The reviews from his 32A class had students talk about how grateful they were that he would be leaving to teach at Berkeley. One year later, he's back and I understand why they expressed such relief. His lectures are lacking. I understand that the content is boring, but he consistently makes errors in his computations during his live lectures. This, combined with the general air of uncertainty about the direction of the lecture, leads me to believe that he begins each lecture entirely unprepared with only an idea of the content he intends to cover.

Another red flag about this professor is that he either skipped or postponed lecture on 3 or 4 separate occasions. I understand if he has a valid reason, but he chose neither to provide that reason nor adjust the difficulty or structure of the course around these missed lectures. Instead, he decided to post lengthy recordings of lectures en masse around test times. In one case, he postponed a final review lecture and held it during finals week.

In a similar vein, the organization of homework and test dates are horrid. Instead of spacing out the homework assignments like a reasonable professor would, he opted to not assign homework during the first three weeks, and then cram six assignments into the last seven, at a rate of about one per week. Moreover, he chose to have two midterms, which would normally be fine. However, the first midterm was at the end of week five, and the second one was in week nine. The grade for the second midterm was not released until partway through our 24-hour final.

The tests are also very difficult, much more so than the course material. The lectures and homework are largely computational, but the exams are very conceptual, to the point where a student could not reasonably expect the content on said exams. This, combined with the failure to provide any actual direction on how to solve missed exam and quiz problems, led to a general unpreparedness for the final.

All in all, Professor Venkatesh is disinterested in teaching the course and apparently intentionally makes succeeding in the class as tedious and difficult as possible. Do not recommend.

Awful Professor, lectures weren't helpful, homework was unnecessarily long and hard, the professor often missed lectures and posted them days later forcing students to be behind on lecture. Quizzes were okay. No part of this class had answers given even after the assignment to check work, not homework, quizzes, or midterms. Low effort professor in a class with difficult concepts and coursework, don't take him unless neccessary.

One of the worst professors I had. AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!! You can keep reading for more information on why. He cancelled lecture about 4 times and instead of just catching up during class time later would cram all the material into videos he would release barely prior to an exam. As an example, before the second midterm he released a review sheet for material we barely covered less than 2 hours before it was released. All of the work he shows during lecture is very computational as well as the homework where as the exams are mostly conceptual.

Lectures: At least for the Zoom classes, he start the second he opens Zoom. Being one minute late is a full page of notes missed. Fast talker with poor microphone. Difficult to understand at times. Writes big and scrolls rapidly, leaving little time for notetaking. Sometimes would cancel lecture 15 or 20 minutes before they're scheduled to begin. Very slow in posting lecture recordings. (When he says he'll post something on Sunday, it means Sunday night at 11:30pm)

Office Hours: Often late, and occasionally missed entire office hours altogether. When he's in, he sounds slightly impatient, sometimes cutting off students to answer before the student has fully asked the question.

Homework: long and slightly tedious but occasionally helpful. A lot of physics application questions which are annoying. Most of them are good practices for the exams though.

Quizzes and Midterms: tests mostly applications of formulas and computation with few proof-based questions. Not too bad in terms of difficulty. However, very disorganized scheduling caused Midterm II to be during week 9 and the grades came out 30 minutes before the Final was due. Did not serve for function of helping the students understand what they need to know for the Final.

Overall: Not the best professor to take for this class. Requires a lot of your own figuring out things by reading the book, looking over notes multiple times, finding other online materials, and talking with the TAs. Please put aside time early on to start homework.

PS. I do think I'm slightly harsh on the judgement. He seemed quite sick and mentioned he had severe headaches during lectures/office hours sometimes. He also seemed to be teaching from a very different time zone. He didn't do a good job communicating that to us and it doesn't justify the poor student experience but this is part of my attempt to understand him.

---Professor: A lot of the other reviews paint Venkatesh to be a bad person, but I think he was just having an off quarter. People complained that he would consistently cancel lectures, but he also had migraines. One issue I did have was that he would never post solutions to homework, quizzes, or exams.
---Lectures: Lectures were hard to follow and confusing, but this could again be attributed to any personal issues he was having. His conceptual overviews were consistently confusing. When going through example problems he would rush through confusing steps.
---Homework: There were 6 homework assignments. He drops the lowest score. They were all pretty hard, but he gives a good amount of time for you to do them.
---Exams: He gave 3 quizzes, 2 midterms, and a final. The quizzes were kind of difficult, but not too bad. The first midterm was easy, but he made up for it with a hard second one. The final was the hardest math test I've taken. The worst part of the exams was that the TA's were insanely hard graders. One small mistake costs an unreasonable amount of points. At times they would punish you for not including reasoning that they did not ask you to provide.
---Tips: Read the textbook section before each lecture. Going into his lectures without any background will leave you confused, but if you've seen the material beforehand it's easy to follow. Focus on justifying answers for exams.

Siddarth is by far the worst professor I have ever taken. He doesn't care about students or the course, the only thing he cares about is himself. A selfish professor who with his effort is a disgrace to UCLA mathematics and the whole of the community. Students who pay thousands of dollars can expect teaching and explanation that is inferior to the textbook with a professor that doesn't deem it necessary to give students some extra points when he cancels lectures with vague reasoning, gives no idea how students do on assessments until grossly after they are submitted or never, and puts two homework assignments, a midterm, and a quiz within two weeks of a final. WHEN WAS I SUPPOSED TO STUDY FOR YOUR 17 PAGE FINAL SIDDARTH? WHEN? I ended up with a respectable grade but unless you desire mental stress and a demeaning professor then consider taking a film class or something.

I’m sure the majority of the students are super dissatisfied with the class but I thought it was fine LOL the class groupme was very aggressive and harsh to the professor and they’ll prob rip him to shreds on bruinwalk so take every review with a grain of salt. While the prof did cancel a couple lectures, took a little long to grade quizzes/midterms, and uploaded documents late at times, I feel that he was genuinely going through something and most students demand empathy from professors but never give that same energy towards them. He seemed really sick towards the end so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he is human and we’re all going through it these days. A good thing about this class was that he followed the textbook pretty exactly and I never went to lecture and just taught myself so if you have trouble teaching yourself concepts, maybe skip on this prof. The quizzes and midterms were reasonably difficult, not too hard but takes a while to digest what the questions are asking. Homework problem sets were given in the beginning of the quarter on the syllabus so I don’t get why students were complaining about homework deadlines when they had access to the homework problems the whole time and could’ve started early. Overall, I’m pretty happy with this class and I feel that I learned what I needed to learn!

Overall, I would definitely recommend this class. The tests felt pretty fair, as all of the questions drew straight from either his lectures or the textbook (which is not something I can say for every UCLA math class). While he does speak quickly in lectures, everything is posted on CCLE so you can go back and review the material later. Professor Venkatesh is also more helpful than most teachers, as he accepted late assignments due to Covid difficulties while other teachers charged me a penalty. The one disadvantage is that he doesn't throw you any free participation points like a lot of other classes, so every single assignment is important. On the flip side, this means it doesn't matter if you decide to not attend lectures or discussion sections, which allows for a lot more freedom in your schedule.

Professor Venkatesh is great. I accidentally submitted a blank exam for one of the midterms, but he emailed me asking if it was intentional. I was able to send him my completed exam without penalty (with proof that it wasn't edited since the exam date). Some people found that he talks too quickly during lectures, but he will slow down if asked.