this class killed my 4.0 gpa. lectures are not recorded. 2 group projects with R but you will struggle unless you are already okay with R

Dont take Rojas unless you absolutely have to. He bascially just reads off the lecture notes during the lectures, which is extremely confusing. He only gave one practice test for midterms and finals, which are pretty much irrelevalant from what actually appeared on the test. Both midterms and finals were quite hard:( However, the group project was graded pretty leniently which was the only good thing about this class.

He changed the structure of this class, there are now 2 projects worth 20% each, a midterm worth 20% and a final worth 40%. He does not give much practice material so just make sure to ask the TAs to give you more practice problems, some give out additional old practice problems.

I really liked Professor Rojas. Although I had taken statistics and probability before, I never truly grasped the concepts until this class. I think he did an excellent job of explaining the material clearly. We had two group projects, which were time-consuming, but they helped deepen our understanding of the content (each project accounted for 20% of the final grade). The midterm (20%) and final (40%) exams were challenging and built on what was taught in class. To succeed, you really need to understand the material as there is also no cheat sheet. On the positive side, the projects were graded leniently, and he only curved grades upwards.

Overall, I thought he was very nice and a good lecturer. I would take another class with him.

Rojas is a great lecturer, learned alot in this class. Projects made up 40% of our grade and everyone basically got a 100% on them. The only problem this class had was that the exams had a few random questions he barely ever touched on and his practice exams were nothing like the actual exams. Most exam questions were very easy however.

EHH. The only two plus's is that practice exams match the level of the actuals, and that he has lecture notes.

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.

Any positive reputation this professor had in the past is completely gone. He has completely checked out as a teacher this year and doesn't care about anyone. You will never get an email response. You will waste 40 hours a week on homework working on unrelated questions. He said we will be tested on R studio and coding, but not a single piece of code was needed for any of the tests. We started with the ability to take tests using R studio, but by the second midterm we were not allowed R studio, limited notes, testing via respondus, and a webcam proctor in addition to testing. While previous reviews say there is a curve, there really isn't. I bombed the first test because I studied to be tested on code. I got B and above on midterm and final. Raw score 79% because of the first exam, C+ as final grade. So basically no curve, couldn't even bump me to a B-. Students were so frustrated with him the entire class wrote a formal letter of complaints to the head of the econ department. One student went as far as chewing him out during one of the class sessions. The material isn't that hard but he made it a very toxic learning environment.

Having taken Econ 1 with Rojas (and having had a pretty good experience), I was shocked by how unorganized and poorly planned this course was. This class began with a ridiculous homework assignment in R that took days and ended with Respondus crashing over and over again on the final. In between, Rojas basically seemed to give up on trying to teach - it really felt like the pandemic had taken a lot out of him. He also decided to teach off of an R Markdown document, which sort of made sense because he was trying to teach us R, but was a lot more difficult to follow than a traditional powerpoint. If you can, I would recommend that you wait a couple of quarters before taking 103 so that the Econ department can figure out how to run this class.

I took this class during the pandemic so things may be different during a normal quarter, but either way I strongly recommend against taking this class. Professor Rojas was highly uncommunicative, rarely responded to emails, and was not very understanding. He assumed we knew material from Econ 41 that we hadn’t actually learned and refused to teach it to us. Lectures were basically Rojas moving his mouse around the screen and reading through the notes, which were extremely long, disorganized, and often incorrect, and he sometimes entirely skipped important sections. You’re required to code in R for homework assignments and interpret it on exams. While R is a useful language to know, there is a disconnect between the amount and difficulty of coding that is required for homework and the basic knowledge you need to have of R for exams. Additionally, the homework took at least five hours to complete each week, and during the first week it took around fifteen hours because of the steep learning curve. Rojas was not very helpful with teaching us R and told us to look up everything online whenever someone had a question rather than answering. Grades consisted of homework (15%), two midterms (20% each), and the final (45%). The first midterm went well, but since the average was higher than what the professor expected he assumed there was cheating and made the second exam heavily proctored. The final was also proctored, but everyone had so many technical difficulties with the software that it was removed and just proctored over Zoom. All exams were open note, which was helpful, but while we had no restrictions on the length of our study guide for the first exam the rest had some page limits. There was very little practice material for the midterms and none for the final, and what was given was often incorrect. While Professor Rojas is knowledgeable about the subject, I did not find his teaching very effective and I would not take this class again.