Michael Tsiang
Department of Statistics
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3.9
Overall Rating
Based on 22 Users
Easiness 4.2 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 4.5 / 5 How clear the class is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Workload 3.6 / 5 How much workload the class is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Helpfulness 4.0 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Uses Slides
  • Tolerates Tardiness
  • Appropriately Priced Materials
  • Gives Extra Credit
GRADE DISTRIBUTIONS
84.1%
70.1%
56.1%
42.1%
28.0%
14.0%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

64.8%
54.0%
43.2%
32.4%
21.6%
10.8%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

49.7%
41.4%
33.1%
24.8%
16.6%
8.3%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

54.9%
45.8%
36.6%
27.5%
18.3%
9.2%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

38.8%
32.3%
25.8%
19.4%
12.9%
6.5%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

ENROLLMENT DISTRIBUTIONS
Clear marks

Sorry, no enrollment data is available.

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Reviews (19)

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Quarter: Winter 2024
Grade: A
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
April 2, 2024

I decided for my reviews now I will now justify my scores for each of the components as well as a more extensive review:

Number Score Overview:
Easiness: 5 - Class content is not that difficult, exams are fair (NOTE: Took AP Stats in Highschool)

Clarity: 5 - He is very clear and great at explaining the statistical concepts

Workload: 5- The workload is not that bad, homework assignments can sometimes be long but not too bad, but it wasn't something completely unmanageable.

Helpfulness: 5- Mike was super helpful his office hour as well as the TAs. There was alot of support in that class to get the help you need.

Overall: 4- Overall this class was fine, I was a little bored but that's probably because I had learned the content before and it was very slow paced. I hated the labs, I did not learn anything and probably will forget the few things I remember about r. Content is interesting but go over less stuff compared to AP Stats.

Extensive Review:
Professor: Mike is a decent professor. He is really nice and really cares about your mental and emotional wellbeing. He is great at explaining things and he can be pretty funny if that's your sense of humor.

Class: The class is fine, a normal introductory statistics class. If you took AP Stats in highschool its pretty much the same thing except with less content. The main difference is that AP Stats covered more topics and focused more on theoretical stuff while this class focuses on what happens if theoretical conditions are not met and how to conduct these tests using simulation. The labs were pretty boring, did not learn much. I was just copying down whatever the TA. There will be coding on your exams so you should try harder on it than I did. The homework can be a bit long but for whatever reason, whoever is grading the homework is such a stickler for the smallest things. I would get the stupidest points marked off on my homework for the most random things. So just be aware of that.

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Quarter: Winter 2024
Grade: A
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
March 27, 2024

Having taken AP Stats a couple years prior, I barely paid attention in this class and did all the (accuracy-graded) homework at 1:30 am with minimal repercussions aside from the usual self-inflicted carelessness. Seeing live the stats Ph.D.s' series of Canvas annotations notifications on my homework as they nitpicked my each and every mistake, misstep, and misoptimal calculation in the middle of the night gave me mild hypertension. I still don't get the policy of having graders separate from TAs for the homework and labs, since it's far more clumsy to learn from the mistakes from an upper div taker who isn't learning the same materials and methods in the class, but to be fair the only thing it really hurt was my pride. Lowest HW, Lab, and Quiz scores are dropped. The Campuswire condescension is kinda true, but not that terrible. The forum's used more like an all-around office hours. You don't need the textbook for this class since he just uses his slides as the content, and the slides are taken directly from the textbook anyway.
Tsiang gives lots of opportunities for people to get to know their classmates, which is more than I can say for almost any bio req lecture. Though few people came to lecture, the people that did saw each other a bit more, and we all kinda got to knew each other and interact with Tsiang if we needed clarification. I heard his 'Whine and Cheese Club' is also an option if you just want to talk more casually outside class, but I never really went so can't say much about it.
This professor notably exercises TA flexibility; anyone can decide to go to another TA or time slot instead if the one they're enrolled in doesn't work out. As someone in a 5-6pm discussion, having that option to go to the 4-5pm one instead freed a lot of time. Speaking of TAs, shoutout to Kaiwen for walking us through all the answers and apologizing when he interpreted the extra practice section wrong but extended the deadline for it, and was all around flexible during the flash floods. Also thanks to the teaching intern Josh for making practice tests for us, which I guess just aren't a thing Tsiang does normally. Other than that, this is a class you should put more effort than me into, but shouldn't be that stressful.

