There are some harsh reviews for Professor Rosario here on Bruinwalk. This is more than a little bit surprising to me, as I had an excellent experience taking 143 with him over the summer. Professor Rosario was an engaging lecturer, answered questions well, and was very helpful during office hours. There are several mentions of bullying/micro-aggressions among the other reviews, and given that they are from the same quarter during which I took the class, I must have missed them. All I can testify is that he was friendly and helpful during lectures and office hours and never gave any indications of being rude or dismissive with me that I could pick up on. I felt that the workload was on the easier end for the computer science department, although Eggert has skewed my perspective on normality, and the final was based off of the class (not an accomplishment, but then again we deal with some silly stuff here) and didn't jump out as being particularly unreasonable. It wasn't necessarily the best class I've ever taken but it didn't stand out as a negative experience. I'm only adding my review so that people know that the narrative that Rosario is an asshole is not a universal experience and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt.

hard pass to this guy - one of the worst classes ive ever taken at ucla. he does not care about you learning; he just wants you to feel bad over things you probably missed in each lecture. He runs through about 100 + slides each lecture so good luck getting down every detail. he's snarky on piazza, and just a terrible professor in general. would never take again.

> 8 am
> Slide heavy
> Doesn't give clarifications on Piazza
> Makes a lot of bad jokes
> No clear direction on what we should know for the exam
> Bajillion questions on the final
> 0/10 Professor
> do NOT take 143 with this professor

Rosario is one of the worst excuses for a professor I’ve ever seen, not to mention he’s a borderline crazy (see previous posts on the topological sort incident in class). He gave extremely unreasonable tests that tested irrelevant or uncovered topics in the grand scheme of the class. He let you have a cheat sheet for the exam (one for the midterm and still only one for the final which makes no sense), and usually in CS classes where a cheat sheet is allowed, one can be confident that the material tested on the exam won’t be straight up regurgitations of your cheat sheet, and it will mostly test understanding. Well not with this guy. He decided to have the most random trivial things on his slides be major test questions and if you didn’t have EVERYTHING on your cheat sheet then tough luck (and he made you hand write it, you couldn’t type it...).

Now what’s even worse about him is his handling of assignments. All of his homeworks were super bogus questions that he took from someone else online or straight out of the textbook, and he couldn’t even answer some of them and always just graded on completion. That’s okay, but it seemed really disorganized having a deluge of piazza posts every week about irrational/unsolvable questions on the homeworks to which he would say not to worry about correctness, so everyone probably just put down gibberish. And the projects... Jesus Christ. Usually in CS classes, it is understandable to grade students project submissions using a script, but this man could not write a script for his life and so when (a lot) of projects wouldn’t run on his test script he would just give you a 0. This was weird because my friends and I thoroughly tested and met all spec requirements, and there weren’t any specific “test script adherence” points to follow. And to top it all off, he even provided sanity checks/submission checkers to “make sure your submission doesn’t get drastic points taken off”, and on several occasions he tried to give my partner and I 0s or Fs because his script sucked... and we passed the sanity check! Like what even is a sanity check for? Also, not to mention he basically tried to fail like half the entire class on a project (that was straight up just complicated string parsing, I don’t know why he felt this was a necessary PROJECT for a DB class but whatever) because apparently they had to manually grade our submissions for not working with his bogus script. He initially said no regrades, but when the entire class requested regrades, he had to oblige everyone’s grades went from Fs to 100s...

He’s just a janky and disorganized professor, but what really makes him bad is his guise of fairness, acting like he wants everyone to learn rather than be focused on a grade, but then he fails you on projects because he can’t write a script. I haven’t even gotten my grade back, but I really don’t care cuz I’m just glad to be done with his BS. PEACE OUT RRR ✌🏽

He blazes through ~120 slides a lecture at 8AM when everyone's tired & unfocused. Studying is hard because the material is seriously so boring, and he doesn't give out a list of topics for the midterm or the final. Save urself a headache and avoid this guy.

He is probably one of my favorite professors so far, I think I took advantage of the office hours a lot and also spent a great deal of time studying. My goal is to learn as much as I can, so I don't think this class is as bad ( maybe because it fits my goals better). I do believe Rosario is trying hard to make this a good class, and it is hard to avoid many issues when it's still being taught for the second time , and we all need some understanding at some point of life. Also, I do think the exam was hard, but that doesn't necessarily mean the grading would be bad . Overall, I still thank him a lot for everything.

