Review for 180, Summer 24:

tl;dr: take her, her teaching is very useful and is very easy compared to other profs

Before taking the class, I didn't have much experience in Leetcode. I can solve medium-level problems, and I definitely didn't know crazy stuff like dp. My professor for math 61 wasn't great either, and I got a B in discrete.

However, Prof. Batista is truly the best professor I've had at ucla to date. I've learnt a lot of proof-based math and algorithmic techniques from her, which have helped me in my ECE 102 and CS 35L exams for sure. Batista teaches material very clearly and slowly, is very engaging with students inside lecture and during her office hours (I went to her office hours instead of discussion sections). When I went to her office hours for help with the homework, she gave tips on algorithmic thinking/how to approach the prblem which was much more useful and generalizeable to other problems. The answers to her exams are literally the exact proof she teaches in class, with one twist per question. Exams and homework were very easy to complete.

I will acknowledge a few shortfalls from her class: While she did offer 3 1% extra credit assignments (you implement an algorithm she chooses in Python, total of 3% boost to overall grade), some people in class said that she curved down three percent? I calculated my grade and I dont think I was affected by a curve down, so not sure if that's true. Her tests were moderately difficult, but I think this is valid given that she gave 4 hours per exam, open note and no proctoring over summer (I think she made them harder to mitigate Chat-GPT usage/cheating).

However, I do think the reviews from summer are a bit biased. Students would ask very basic questions during lectures/information that was covered literally in the prevous slide. Also, this was a summer class, and I think almost all of us took this class as a "cop-out" to taking it over the school year, and I think people are just butthurt that it wasn't as easy as they were hoping it was.

I highly suggest taking Professor Batista's class. She's a lot better than the other professors that teach this class (I've seen my friends get cooked).

Like the other reviewer, this is a review for CS 180, not 181. I have been spurred to write this as I feel that while the other review communicates frustrations with the class that are very much valid, an overall rating of 2.0 is far lower than deserved for Batista.

The homework assignments were difficult, but fair, and both the deadline and grading policies were very lenient (could submit two days late for full credit, and homework was graded on effort). I feel that the lectures may not have prepared students enough for the assignments, but they gave you enough understanding to be able to dig a little deeper on your own and complete the assignments without an unreasonable amount of stress.

As for the exams, the other reviewer is definitely right. Given that the course was entirely online and asynchronous (including exams), it was apparent to most students that the exams were designed with a level of difficulty that strongly accounted for the possibility of cheating. But of course, in doing this, you essentially unfairly deflate the grades of almost everyone who wants to be honest and not cheat. The exams seemed like they required a much longer time than was given (4 hours given, and the claim was that they were meant to take 2 hours, yet 4 was not enough), and also seemed to require a level of thinking that I don't think could be expected given the content of the lectures. I took this class very seriously and managed to do okay, but from what I know, cheating was rampant which I felt was unfair. Again, grading on exams was also quite forgiving, so that may have been the part of the intention of making the exams so hard, but the general consensus was that cheating was borderline expected.

That being said, Batista is a very kind and reasonable teacher, and some of the grading issues cited in the previous review are more than likely attributable to the TAs rather than Batista. I thoroughly enjoyed the course and looking back was happy to have been challenged on exams more than other courses.

NOTE: This is a review for CS 180 Introduction to Algorithms and Complexity, NOT CS 181 Theory of Computing. For some reason, Bruinwalk didn't have the class listed so I'm leaving the review here for now.

Class overview:
7X Homework assignments
Midterm
Final
3X Extra Credit assignments
Recorded and annotated lectures

Avoid this professor if you want to understand the material to any degree (however, it is not hard to get a decent grade as long as you put in work). She is a nice person with generous policies on homework/extra credit but her extremely vague lectures and very poor communication to her students do not make up for it in the slightest. The material for this class is challenging enough as it is (although it is quite interesting) but her poor explanatory skills make it 100X worse. Stick to the textbook or request the department for Recorded Lectures from a different, more competent professor. Tests are exceedingly long (given 4 hours but you often need more) and rubrics for points are often vague (expect stuff like "1 more points" and "3 logic" to be the type of comments you get back on your exams to justify you getting or losing X amount of points on Gradescope). Additionally, the questions have a tendency to cascade (i.e. you miss one part of the question, you're likely to also miss the following points as they are based off of the previous question) and she appears to be extremely stingy in giving back points in regrade requests (she does seem to acknowledge the difficulty of the exams and grades somewhat generously however). Homework is virtually impossible without outside help after like the third one but they are graded on completion. She does not reply to emails (like ever, it's not just me either but I've heard the same thing from a bunch of other students) and her KEYS or homework assignments and exams often need multiple additional piazza posts to explain problems to solutions because of how incomplete they are.

Overall-

Pros:
lenient homework policy with auto-extension of two days and completion grading
annotated slides
extra credit opportunities
generous grading (although this may be due to how shit her exams are)

Cons:
terrible communication and teaching skill (whether through piazza, email, or explaining concepts in class) *granted, this may be a bit subjective but according to me and roughly another dozen or so students, this is the consensus*
4 hour (plus) exams for midterm and final and cascading questions (also takes a while to get grades back)
Incomplete keys