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Quarter: Winter 2024
Grade: A
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
March 26, 2024

I have never met a more passive-aggressive person who has such a reputation for being nice. At first, Dr. Tsiang seems very sweet. He is super accommodating, makes a lot of jokes, asks students to call him Mike, has a no penalty late work policy, etc. He frequently makes pop culture references and really tries to relate to his students. In person, he's awesome. In contrast, he requires students to participate on campuswire for 2% of their overall grade. You need to reach red bird for full credit and eagle for extra credit. Here, he frequently belittles students for their answers, simply responding "incorrect." to their answers without explanation as to where their thinking is wrong. He hounds the site at all hours of the day, making it difficult to respond before him (he frequently complains that students answer after he already answered as if he didn't make participation required). He bemoans students not upvoting his answers when they upvote each other when he doesn't upvote students' answers. He berates students for not citing his slide deck when answering questions as if we have time to memorize where every piece of information is. I have never felt as unwelcome to participate in a class as here, and I had Dr. Scerri for a chemistry class. It feels as if Dr. Tsiang has this expectation of gratitude for his niceness, which makes it seem fake. That said, this class is criminally easy if you took AP Stats. Just reading the slides is sufficient to understand what is going on if you just need a refresher, so I would say going to lecture isn't necessary. If you're new to stats, I would at least watch the bruincast on 2x speed. The homeworks are much longer than Dr. Kim's, but they are still manageable and take 1-3 hours a week. The labs are tedious, but the TAs give you the answers, so don't worry if you've never had to code. The midterm and final are very easy as long as you know the basics of the material an are able to differentiate between different types of tests. I think the most challenging part of this class is being able to know the difference between when to use a single mean/proportion, two means/proportions, and regression.

TL;DR: Dr. Tsiang can be passive aggressive and mean to students over campuswire, but he is nice in person, and the class is very easy with lenient grading.

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Quarter: Winter 2024
Grade: NR
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
March 22, 2024

Overall, Mike is a great teacher. His notes, lectures, slides were super helpful and really easy to understand. However I felt like it was really hard to ask questions in person and even on campuswire. He would respond really passive aggressively and make students feel discouraged a lot. Overall its a good class

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Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
March 31, 2021

I personally really liked Professor Tsiang, he seemed really relatable and always slipped in funny TV show references on tests and in lectures and instructions. He was genuinely caring towards students' well being, especially mental health. He stressed this multiple times throughout the quarter, gave us free points on quizzes and exams related to this, and extended deadlines when he felt the workload was too much. Additionally, no textbook was required and you get everything you need just from his lectures. They were generally shorter lectures too, the allotted time is normally 50 min a lecture but most of the time they were closer to 30-40 minutes. The labs were pretty straight forward, with the instructions basically telling you everything you need, so don't stress for people who haven't used R or coded before!
That being said, I did feel that there was a lot of work for this class, weekly quizzes, homework, and biweekly labs. It was manageable if you didn't leave things to the last minute however. I felt that the graders were a bit harsh, but still did well on most assignments. Prof Tsiang did require Campuswire participation, which you could also get EC through which I thought might be a nuisance at first, but was super easy and the majority of the class got most points for this. I would say try to get most of your points early on so you don't have to worry about it as much later on, but I checked Campuswire maybe three times a week and tried to answer or ask a question each time and achieved the extra credit level before week 8.
The exams were a bit harder, but you have plenty of time and open notes so I think just understanding concepts, and understanding the wording Professor emphasizes and keeping a diagram of the validity conditions is super helpful. He does not provide practice questions, so I reviewed the quizzes and did some from the suggested (but not required) textbook.

