The final exam just does not make any sense. The professor tries to be like Paul Eggert but fails hardly and makes the class much worse than Eggert's. Eggert's final exam at least allows us to use all notes and books, but professor Rosario only allows one cheat sheet and gives us questions randomly pulled from enormous amount of lecture slides. I don't think the final exam is very helpful as a recap of what we have learned during the quarter and is extremely difficult. I can say it is more difficult than Eggert's. Eggert teaches cs131 pretty good btw.

Let me write the most accurate review of this class ever. Ryan R Rosario (RRR) is a "wannabe". He want's to be a top tier CS lecture like the ones before him: Paul Eggert, Junghoo Cho, David Smallberg etc. But, he falls terribly short of his lofty goals. Deep down, I like to think he means well. But this is not at all evident from his demeanor.

His lectures are dull and uninspiring. He straight up reads from his slides. To give him credit, his slides are well made. But there can be parts which are unclear and could use an example and RRR does a decent job of expanding on these parts in lecture and during office hours. It is also possible to understand the confusing bits using several online aides such as StackOverflow or by simply asking a friend to help you out. The other main draw for his lecture is that not everything in his slides will show up on the final exam or are required. This cannot be easily determined by the student. Topics that seem advanced and beyond the scope of an introductory database systems course will APPEAR on the exams. RRR does NOT like it when students ask him for clarification on topics. He expects you to attend lectures and pay attention to what he highlights to be important. This is understandable, after-all this is the point of lecture. But we are students in a very competitive and high-work load major: Computer Science. We stay up late completing projects against deadlines. We may miss a lecture for personal reasons. Even then, to be fair, the professor is NOT required to re-clarify what's covered on the lecture. But when a TA goes rogue and stars listing topics that RRR said was not important, butchers explanations of questions and gives up mid-discussion and begins conversing with herself in a foreign language (क्या? @ स्वाति शर्मा) then the least RRR can do is clarify what topics will be on the exams and provide explanations on practice questions. But, he FAILS to do this. Instead, he harasses stressed out students during finals week. One such instance taken from Piazza:
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To quote him "I'm not sure at which school or department the professor isn't the one writing the final. I will not be providing a list of topics. I've made it very clear in lecture after lecture what I feel is important and what I don't feel is important. If students chose to not attend ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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When a student calls him out for being "vindictive", RRR deanonymizes him and publicly calls him out for doing so. This is serious violation of rights and should be reported to the dean of students.
Don't worry it does not end there. When students confronted his attitude on reddit this is what happened. RRR called a random Redditter to be someone from his class. Over reacted to a comment against him by reporting the "alleged" Redditer to the police. He also described some psychopathic policies he has implemented in the course.
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When I see the same name pop up on Piazza, I reach for my photo roster and usually it's "yep, never seen that person."
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(The Reddit post has not been linked. But can be found by searching through u/LADataJunkie/)
That is weird! No we students are not entitled. If anything, we are stressed and just trying to get by. Please try to empathize. RRR is accomplished and hardworking but so are we!

The projects are not that bad but we had to repeatedly seek assistance on Piazza for his specs. The second did take some time as it had some ML work but it is impossible to make a project in which no student has experience in and is fair to all. The first project is a cake walk if you have web development experience. The specs could use more work. Smallberg, Nachenberg and Eggert all have better specs. You don't learn much from projects.

The grading for this class is NOT SPOT ON. RRR does not allow regrades beyond a certain date for projects (this is sometimes just 12hrs, how are we supposed to check myUCLA every 12 hrs?) and does not allow regrades on exams.

The final was ridiculous. Hardest final I have taken at UCLA. It was incredibly hard but that is not something to complain about. The one thing I have against it is that we were not prepared to handle an exam of that caliber. If we received more practice exams and assistance from the instructors it would have been much smoother. Midterm was long but not nearly on the same ball park as the final.

He curves the final based on what he thinks should have been the average score. So if thought the median should be a 60 and it was a 40, tough luck cause everyone who got a median score gets a C- on the final! The median on the final was 42 and that was a C- for Spring 2019.

With all this said, it seems to me that RRR has a need to feel respected and validated by his students. But I don't really get why! RRR is accomplished and established and there is no reason for him to come give back to UCLA unless he really wants to.

