This is not an engineering class but a writing class which purpose is to do a free research for the institute run by prof. Random grading by rude TA Jesse who is not qualified for the job of grading papers. Professor does not like questions, gets upset with emails, does not want any communication from students. Old slides with oudated information and Wikipedia-borrowed graphics and info. Beware of this class - a lot of frustration and uncertainity with grades that are based on writing but evaluated by the unqualified graders.

This class is about your writing skills and paper organization more than an engineering, but even so, the writing is evaluated by engineering students-graders who likely have no expertise in writing and likely not even qualified to teach writing at college level or teach college English courses in general. Grading is arbitrary, capricious, unskilled, and the scores do not reflect engineering knowledge in this class. One has the same chance to get a decent grade as playing a roulette. Emails to professor are also unwelcome. This class seems to be a solicitation of research and research ideas.

Waste of time. Horrible uncaring professor and even worse TA Jesse Cha.

Never have I write a review on bruinwalk, but I feel like I have to for this class. This is the worst class I have taken in UCLA. First of all, you won't learn anything from this class, you can watch a whole quater worth of information in 1 youtube video. The professor goes over the same material taught in week 1-2 thoughout the quater, and invite guess speaker to teach. He also cut the guess speaker short so that he can leave 1 hour early. This is understandable when you realise that this class is for the professor to gain man power to do research for him. The research cover the whole 10 weeks. Each week has a 1 vague sentence prompt that you have to complete. However, the grading is very specific, which make you wonder why the grading critiria is not in the prompt itself. To put to perspective, it is like the professor said he is hungry, and you are task to bring him food. But once you deliver the food, he take off point because its not the vegan decaf tuna sushi that he wanted. Each week also have 3 HW assignment, 1 for theorectical, 1 for lecture ,and 1 for the research project, all albritary grading btw. You will thank me later for not taking this class. However, if you wanna do a russian roulette hoping to get an A and waste 10 week of your lifespan, feel free to do so. (Engineering knowledge are not required)

The professor isnt concerned much about teaching. he didnt show up for some classes too and any emails i sent him, he would just forward to the TA to figure out. I think he does not even bother to check the exams. On the contrary, the TA used to teach us pretty good. He even made CAD videos for those of us who never bothered to turn up in the discussion sessions and studied for the exams last minute. the TA's office/discussion hours were pretty helpful, he solved a lot of my doubts. the course would sink like a rock without the TA but why is the guy below me bitching about the TA? isnt this review about the professor?

I am disappointed and embarrassed by the quality of this class. This is not UCLA standard. SHAME !!!!

Here are the reasons:

1. In summary the class is just a research class where the prof make his student to research for his lab because no one want to join his lab.

2. Doesn't not teach you anything at all. Many youtuber do a better job at explaining and teaching smart grid than this clown of a professor.

3. Prompt for homework are vague but the grading is very harsh and it's like a roulette. Unless you get lucky and answer them the specific way he want (highly unlikely because he doesn't tell you what he wanted).

4. TA (Amir) is as useful as a Solar-power flashlight..... No communication with the prof at all.

5. Grading are very slow but the assignment rate are rapid (3 hw every week + project). Only revived the grade 3 week after submission (9 assignment was submitted until the first one was graded). The project assignment build on each other so if you get the first one wrong then you are F*CKed for the rest of the quarter.

DO YOURSELF A FAVOR AND JUST SAY "NO" for this class. There are plenty other class where the prof actually care and want you to learn.

Some good thing (only 1):

1. The guess lecturer, which he bring in every week since he is too lazy to teach, was exceptional. And of course he had to cut them 1 hour short every time since he wanted to be somewhere else.

Awful professor with horrible sense of humor. Obsolete slides with outdated information. The only thing the professor does throughout the class is brag about the number of houses he bought and the new equipment he has installed in his house. Does not care about the performance of the students. I think the reason he is interested in being at UCLA is to get funding for his projects. And even for those projects, he taking credit when the Phd students are putting in efforts.

I think someone would enjoy this class more with a different professor, but taking it with Gadh is definitely doable. Gadh’s lectures emphasize hand drafting and drawing the third view given two other views. I doubt this skill will be too helpful in the future, so the heavy emphasis on this was irritating. Gadh has a casual, slow lecturing style and relies on an old website to teach his content. As a result, I ended up just skimming his recording, if at all. Depending on your visualization skills, I think to do well in this class you just need to practice drafting by doing the homework (which was assigned about every other week) to build intuition over time. The Solidworks part of the class was okay and we gained skills by working on lab assignments each week. The timed exams were annoying, but they seemed to be graded reasonably. We also did a final project where we worked as a group to create a product, but your experience with that will mostly depend on the group you choose. TLDR; mediocre class with a low-medium workload but would be a lot more enjoyable with a different professor.

Gadh was honestly one of the worst professors I have ever had at UCLA (and I took physics with Corbin!). He was so unclear and would go over basic examples for 30 minutes in lecture that did not help prepare for lab or tests. I once went to office hours because I had a question and instead of even trying to answer the question he used the time to tell me how easy this was for him when he learned it and how people always ask him to write textbooks because he is so good at it. He also said an A was a 95.5% or higher which seems absurd to me. The only professor I know that curves down...during a pandemic. Thought it would be an easy A but guess not. Would NOT recommend taking this class with Prof Gadh.

This class felt most often like two disjointed classes squished into one. The lectures were all about hand-drafting and how to understand hand-drawings, where as the labs were all about how to use SolidWorks. This wasn't inherently bad, but was a bit weird. The labs and classes were not difficult if you are familiar with modeling at all, but there was quite a bit of work for each one. The end project felt a bit unclear about what the actual requirements were. The midterm and final were mainly based on hand-drawing. Professor Gadh was clear in what he was teaching but often quite slow in his teaching style