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Quarter: Summer 2020
Grade: P
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Sept. 4, 2020

The practice midterms and exams are definitely not reflective of the actual midterm and final, which really threw me off since they were more difficult...almost ambiguously and confusingly difficult. Exams were hard and I get why Dr. Tsiang made it harder due to remote learning. Nothing can really prepare you for it since there's no "practice exams/midterms" for remote learning. Recorded lectures were long and he read from the slides but it was digestible and Dr. Tsiang just followed the textbook (that is not required!) I really appreciate Dr. Tsiang not mandating purchasing textbooks and materials for the course.

Aside from emails, the primary mode of correspondence for this quarter was a Discord server which I really didn't go on much except to clarify a few things that someone else already asked.

His love for Parks and Rec definitely permeates into the course, so if you're a fan, you'll appreciate the incorporation of the show into the work...if you're not, just nod and smile.

Labs are easy since the TA just uploads the video doing the lab step by step, question by question. No problems with that. Labs were probably the easiest thing to complete from this course.

This is a class many of y'all probably need to take, so just bite the bullet now and take it and hold on. Don't let go or fall off the wagon mid-quarter and don't let time slip away.

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Quarter: Summer 2020
Grade: A-
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Aug. 9, 2020

Look, I hear Stats 13 is the easiest pre-req for LS majors. I am usually an A student, and was expecting this class to be a breeze. But, due to online learning, Tsiang made his exams a lot harder than it was in person (he used past exams as 'practice tests' even though they were wayyyy easier than the actual exams.) Recorded lectures were pretty straight forward, and I thought that I was well-versed in the material. Fast forward to Exam 1, I got a 77% (class average was 78%) and I was shook. Most questions were short answers, so I got many partial credit, and only got 1 multiple choice answer wrong. For the final I got a 75% (have no idea what was the class average), but same deal. To be fair, the exams are open note that's why they are harder, but even then, I was surprised since I'd do very well on the homework. According to syllabus, I had an 85% in the class, but Tsiang adjusted the grading scale to fit distributions, so I ended up with an A-. I am not too upset, since I was expecting a B, but I wish I would have been prepared on how detailed I needed to be when it came to short answer questions. Also he bombarded us with lecture videos Week 5, and it was just a bit too fast-paced and it was frustrating. I had many peers feel the same way as well. But at the end of the day, I really liked Tsiang, he's a good professor and cares about his students, I just didn't have that much interaction with him due to chaotic home life and to be honest, laziness to attend office hours.

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Quarter: Spring 2018
Grade: A
June 9, 2020

I really enjoyed taking this class with Tsiang. He explains all the material very clearly and puts in a lot of effort into teaching. Stats is not the most interesting subject (at least to me) but he makes his lectures as engaging as possible. He was also super helpful during office hours and was willing to spend lots of time with students to make sure they understand a concept. In addition, his exams were completely fair and by no means challenging as long as you put in a little bit of effort into studying. He even let us use a cheat sheet which was really helpful.
If you're hesitant about taking this class with Tsiang because of the reviews - don't be! I don't understand why people are upset with his teaching. I thought he went above and beyond to help students and is in general a super nice person. Would definitely recommend this class with him.

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Quarter: Summer 2019
Grade: A
Sept. 14, 2019

I put off taking stats for as long as I could during my UCLA career just because I had no interest in the material. Nevertheless, I tried to go in with an open mind. Unfortunately, Tsiang did not help this situation. For 2 hours, you basically sit and listen to him read from slides verbatim. It was borderline painful some mornings. Again, maybe this is because I just didn't find the material interesting or maybe it was just presented in a really boring way. In terms of the class, the tests are all multiple choice and you get a cheat sheet, but they are still pretty tricky. Best advice is to look at the conceptual multiple choice from the textbook chapters (he steals questions from here). There are twice weekly discussions, but in one per week the TAs go over the weekly labs and basically give you the answers which is nice. The other discussion per week is spent going over example problems. Each week you have homework which definitely takes a while to complete and is graded on accuracy which is just annoying. Although he gives some extra credit opportunities, it is for a very low level (1% max of final grade). Lastly, I agree with the previous poster about the CampusWire arrogance. Although I think what he was trying to do was get students to think about the concepts and come up with the answers themselves, he does this in a very poor and rude manner. BUT he is super responsive on there which I guess is good. (Also, please stop the "ain't nobody got time for that" jokes... they are beyond cringe worthy after week 1).

