Horrible professor, lectures provided absolutely no help. His explanations were terrible, the only way to keep up with the course content was to read the book on your own. He claimed he was going to make a "significantly simplified final" and assess grades on a "generous curve", but did neither of those. Will be actively avoiding taking any more classes with him.

Class is piss easy, but the tests were somewhat difficult, especially the final.

This class is actually quite good. Professor Pinto is genuinely a very nice, motivated, and funny lecturer. Econometrics is a very tedious subject, and Professor tried to make the class as vigor as possible. He also explains everything down to the basic so you can follow everything on his slides, which made review much easier and really helped you understand what is going on. Homeworks are all graded on completion, and there's a midterm and a final. You do have to study though, since there's a tons of materials covered and there's not much space for mistakes during tests if you wanna keep your GPA. However, I do think this course is generally a rewarding experience, and professor clearly did his job well. Would recommand this class to anyone hesitating to take 103 with this professor.

When the quarter started, I thought it was going to be a nightmare because the professor covered one whole chapter each 75 minutes lecture. The problem sets, at first, were time consuming, but this was largely due to the coding side of it since many of us have never coded before.

However, the material isn't as difficult as many make it out to be in the reviews. I found Econ 41 to be a lot harder than this class, so if you remember the material from that class, you can manage this one. A lot of content overlaps, like confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, NOT probability (thank god!). The course focuses heavily on regression, but the upside to this is that it's pretty simple and the calculations required to interpret or answer hw/exams questions are given by statistical software! And in exams, you don't even have to code yourself, the professor provides it for you. (Btw exams are theory focused and I would say that 90% of the questions are conceptual and require you to understand the formulas provided on the cheat sheet!)

Professor Pinto is a fast lecturer and reads off the slides, but also gives a few breaks to answer some questions. The initial syllabus stated we were going to do 6 problems sets, but we only ended up turning it 4 and the prof provided the coding commands + workbook sections we should refer to after students expressed their trouble with codes. He was very accommodating and understanding about it and he addressed the feedback fairly quickly too! He provided useful practice quizzes that actually reflected the exam material and before each test, he would go over the answers + explain why the wrong ones were wrong. For the final, he spent almost an hour after lecture time going over the practice! He really wants students to be successful. It *is* a lot of work, so just keep that in mind.

Overall, this is a good class. I would recommend that you put in the hours early on. Learn the fundamentals and then the rest will come relatively easy. Professor Pinto does his best to make the content interesting, but it is a bit challenging to do so because it is inherently un-invigorating. If you look at slides and come to class with a sense of the material to be covered, you will do very well.

i don't even know what to say.. going into it I was looking forward to learning more about coding with R because coding never came naturally to me. it was easy for the first couple of labs but then it started to feel like he expected us to know how to do it and was just saying what the codes were. the homeworks were on jupyter notebook and were graded on completion. idk I felt like I didn't really learn much in that aspect.
as for lectures, he does have a pretty thick accent. you kinda get used to it but it was kind of hard for me to fully comprehend what he was teaching us on top of the already confusing topics. i'd say it was more helpful going to the ta sections and trying to understand the material from there. the tests were pretty similar to the practice tests and it was a good ratio of questions to time. no coding was needed for tests and it was primarily theory based to test your understanding of the content. during the first midterm, they didn't print enough tests and there were like 2 rows of students that didn't have tests.. so we just sat there for 20 minutes waiting to start. he ended up having us end at the scheduled time but gave us 5 free points to make up for that mistake. he moved the final online because of the protests on campus. prof pinto is very passionate about econometrics but this was probably my least favorite econ class I've taken so far.

I didn't find Econ 103 with Professor Pinto to be that bad. He is a really nice dude and is pretty funny. I really liked his lecture slides and they were very self-explanatory, but I would still recommend going to class since he does a good job of going over it. He does have an accent that makes some things unclear, but I didn't find it to be too bad. It's actually funny how he pronounces some words.

His grading scheme is 20% problem set, 30% optional midterm, 50% final (or 80% if you do bad on midterm). His midterm and final were pretty straightforward. There is no calculator and his questions are all pretty much theoretical. He also does not require any use of tables for t-values, F-test values etc... The problem sets can be a little long, but the TAs help a lot, especially with the STATA code. Go to TA discussions to get the homework done. I would highly suggest going for the midterm since it can take up 30% of the grade and was pretty easy compared to the final.

The STATA portion of the class isn't too bad, the TAs help with STATA hw questions and the midterm STATA portion was very straightforward. He asked questions on the final regarding STATA outputs, but that's about it. The final had 35 Multiple choice questions and midterm had 3 short answer and 4 MCQ.

For the midterm and final, he allows 10 pages of handwritten notes to use and a 3 page printed formula sheet, but trust me, he does find a way to test you on the material in a way that the notes won't completely save you. You have to know your stuff.

Overall, the course is pretty straightforward and the material isn't ridiculous or anything. I think some of the bad reviews below are outdated, because I didn't find the course to be that bad.

Considering that it's ECON 103, I expected much worse. His lectures aren't mandatory if you understand the slides he posts and I stopped going altogether. He answers all questions anyone has and his problem sets are really long, but graded on completion if you catch my drift. R is unnecessary to the course since you aren't tested on it. His grading scheme is also nice. 20% homework (everyone should get 100% on it since it's graded on completion) and then either: 50% final, 30% midterm or 80% final if you do better on the final than the midterm. Completely bombed the midterm and still got an A- (he doesn't curve the course either). Exams are medium difficulty but do the practices and make a cheatsheet and you should be alright.