RRR is kind and helpful during his office hours but caters quite a bit to students who are trying to slide in to an internship at his workplace, Google. Some of the questions students ask are plain stupid and are just there to get to know him better and hopefully get an internship referral. Its pretty nasty but CS students do steep that low for internship. Oh yeah, there is also an RRR cheer team on Piazza that upvotes everything he says (even the nasty, rude and sarcastic responses). I suspect these are the same kids that are trying to get a recommendation from him.

In short, don't take his class. If you do, go to all lectures, office hours and practice everything on the slides. Do not rely on RRR to always help you out.

I will defer judgement of the academic rigors of RRR's class to other bruinwalk reviews. But, I will comment on the temperament, and attitude that RRR holds.

To put it lightly, Rosario is not the most socially aware. He engages in typical micro-aggressions that seep through many, if not most, of his comments about the class and the us, the students. Often blunt and only thinking about his own ego, Rosario makes sweeping claims against both his students as a whole and specific individuals. He personally attacked various students on Piazza (even when they wanted to remain anonymous), and made it his personal goal to vindicate his own class.

Rosario depicts himself as the victim, but any rational human can see he is anything but. I don't think UCLA should support employees with his demeanor, attitude, and view on education. It reflects extremely poorly on the university and his employment should be re-thought.

Rosario is a straight up clown.

lead singer of smash mouth leaves band to mountain bike and bully students

Be prepared to sift through hundreds of slides of information only to be tested on random topics that are relevant for half a lecture. Rosario is an interesting guy and he knows a lot about the subject, but doesn’t know how to make a meaningful connections between what’s given in assignments/projects, and the exams. If you’re looking for an easier upper div elective, this is NOT the class for you! He’s purposefully vague on Piazza and forbids TAs from releasing practice questions. it’s caused lots of controversy with students. (Why even have piazza if you aren’t going to answer students questions?) In my experience I haven’t seen a professor this uncommitted to helping students.

The lectures get old really fast. He's engaging sometimes, but the slides are way too long (avg 100 slides per lecture) and he goes through them too fast. I wouldn't mind if each slide was succinct, but they're not. They contain a lot of useless information that only makes studying worse because he doesn't tell you what's on the midterm and final. Taking notes for this class feels like a chore and studying is just annoying.

From what I can tell from previous reviews, RRR is definitely a changed man. Lectures were occasionally amusing with some jokes here and there. However, lectures are also like a firehose of information with some lectures having over 80 slides. However again, lectures are recorded and I found going through the recordings to be really helpful (had to spend like 3-4 hours for a 2 hour lecture though :/). Homework was alright, but ofc it's always better to start early, but he allows 2 late days for an assignment (6 late days total) and since there are only like 7 assignments and 5 that are seriously graded the late days are actually pretty generous. Tests are hard, but they were open note so take good notes and index them or get an iPad and it should be alright.

This was a great experience. Don't let the past reviews from Spring 2019 scare you; Professor Rosario was extremely helpful and accommodating this quarter. He recorded all the in-person lectures and uploaded them to Youtube no more than a day after each class. His slides are well-written, informative and contain (almost) all of what you need to know to succeed in his class. Nothing like the reviews from 2019.

That being said though, don't come into Rosario's CS 143 thinking it'll be easy. Getting a B shouldn't be too difficult, but an A is quite challenging and requires lots of effort and patience. The exams are not at all easy as the average on the midterm was 69 and final 59. I felt like the tests were for the most part fair, though some questions on the final required a deep understanding of the material and some ingenuity. On the flip side, the homework is worth 40% of the final grade and graded very leniently, as some parts were graded for completion rather than accuracy.

Difficulty wise, this iteration of the class definitely seems harder than Spring 2020 or Spring 2021 since we're now back in-person, but definitely easier than Spring 2019. One piece of feedback I'd give for next year's class is to maybe add some harder homework problems that are more in line with the difficulty of the exams. I noticed that Rosario tended to include the easiest problems on his homework assignments, which probably led to a rude awakening for some students on the final.

I took this class in the online format in Spring of 2020. I learned a lot in this class, Professor Rosario makes the content interesting and is very helpful during office hours and on CCLE. On CCLE, he will give extremely clear answers which was really helpful especially due to the online format of the course. During office hours, he is approachable, and I was able to get clarification on some of the harder homework problems.
In addition, towards the end, he covers some topics that are not required by the curriculum but are very interesting and useful. He also gives advice on his experiences from industry etc in the last class which was awesome to hear especially since he is a UCLA alum.
Exams are challenging, and reflect lecture and homework content. The homeworks were reasonable although they usually had a couple of difficult questions that usually took a little more time.
I highly recommend Rosario for CS143!