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Quarter: Summer 2019
Grade: A
Sept. 12, 2019

Not sure who the hell is writing these reviews. Maybe this was an off summer for Tsiang, but the guy is not what he is made out to be by this bruinwalk page. People saying he's funny are saying that because every 30 or so minutes in his (painfully dull) 2 hour lectures, he says "aint nobody got time for that" and it wakes a portion of the class up. Maybe that is enough for the kind of people who write bruinwalk reviews to consider him funny. See, I accidentally missed the course evaluation deadline, so now I have to settle for a bruinwalk review in the hopes that it finds whoever tracks the progress of junior lecturers. One positive for Tsiang is that he gives great life advice before tests. He reminds students that mental health, sleep, and overall well-being is far more important than any grade. I respect his thoughts on this. That being said, his tests were still tough and required a lot of preparation. Also, anybody who says he is a "nice guy" or teaches with "good clarity" is either tripping or had a different teacher. This guy is far and above the most condescending teacher I have ever experienced. Though it is hard to tell whether he is robot or human from lecture, when you actually meet with this guy in person, you quickly realize that the attitude he puts out on Campuswire is true to he actually is. Campuswire is an online forum and part of the class is participating on it by asking and answering questions. If you somehow find the patience to rack up 50 upvotes on your responses, you can earn a whopping .5% of extra credit. I swear to you, on every singly discussion topic you click, you can find a condescending response from Tsiang, shaming the person for asking, and completely dodging the task of actually answering the question posed. He manages to consistently leave you guessing in confusion, putting a roundabout bullshit response to any and everyone who dare ask for help on the website. Take this review as one angry review from a kid who you think got a bad grade, or take this as a collective effort by 12 csesh students who all got A's and B's, but were shocked by how misleading the teacher's bruinwalk page was. Tsiang - get over yourself, stop your Parks and Rec references and learn to teach.

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Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Winter 2024
Grade: A
April 2, 2024

I decided for my reviews now I will now justify my scores for each of the components as well as a more extensive review:

Number Score Overview:
Easiness: 5 - Class content is not that difficult, exams are fair (NOTE: Took AP Stats in Highschool)

Clarity: 5 - He is very clear and great at explaining the statistical concepts

Workload: 5- The workload is not that bad, homework assignments can sometimes be long but not too bad, but it wasn't something completely unmanageable.

Helpfulness: 5- Mike was super helpful his office hour as well as the TAs. There was alot of support in that class to get the help you need.

Overall: 4- Overall this class was fine, I was a little bored but that's probably because I had learned the content before and it was very slow paced. I hated the labs, I did not learn anything and probably will forget the few things I remember about r. Content is interesting but go over less stuff compared to AP Stats.

Extensive Review:
Professor: Mike is a decent professor. He is really nice and really cares about your mental and emotional wellbeing. He is great at explaining things and he can be pretty funny if that's your sense of humor.

Class: The class is fine, a normal introductory statistics class. If you took AP Stats in highschool its pretty much the same thing except with less content. The main difference is that AP Stats covered more topics and focused more on theoretical stuff while this class focuses on what happens if theoretical conditions are not met and how to conduct these tests using simulation. The labs were pretty boring, did not learn much. I was just copying down whatever the TA. There will be coding on your exams so you should try harder on it than I did. The homework can be a bit long but for whatever reason, whoever is grading the homework is such a stickler for the smallest things. I would get the stupidest points marked off on my homework for the most random things. So just be aware of that.