Rosario at first seems like a chill guy and I feel like I learned a lot of practical stuff in the class. Midterm was very reasonable. But his final was the biggest load of BS I've ever seen. He pulled the most random stuff that he had only 1 or 2 slides on and made them worth a lot. Decided to test us on the most niche stuff rather than meat of coursework. Also kind of a weird guy, he would get angry when he was wrong, and it always seems like he was trying to flex his industry experience. I would try to avoid him, but it's not the end of the world big you have him.

Course Material: very dense, some useful, some a waste of time. This course covers so many different topics at a hastened pace. His lectures are powerpoint based; each are ~100 slides and each slide is pretty dense in content. In addition, you also need to read the textbook for certain chapters, which is also pretty dense. Much of what he covers is useful and practical, but he also covers some obscure and unimportant stuff. Try your best not to skip lecture if you can, or else you can fall behind pretty quickly.

Projects: time-consuming but otherwise reasonable and practical. There are 2 partner projects, each divided into an "A" and "B" part; i.e. (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B). Part A of each project is easy and are really warm-ups for the "real" work that constitutes part B. Part B comprises the majority of the time and work for each project. You are given 2 late-day passes (i.e. you could submit 2 days late without penalty) for each project, and there is no other late policy. I advise to start as early as possible on the projects (particularly the Part B's) and to use late passes on the Part B's.

Exams: I found the midterm reasonable and the final a bit challenging/unreasonable, in part because of the sheer amount of material covered in this course. Anything in lecture, even seemingly unimportant and obscure topics, are fair game for the exams. As of this post, midterm average 66%, final average TBD.

Homework Assignments: reasonable and graded mostly on completion. There are five homework assignments, and he drops the lowest homework score.

Also, if your Final Exam "letter grade equivalent" is higher than your midterm "letter grade equivalent", he replaces your midterm grade. Likewise, if your Final Exam "letter grade equivalent" is higher than what would be your final grade, then your Final Exam grade becomes your final grade.

Overall, I found this class to be challenging compared to other CS electives, in part because the course is very material-dense. I did find the exams (the final in particular) to be unreasonable, and I do agree with the sentiments of other reviewers in this regard. However, the professor does seem to have good intentions, by introducing more practical and useful applications in this course and by trying to grade as fairly and consistently as possible.

The class this quarter seemed to be a significant improvement over last year's. Prof Rosario removed all midterms/finals and replaced them with quizzes every 2 weeks on Respondus, which you can take any time within a day or so.

Lectures were mostly good, especially if this stuff interests you but sometimes sped through difficult concepts. For example, he spent maybe a grand total of 15 minutes going through some of the Recommendation Systems Algorithms and quizzed us expecting to know every little detail about its implementation.

The projects were a bit disorganized, likely due to him developing them concurrently with the quarter. Despite this, the first project was beneficial, as it made me create a front-end webpage for job searching using pure HTML, CSS, and JS. The second project, where we had to implement mongoDB, graphQL, and tRPC APIs was decent but definitely could've been split into multiple projects as some of the API endpoints didn't end up being used in the frontend.
The third project was all about WASM, but during the WASM lecture, I thought he went a bit too quick -- we had to write some code in Rust, which wasn't covered at all.
The fourth project was cancelled and he gave us all 100%'s, but he said it would have had something to do with Kubernetes, which is something the final project required anyway.

As for the quizzes, they were mostly fine, since you could refer to your notes and the slides, but some questions could require you to dig a bit further...

The final project (which is similar to your CS35L project but with extra features such as deployment, CI/CD, PWAs, caching, and authentication), was pretty straightforward, but our group started 2 days before it was due and treated it like a hackathon -- we somehow got 100% though despite not implementing all the features. The final exam period was dedicated to group project presentations, with individual or two-person groups exempt from presenting. We also provided peer feedback during these demos for credit.

The funniest part about this professor is when a student pointed out his mistakes on the slide, he explained that he was not the person who made the ppt. When he could not explain himself, he would say there are some different implementations. Also, every time he said this won't be on the test, do NOT trust him. If you have to take this class with this professor, god bless you.