Professor Rojas is definitely very talented and a great instructor for such a hard-core course. He efficiently uses every single minute of the lecture to teach as many concepts as possible, and since the amount of materials is so dense, it would be hard to catch up if you missed a class. However, Professor Rojas teaches very clearly, so you can definitely follow along as long as you concentrate in class. HW and projects require a lot of effort (usually files with 30-50 pages generated from R markdown), but all of them are extremely useful and hands-on practices that help you explore how to fit models to real-world data. Tests could be a bit hard since it requires you to fully understand all concepts taught in class (with no cheat sheet so you have to memorize), but it is heavily analysis-based instead of coding-based, so personally it works better for me. Overall, I would say it is definitely a challenging course that requires you to have a strong technical background (be very familiar with using R and have at least some knowledge of math/statistics), but definitely one of the most useful classes I've taken at UCLA that I think I could apply the knowledge to my future career.

This course should not be a requirement for Biz Econ majors. It is far to complication and completely unnecessary for any business professions. I'm going into accounting. I don't need to know how to code and do data science. Rojas was really good. He is very nice. We weren't prepared at all by our 103 professor, so it was a bit of a learning curve. He basically has to teach 41, 103, and 104, because we are all bad at data science and weren't prepared. Rojas is a really good professor, especially given our failures. His exams are very reasonable.

professor rojas does his best to teach ECON 1; however, this class is hard asf for no reason!!! the important thing to note: your grade is solely based on two midterms + a final * though, the distribution you can choose :-) your TAs try to be as helpful as they can~ it's giving AP econ exam LOL

Super easy class. The professor is super good. Tests are easy as long as you do practice problems.

This class was one of the most interesting and useful classes that I have taken at UCLA. Granted, it does have a fairly heavy workload with a significant amount of work in R. However, I took this class at the same time as Econ 104 and thought I was prepared enough for the R work. Just be prepared to spend some long hours working on projects.

As a person who aspires to work in finance, I highly recommend this class. The topics covered are very applicable to real-life quantitative analysis in the field and Rojas has some very interesting lectures and anecdotes he shares in class.

To do well in this class just make sure you passed Econ 103 and found R not too challenging (although I think anyone should be able to learn R quickly), are ready to spend a solid amount of hours on projects, and study the past midterms/finals thoroughly for the tests!

If you’re taking Econ 1, definitely take it with another professor. I came out of every lecture confused, but if I went over the lecture slides on my own it was much easier. He makes everything way more confusing than it has to be and his class is fully based on two midterms and a final, which you need to be able to be good at answering weird questions, not just understanding the material. The class average for the midterms and the final ranged from a C- to a C+.
Thankfully, he curved it a bit at the end because a lot of people didn’t do too well. I feel like I understood most, if not all of the material that was taught in the class, but the professor made the class way more complicated than it had to be.

I personally did not find the class to be that difficult or time consuming, just somewhat annoying. Anyway, some notes:
- The class is 100% exams for your grade: 25% x 2 midterms, and 50% final, which is pretty brutal. What makes it worse is all exams are completely multiple choice, and every single question you missed on the midterm was 1% of your grade lost (25 questions on midterms), and final a little less (70 questions).
- Exam questions were mostly pretty straightforward, though just a time crunch. Each exam did have a more than a couple curveballs that were a little weird though, and especially with the midterms, I felt like some questions were almost repeated, so you could have double jeopardy if you forgot one concept.
- The professor held lectures in-person with a zoom stream, but did not record them. However, he posted slides, which I found to be useful and was my primary study tool. Memorize how to identify the areas on the Price-Quantity graph, how the supply/demand curves move, how ceilings/floors/taxes/tariifs/whatever move the Price and Quantity of a product, as well as the 10 or so formulas that come up throughout the course, like midpoint price elasticity of demand, and you're good for most of the exam questions.
- As part of the course, there's an inclusive access "homework" (Mindtap) that costs like $75 where the professor assigns optional homework. However, THEY ARE NOT REALLY OPTIONAL! Some questions on the exams were copy-pasted directly from Mindtap, including some more tricky ones, and they generally were in the style of the exam questions. It was pretty clear that some people did not since in the groupme, people were trying to cause a riot over a question that was directly ripped from the homework - don't be like them and just get the points at the start. Mindtap and the previous exams that the professor posted for the midterms were my study tools for the exams.
- The professor stated that he will not downcurve, but will only curve the class upward to match the average at 80% if the average is below that. For this class, the overall average was around 75%, and everyone had around 5% added to their grade before translating to letter grades.

The professor essentially just reads off slides which are generally not that helpful in regard to the exams. Additionally, your entire grade is comprised of 3 exams - two midterms and a final. The practice exams he gives are significantly easier than the actual exams & thus are fairly useless for practice. Further, the class average for the final was 74.4%. The only possible way this could be fair is if a significant curve was added to each exam.

Selling Textbook for Econ 41 for $50
Contact: **********

if anyone needs mindtap access let me know. it's usually $120 but we can split the cost -- **********
I had him for econ 1 last quarter, using mindtap helped me a lot (finished with an A+).