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Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Winter 2024
Grade: A
March 27, 2024

Having taken AP Stats a couple years prior, I barely paid attention in this class and did all the (accuracy-graded) homework at 1:30 am with minimal repercussions aside from the usual self-inflicted carelessness. Seeing live the stats Ph.D.s' series of Canvas annotations notifications on my homework as they nitpicked my each and every mistake, misstep, and misoptimal calculation in the middle of the night gave me mild hypertension. I still don't get the policy of having graders separate from TAs for the homework and labs, since it's far more clumsy to learn from the mistakes from an upper div taker who isn't learning the same materials and methods in the class, but to be fair the only thing it really hurt was my pride. Lowest HW, Lab, and Quiz scores are dropped. The Campuswire condescension is kinda true, but not that terrible. The forum's used more like an all-around office hours. You don't need the textbook for this class since he just uses his slides as the content, and the slides are taken directly from the textbook anyway.
Tsiang gives lots of opportunities for people to get to know their classmates, which is more than I can say for almost any bio req lecture. Though few people came to lecture, the people that did saw each other a bit more, and we all kinda got to knew each other and interact with Tsiang if we needed clarification. I heard his 'Whine and Cheese Club' is also an option if you just want to talk more casually outside class, but I never really went so can't say much about it.
This professor notably exercises TA flexibility; anyone can decide to go to another TA or time slot instead if the one they're enrolled in doesn't work out. As someone in a 5-6pm discussion, having that option to go to the 4-5pm one instead freed a lot of time. Speaking of TAs, shoutout to Kaiwen for walking us through all the answers and apologizing when he interpreted the extra practice section wrong but extended the deadline for it, and was all around flexible during the flash floods. Also thanks to the teaching intern Josh for making practice tests for us, which I guess just aren't a thing Tsiang does normally. Other than that, this is a class you should put more effort than me into, but shouldn't be that stressful.

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Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Winter 2024
Grade: A
March 26, 2024

I have never met a more passive-aggressive person who has such a reputation for being nice. At first, Dr. Tsiang seems very sweet. He is super accommodating, makes a lot of jokes, asks students to call him Mike, has a no penalty late work policy, etc. He frequently makes pop culture references and really tries to relate to his students. In person, he's awesome. In contrast, he requires students to participate on campuswire for 2% of their overall grade. You need to reach red bird for full credit and eagle for extra credit. Here, he frequently belittles students for their answers, simply responding "incorrect." to their answers without explanation as to where their thinking is wrong. He hounds the site at all hours of the day, making it difficult to respond before him (he frequently complains that students answer after he already answered as if he didn't make participation required). He bemoans students not upvoting his answers when they upvote each other when he doesn't upvote students' answers. He berates students for not citing his slide deck when answering questions as if we have time to memorize where every piece of information is. I have never felt as unwelcome to participate in a class as here, and I had Dr. Scerri for a chemistry class. It feels as if Dr. Tsiang has this expectation of gratitude for his niceness, which makes it seem fake. That said, this class is criminally easy if you took AP Stats. Just reading the slides is sufficient to understand what is going on if you just need a refresher, so I would say going to lecture isn't necessary. If you're new to stats, I would at least watch the bruincast on 2x speed. The homeworks are much longer than Dr. Kim's, but they are still manageable and take 1-3 hours a week. The labs are tedious, but the TAs give you the answers, so don't worry if you've never had to code. The midterm and final are very easy as long as you know the basics of the material an are able to differentiate between different types of tests. I think the most challenging part of this class is being able to know the difference between when to use a single mean/proportion, two means/proportions, and regression.

TL;DR: Dr. Tsiang can be passive aggressive and mean to students over campuswire, but he is nice in person, and the class is very easy with lenient grading.

