I'm an international student and I do not intend to major econ. I took this class just for learning about some basic concepts and approach that might be helpful for my other projects. And I DO NOT recommend any non-econ major student to take this course only because you are curious or want to challenge yourself.

Professor's lectures are not helpful at all (at least for me), because I could barely catch up without previous econ experience. So I turned to self-study with the textbook and practices on mindtap, which is expensive but helpful. Every week it took me about a day to read the chapters and finish the homework (not hard), so the workload is pretty light. And the tests are not difficult at all, although the professor does not care about time-zone differences and makes international students like me get up at 2:30am for final.

So this course, generally, is not hard, but I feel like it has no difference with self-learning. Thus, if this course is not a prerequisite for you, you are totally able to rent an ebook and learn by yourself. There's nothing hard. Do not waste your money on expensive materials required for this course.

The workload of the class wasn't too bad, but the material in the second half of the quarter was difficult to learn. The professor seemed really nice, but I stopped going to lecture because I couldn't pay attention for that long. I think lectures would've been more helpful if I skimmed the chapter before going to class. I found that reading the book at my own pace, watching videos, and going to discussion were good enough to learn the material.

My TA Fatih was extremely helpful in learning the material. During discussion, we go through problems and his explanations were very clear and helpful. I asked him for explanations on difficult homework problems during office hours and that was really helpful.

There was homework almost every week. It was all multiple choice, not timed, and there's a check your work button you can use before you submit. Homework can be long, but I basically learned the material as I did the homework.

There's two midterms and one final. All of the tests are on MindTap and all of the tests are multiple choice. The time frame was a bit short. I found the second midterm to be the hardest. You can choose to take the midterms in the morning or in the afternoon so there is a morning curve and an afternoon curve. To study for the tests, just do a bunch of practice problems on MindTap because all of the tests questions and homework questions have a very similar structure.

Written from the perspective of someone who struggles with auditory processing:

Helpfulness: "5" because Professor Rojas was open to my questions and feedback on the course content.

Clarity: "5" because during the lectures he took care to enunciate verbal information and connect it with visual information.

Workload: "3" because the amount of homework assigned was fair and left me with enough time and resources to practice on my own.

Easiness: "3" because the course readings aside from the textbook were super helpful for getting me to consider the textbook info more deeply.

Overall: “5” because I believe Professor Rojas has succeeded in setting up a welcoming environment while encouraging critical thinking about economics.

This class was very lecture heavy and Rojas does a good job of explaining the material. It does feel a little bit like you are on your own in this class as the one-on-one aspect isn't really there. I felt like I leaned on my other fellow students more for help than Rojas or my TA. The material isn't super engaging and the slides are pretty lengthy. Attendance wasn't mandatory but I learned the most from the slides. Exams were progressively harder but they were never too difficult.

Professor Rojas is a really great lecturer. Although it was online and that sucked, his explanations were clear and thorough and I got an A- putting in pretty minimal effort.

Class is not hard nor easy, but he taught all material without any order. It was very difficult to review the materials without any orderness.

I took this course online. I am genuinely surprised about his low rating. He seemed very sweet and my friends and I all liked him too. Econ 1 with him was easy, especially if you are coming in with some Econ knowledge. He takes time to explain every concept and terms which makes it easier for us to follow and understand. He made sure he answered all our questions too. The only negative thing about his course is how expensive the required online textbook (cengage) is. I remember it charged me about $160 on bruinbill, but it was a very helpful textbook/website. Even though I have not taken the final yet, the two midterms were completely doable if you made sure to know and understand the content. The weekly homeworks took like an hour to complete at most and they were all very good practice for the exams. Take his Econ 1 if you can!

This was overall a very tough but useful class. This class builds off of the material we learned from 103 so it is very important to have strong R skills as you will be doing group projects using R. The group projects were tedious but are mostly graded based on completion. Since this was the first quarter having exams in person, we didn't have to code on exams but instead they're mostly conceptual, some calculations, and some R code interpretations. Overall a pretty good class and prof rojas is very helpful and open to answering questions.

Professor Rojas explains concepts very clearly and makes sure to answer all of his students' questions in class, even if it takes a while. Because of this, I think he's a pretty great instructor! However, I do feel like he spent waaay too much time explaining super simple concepts and waaay too little time explaining some of the more difficult concepts. There is very little work required for the class, but if you want to have a strong understanding of everything I would recommend doing all the chapter readings. For the most part, the exams are straightforward (they're all multiple choice), but the second midterm was fairly challenging in my opinion. The overall class structure is a bit boring, but the content itself is actually pretty interesting if you're someone who really likes connecting intuitive ideas to the real world. Overall, I definitely don't regret taking Econ 1 w/Rojas!

This is really the hardest class in the econ department. Imagine Econ 103 x 10 for level of difficulty. Professor Rojas is very inspiring and engaging, although the materials are hard and he’s a strict professor, he still managed to make me like the class way more than I thought I would. The key to do well in this class for me was practicing coding and understanding the theory enough to be able to code and understand the output. Professor Rojas expects you to know a lot, so if you didn’t take econ 103 with him, let him know so he can provide some sort of R workshop (which he did for us) or his lab notes from 103 so you can catch up. Otherwise I recommend learning R using datacamp or something like that to get ahead. Always take advantage of his office hours because he’s very patient, and he truly wants his students to succeed. I asked a lot of stupid questions but he would try a lot of different ways to explain. The skill set I learned from his class is honestly the most useful out of all the econ classes i’ve taken due to the coding aspect.