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.

This class is great, idk what everyone is talking about. He posts the annotated lecture slides with full recordings and is very accommodating throughout the quarter. His homeworks are very reasonable, and not incredibly time-consuming. His midterm and final are difficult; however, he curves the class significantly so around half get an A and a half get a B (with the lowest getting a C).

I don't understand any of the hate. He is a fairly nice professor who is very knowledgeable and cares a lot about the material and class. He'll help with anything during office hours. This class is probably one of the most industry-oriented classes in all of the CS department. I recommend the class.

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.

Honestly this is a pretty typical CS elective. We go over a good amount of material, and it’s not always taught the best but you still end up learning at least a few useful things. It’s nice that Rosario makes some kind of effort to keep the class modern: he completely rewrote our first project to use Python and Postgres instead of PHP and MySQL, and while I didn’t find our second project very interesting, we still got good exposure to some pretty important tech for data science. They could’ve been better (especially project 2, which had a good amount of probably unnecessary hiccups). The homework’s are kind of bad, they’re kind of too wordy and not clear, but thankfully it’s all graded on completion, and you’ll still get something out of them at least.

For his lectures there’s definitely a whole lot of content. It’s a bit better if you actually go to class since he kind of breezes over some of the stuff that he realizes he won’t have time to cover. It’s definitely and can be hard to focus for an 8am, but usually after asking a few questions I was able to come out of lecture understanding most of the stuff. A lot of the topics did have me dozing off, but databases isn’t the most interesting topic in general. I liked how he kept his material modern, even if he didn’t cover NoSQL stuff very well it’s still good to hear it mentioned, and he also had some nice materials on streams and distributed big data type stuff.

Lastly, I’m not sure what’s up with the overwhelmingly negative reviews? I’ve never actually talked to anyone who hates this class as much as these people seem to do. Additionally there’s a lot of really strange personal attacks on a guy that clearly means well but just isn’t a great teacher. And it seems that all those same people are downvoting any reviews that are positive in any way (I’m sure they’ll come for this one too!). Really just seems like one friend group who for some reason felt personally wronged by the professor. The class isn’t great but it’s overall fine, and the stuff you learn is really valuable, especially if you’ve never had exposure to it before. I recommend it especially cuz it doesn’t seem like 143 has any other good professors anymore.