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Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Winter 2024
Grade: NR
March 22, 2024

Overall, Mike is a great teacher. His notes, lectures, slides were super helpful and really easy to understand. However I felt like it was really hard to ask questions in person and even on campuswire. He would respond really passive aggressively and make students feel discouraged a lot. Overall its a good class

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A
March 31, 2021

I personally really liked Professor Tsiang, he seemed really relatable and always slipped in funny TV show references on tests and in lectures and instructions. He was genuinely caring towards students' well being, especially mental health. He stressed this multiple times throughout the quarter, gave us free points on quizzes and exams related to this, and extended deadlines when he felt the workload was too much. Additionally, no textbook was required and you get everything you need just from his lectures. They were generally shorter lectures too, the allotted time is normally 50 min a lecture but most of the time they were closer to 30-40 minutes. The labs were pretty straight forward, with the instructions basically telling you everything you need, so don't stress for people who haven't used R or coded before!
That being said, I did feel that there was a lot of work for this class, weekly quizzes, homework, and biweekly labs. It was manageable if you didn't leave things to the last minute however. I felt that the graders were a bit harsh, but still did well on most assignments. Prof Tsiang did require Campuswire participation, which you could also get EC through which I thought might be a nuisance at first, but was super easy and the majority of the class got most points for this. I would say try to get most of your points early on so you don't have to worry about it as much later on, but I checked Campuswire maybe three times a week and tried to answer or ask a question each time and achieved the extra credit level before week 8.
The exams were a bit harder, but you have plenty of time and open notes so I think just understanding concepts, and understanding the wording Professor emphasizes and keeping a diagram of the validity conditions is super helpful. He does not provide practice questions, so I reviewed the quizzes and did some from the suggested (but not required) textbook.

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Summer 2020
Grade: P
Sept. 4, 2020

The practice midterms and exams are definitely not reflective of the actual midterm and final, which really threw me off since they were more difficult...almost ambiguously and confusingly difficult. Exams were hard and I get why Dr. Tsiang made it harder due to remote learning. Nothing can really prepare you for it since there's no "practice exams/midterms" for remote learning. Recorded lectures were long and he read from the slides but it was digestible and Dr. Tsiang just followed the textbook (that is not required!) I really appreciate Dr. Tsiang not mandating purchasing textbooks and materials for the course.

Aside from emails, the primary mode of correspondence for this quarter was a Discord server which I really didn't go on much except to clarify a few things that someone else already asked.

His love for Parks and Rec definitely permeates into the course, so if you're a fan, you'll appreciate the incorporation of the show into the work...if you're not, just nod and smile.

Labs are easy since the TA just uploads the video doing the lab step by step, question by question. No problems with that. Labs were probably the easiest thing to complete from this course.

This is a class many of y'all probably need to take, so just bite the bullet now and take it and hold on. Don't let go or fall off the wagon mid-quarter and don't let time slip away.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Summer 2020
Grade: A-
Aug. 9, 2020

Look, I hear Stats 13 is the easiest pre-req for LS majors. I am usually an A student, and was expecting this class to be a breeze. But, due to online learning, Tsiang made his exams a lot harder than it was in person (he used past exams as 'practice tests' even though they were wayyyy easier than the actual exams.) Recorded lectures were pretty straight forward, and I thought that I was well-versed in the material. Fast forward to Exam 1, I got a 77% (class average was 78%) and I was shook. Most questions were short answers, so I got many partial credit, and only got 1 multiple choice answer wrong. For the final I got a 75% (have no idea what was the class average), but same deal. To be fair, the exams are open note that's why they are harder, but even then, I was surprised since I'd do very well on the homework. According to syllabus, I had an 85% in the class, but Tsiang adjusted the grading scale to fit distributions, so I ended up with an A-. I am not too upset, since I was expecting a B, but I wish I would have been prepared on how detailed I needed to be when it came to short answer questions. Also he bombarded us with lecture videos Week 5, and it was just a bit too fast-paced and it was frustrating. I had many peers feel the same way as well. But at the end of the day, I really liked Tsiang, he's a good professor and cares about his students, I just didn't have that much interaction with him due to chaotic home life and to be honest, laziness to attend office hours.

