lecture recordings, I felt as through the slides themselves were enough to stay on track even if I missed a class. In class, Cha did a great job of explaining concepts. I personally did not enjoy using R Studio and felt as though it was a bit of a waste of time to be told what to code, but never really learn why or how, but that could just be my opinion. Overall, a great and easy class that I would recommend.

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1 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
STATS 10
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A+
March 21, 2021

Note: COVID-19 review

Grading: 15% participation, 20% quizzes, 20% labs, 15% Exam 1, 15% Exam 2, 15% project. The lowest 2 quiz scores are dropped, the lowest lab grade is dropped, 2 lectures can be missed without losing participation points. Extra credit is offered for filling out 2 surveys about the class

Professor Cha is amazing and a solid choice for Stats 10. In the first lecture, she was very kind and made it clear she cared about our physical and mental health, and she said to talk to her if we had any such issues. As you can see from the grading scheme, she drops the lowest scores in most of the categories. Her lectures are very clear and she does a lot of examples to make sure you understand the concepts. The last unit on Hypothesis Testing is a bit harder to get, but with enough practice you’ll get used to it. I’m a freshman who’d never taken a stats class before and found this class very easy to follow, and if you’ve taken AP Stats it’ll probably be even easier. This quarter for online learning she did half synchronous lectures (on Tuesdays) and half asynchronous lectures (on Thursdays). I liked this format as it allowed for some flexibility for the Thursday lessons and also made it so we weren’t doing the same thing over and over for every lesson each week.

Participation in synchronous lectures was easy, you just had to answer poll questions she presented during class and you didn’t even have to get the answer right. With the asynchronous lectures, you had to answer questions intermittently throughout the lesson on CCLE, and these also felt pretty easy to me. Quizzes were untimed, multiple choice, and fairly similar to her examples from the lecture. Labs were easy as long as you followed along with your TA as they coded in R to answer the questions. The exams were completely multiple choice, 30 questions long, non-cumulative, and reasonable to complete within the time limit. The project was a new assignment she was trying for this quarter and it took a bit of effort, but since you were allowed to work in groups of up to 5, it was easy enough to spread out the work. If she keeps doing the project in future quarters, make sure you pay attention to labs/rewatch the recordings of labs/save your code from labs as you do have to use R on the project. Even if you weren’t an expert programmer, it was fairly simple to figure out what code to use in my opinion, as you could reference your labs and easily figure it out from there.

Overall I found this class to be fairly easy, and Professor Cha to be an excellent teacher. Whether you need to fulfill a science GE, need a basic stats class for your major reqs, need a stats class for your minor reqs, or simply want to learn the basics of statistics, I highly recommend this class.

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