Worst class I’ve taken at UCLA, not even close. Bigio Luks was a horrendous lecturer. I learned absolutely nothing from his lectures. so many times he just popped an equation with 10 variables on the screen, stared at it, and realized he can’t explain it so he just goes “you can check the textbook to figure it out”. He tried to hide his terrible teaching with a decent grade distribution, but in terms of how much I learned in the class I deserved to fail. If u care abt learning economics, do not take 102 with Bigio Luks, try to get anyone else. If u don’t care and just want to get the class over with, be prepared to be carry an underlying sense of frustration and existential dread everyday for the quarter because you will live with the anxiety of wasting your college degree on such a useless class.

As mentioned in other reviews, this class was terrible. Yes, the grade distributions may not indicate this - the class was curved exceedingly heavily, in what was perhaps the only redeeming quality of the course. However, it terms of educational attainment, this class was easily the worst econ course I have taken. Other courses like 101 or 104 were challenging, but I felt that by the end of the quarter, I had at least learned something of relevance to economics. This course lacked even that - I can confidently say that my grasp of 102 course concepts now is no greater than my grasp of the course concepts prior to having taken the course. Little to no practice material was offered besides biweekly homework assignments, and a single practice midterm and final respectively. Additionally, exams contained questions unlike any examples given previously, leaving students to figure it out during the exam.
Lectures were directly copied from the textbook, except they were somehow made even more useless through tangential anecdotes and irrelevant backstory. No original content was developed by the professor, however the TAs did try their best to provide necessary information to somewhat comprehend the course.
Take this course with another professor if you can.

Professor Saki Bigio is the worst professor I've had at UCLA so far, which is saying a lot. I completely understand that macroeconomics at this level is challenging and confusing, but Professor Bigio made it 100x harder for all the students through challenging tests, providing no examples in class, and just overall not being helpful or approachable. I'd say the TAs discussions and notes carried any aspect of learning in this class. Saki would go through maybe 60 slides in a lecture but literally none of it would be helpful in any way whatsoever. The one time he did an example in class he did it incorrectly and it was so pathetic I could hear students snickering. He also is just snarky in general and oftentimes passive-aggressive. During the TA strike some students emailed him about having a no harm final. He responded in a way that basically said "F you stop bothering me" when he could have just been respectful about students concerns. He also closed out the class in a message which said "[Macro] is not difficult to grasp. ", which is pretty condescending considering most people struggled in this class. This class made me cry tears of frustration and anger and I do not recommend it at all.

Saki's lectures are beyond useless as well as boring. Textbook does not prepare you for the difficulty of the midterm or even the homeworks. Anecdotally, I would be doing his ridiculous homework while c*ssing at him under my breath for just how dog-sh*t the assignment and the whole class were. Trust me when I tell you that should heed these other reviews -- I wish they were around before I took this class w this professor.

The open note tests may be a "saving grace," but it does not feel as so. There is no heart to this class. No knowledge was truly tested. No economic insights were gained (which I normally don't even care about). & there wasn't a deep-down good, likable person to lead the class.

You will walk out feeling unsatisfied with anything other than your ability to print out the right questions.

Worst Economics class I have taken at UCLA before (topping Haanwinckel 101). As written in other reviews, I tend to take every Bruinwalk review with a grain of salt. For Saki, I wish I had listened to previous reviews on this guy. Bigios is an intelligent dude for sure, but a horrible teacher with little concept of how well his students understand the material. The only pro to this class was his open note tests which allowed you to print every practice problem ever solved in his class and bring them to the final and midterm and hope that you can plug in answers with different numbers that you have printed out. Other than that, the class was very difficult and Bigios's TAs did all the real teaching. His lectures were pointless and he never taught us how to actually solve the problems he tested us on, just gave quick theoretical overviews. This class is doable, but not without a serious headache and serious doubt on whether you learned any useful information over the course of an entire quarter. in retrospect, I really wished I had waited and taken 102 with another professor.

I don't usually write reviews but I figured people would come on here and blast him so wanted to provide some perspective (especially since I was terrified to take this class after reading last quarter's reviews). The lectures are definitely boring and hard to follow since they're just going over formulas and it's hard to see the intuition, but Professor Saki does his best to explain why they're relevant and starts each topic off with a motivation slide to let us know why it's important that we learn this, which I appreciate. I think the material of this class in general is pretty dull regardless of who you take it with, so I wouldn't blame him for that. The homework sets (there's only 4, and 2 of them were a practice midterm/final) are very similar to the practice exams he provides, so a lot of the solutions overlap and make it slightly more doable. They're definitely the most challenging part of the course, but he gives us a long time to do them and you can work with your TA and other students. The midterm was not necessarily very hard, but was long, so nobody finished. It ended up being absolutely fine as he gave us a very generous curve (my 52% went to 85%). The TAs are super helpful (take Bangyu if you can!) and prepare you for exams well. Definitely attend discussion because you get your participation points just for attending, and they're very very helpful. Overall, he's not the best professor I've ever had but he's definitely not the worst, especially in this department. He even started the class by saying he tries to learn from reviews and wants to do better than he did last quarter. He's passionate about the subject and is a great guy who really wants us to learn the material with the same passion he has. I agree with the person who said he was meant to be an economist, not an economics professor, but overall, if you need to take this class with him you'll be fine.

Believe this bruin walk page for Saki. Usually, I see bad reviews for professors but still will take classes with those professors. This is VERY DIFFERENT. Try at all costs to avoid Saki, trust me.

I'm not normally one to complain, and 99% of the time when people complain about a professor on here they are never as bad as they seem. This is not the case for this class. The only good thing about it is that the exams are open note so you can just print out the prior years' test and answers and essentially copy/paste some questions with the new numbers. That's all the pros. Everything else is a con, from the lengthy and difficult homework where you have to answer problems we've never even gone over in class, to the dull lectures where page after page of mindless, vague math and derivation just turns into a blur. Professor Luks is very intelligent, he is also a terrible teacher. He was born to be an economist, not an economics professor. Try your best to steer clear of him, if you're stuck with him your best bet is just to print everything out for the tests that way you can at least get some points when questions are repeated with different numbers.

Don't take this class unless you want to hate yourself. I don't know how he's still a professor. Take 102 with Surro or anyone else

Honestly, I think the negative reviews are out of proportion. Yes, he’s not the best lecturer and does go on irrelevant tangents, but his slides are quite concise with a good amt of info, and homework is good practice for tests. He also posts past exams which are pretty similar to exams and has a VERY generous curve. I wouldn’t say I absolutely recommend, but don’t be afraid or put off from taking his classes.