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Quarter: Spring 2018
Grade: A
June 9, 2020

I really enjoyed taking this class with Tsiang. He explains all the material very clearly and puts in a lot of effort into teaching. Stats is not the most interesting subject (at least to me) but he makes his lectures as engaging as possible. He was also super helpful during office hours and was willing to spend lots of time with students to make sure they understand a concept. In addition, his exams were completely fair and by no means challenging as long as you put in a little bit of effort into studying. He even let us use a cheat sheet which was really helpful.
If you're hesitant about taking this class with Tsiang because of the reviews - don't be! I don't understand why people are upset with his teaching. I thought he went above and beyond to help students and is in general a super nice person. Would definitely recommend this class with him.

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Quarter: Summer 2019
Grade: A
Sept. 14, 2019

I put off taking stats for as long as I could during my UCLA career just because I had no interest in the material. Nevertheless, I tried to go in with an open mind. Unfortunately, Tsiang did not help this situation. For 2 hours, you basically sit and listen to him read from slides verbatim. It was borderline painful some mornings. Again, maybe this is because I just didn't find the material interesting or maybe it was just presented in a really boring way. In terms of the class, the tests are all multiple choice and you get a cheat sheet, but they are still pretty tricky. Best advice is to look at the conceptual multiple choice from the textbook chapters (he steals questions from here). There are twice weekly discussions, but in one per week the TAs go over the weekly labs and basically give you the answers which is nice. The other discussion per week is spent going over example problems. Each week you have homework which definitely takes a while to complete and is graded on accuracy which is just annoying. Although he gives some extra credit opportunities, it is for a very low level (1% max of final grade). Lastly, I agree with the previous poster about the CampusWire arrogance. Although I think what he was trying to do was get students to think about the concepts and come up with the answers themselves, he does this in a very poor and rude manner. BUT he is super responsive on there which I guess is good. (Also, please stop the "ain't nobody got time for that" jokes... they are beyond cringe worthy after week 1).

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Quarter: Summer 2019
Grade: A
Sept. 12, 2019

Not sure who the hell is writing these reviews. Maybe this was an off summer for Tsiang, but the guy is not what he is made out to be by this bruinwalk page. People saying he's funny are saying that because every 30 or so minutes in his (painfully dull) 2 hour lectures, he says "aint nobody got time for that" and it wakes a portion of the class up. Maybe that is enough for the kind of people who write bruinwalk reviews to consider him funny. See, I accidentally missed the course evaluation deadline, so now I have to settle for a bruinwalk review in the hopes that it finds whoever tracks the progress of junior lecturers. One positive for Tsiang is that he gives great life advice before tests. He reminds students that mental health, sleep, and overall well-being is far more important than any grade. I respect his thoughts on this. That being said, his tests were still tough and required a lot of preparation. Also, anybody who says he is a "nice guy" or teaches with "good clarity" is either tripping or had a different teacher. This guy is far and above the most condescending teacher I have ever experienced. Though it is hard to tell whether he is robot or human from lecture, when you actually meet with this guy in person, you quickly realize that the attitude he puts out on Campuswire is true to he actually is. Campuswire is an online forum and part of the class is participating on it by asking and answering questions. If you somehow find the patience to rack up 50 upvotes on your responses, you can earn a whopping .5% of extra credit. I swear to you, on every singly discussion topic you click, you can find a condescending response from Tsiang, shaming the person for asking, and completely dodging the task of actually answering the question posed. He manages to consistently leave you guessing in confusion, putting a roundabout bullshit response to any and everyone who dare ask for help on the website. Take this review as one angry review from a kid who you think got a bad grade, or take this as a collective effort by 12 csesh students who all got A's and B's, but were shocked by how misleading the teacher's bruinwalk page was. Tsiang - get over yourself, stop your Parks and Rec references and learn to teach.

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3.9
Overall Rating
Based on 22 Users
Easiness 4.2 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 4.5 / 5 How clear the class is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Workload 3.6 / 5 How much workload the class is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Helpfulness 4.0 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Uses Slides
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  • Tolerates Tardiness
    (11)
  • Appropriately Priced Materials
    (9)
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