Worst class and professor I have ever taken. DO NOT TAKE TYSON ROBERTS. He does not care about his students or the quality of education he is giving them. He miscalculated my attendance grade which dropped my overall grade by 10% at the end of the quarter. When I reached out to fix it, he never responded to me and never fixed my grade. Started the final exam by prefacing he would have to curve the test because he had written it poorly. The class following the midterm began with "what happened guys" because the average grade was so low as a direct result of poor teaching and exam writing. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS OR PROFESSOR.

While the professor had an attitude of genuine caring and encouragement of student learning, the course structure relied heavily on self-directed learning, utilizing an online textbook and homework assignments as the primary means of instruction. While the content itself was comprehensive, there was a noticeable lack of organization and clarity in how it was presented in lectures. Students often found themselves navigating the material independently, with limited guidance from the professor. However, the course was overall manageable, and the content was accessible and relevant to the subject matter. The assessment and coursework were also self-directed but allowed for a large amount of flexibility and was considerate of students. Overall, doable and a very reasonable option to satisfy the quant requirement - just expect it to be the type of class where you do most of your learning by yourself and only go to class/discussion if you need help or participation credit.

Class had a good weekly layout and I could easily navigate the materials through canvas. Class wasn't difficult, just time consuming, as long as you did readings and wrote good notes during the class lecture, you would be able to easily follow along with the topics and complete the assignments/quizzes. Professor also is very forgiving with the grading, he would drop the lowest grades in each category, quizzes, assignments, and problem sets. Midterms and final were multiple choice and were almost identical in terms of questions to the previous weekly quizzes/problem sets if you did them.

I tried to drop this class in the first week but I couldn't get off the waitlist anywhere else so unfortunately I had to take this class for the entire quarter.

Roberts absolutely sucks as a lecturer. He just kind of reads off of the slides, and when he does go on tangents they offer nothing of value to the class. I'm not even sure he actually knows the material. He was also supposed to be broadcasting the lectures on Zoom but he sometimes forgot and then still marked down people for not "participating" in lecture (when many couldn't participate because he didn't even start the Zoom).

For the midterm, he gave us a list of things to study, but then it felt like half of the things on the test weren't on the study guide. For the final, he didn't even bother and just said "study the entire course", which is completely useless.

The only positive thing I can say about this class is that the weekly workload, for the most part, isn't too bad. The readings are long but the actual weekly assignments are pretty brief.

The weekly assignments are short little research projects that only take around 30 minutes to complete every week. This builds up to a final research paper that was one of the most frustrating assignments I've ever had to take at UCLA. I came up to him multiple times to workshop my essay and get his input on things. He often offer suggestions that were either A) not actually mentioned in the course readings, or B) were completely counterfactual to the evidence presented in the course material. Every time I went to his office hours I ended up leaving more confused than when I originally went in.

If you can, do whatever you can to stay away from this class. I promise it's not worth your time.

This class gets bad reviews for no reason! Professor Roberts was awesome and I would 100% take this class again or one of his classes in the future. I actually did not know this was a programming class until the first day lol but it all worked out. It's a flipped classroom so you learn the concepts for homework using an interactive textbook embedded in BruinLearn (for free) and then in class Prof Roberts uses poli sci data sets so that we can apply the concepts. All of the quizzes/tests are open note and often offer extra credit questions. Also, if you go to the discussion section the TA does a "quiz review" that is legit the same questions as the quiz just with a different data set. It is 100% your fault if you do poorly on the quizzes because you can literally copy and paste the code from the review for every question. 10/10 take this class because it is a great way to learn R!!!

This class is not as bad as most of the other reviews claim it is. Maybe the course has changed over some time? Or the people that took this class just had a difficult time managing the workload in conjunction with their other classes? Regardless, the workload is just quite a bit of reading + reading quizzes, research projects, and problem sets. There is also a midterm and a final, both of which you get a cheat sheet for. I think this class might be time-consuming, but the readings/podcasts are decently interesting and the reading quizzes are straightforward. Roberts is a funny guy (he is late pretty often though) and you can tell he is trying to teach. However, he will go through the powerpoints kind of quickly, and sometimes it's difficult for him to explain some concepts. Both the research projects and the problem sets are also pretty easy (he goes over them both in class and during lab time). Overall, if you have time in your week to do these kinds of long readings, I would take the class, but if you are time-pressed and have trouble understanding some concepts by yourself, I would maybe consider it for a different quarter. I had fun - I guess.

Honestly, this class was definitely manageable and Prof Roberts did a great job of helping his students out. He has "labs" now, which are essentially office hours except he goes over practice problems and reviews material and any questions that students may have. Yes, he is a fast talker, but honestly it was better for me since I absolutely dislike when a professor has disengaging and slow lectures. His assignments consisted of bi-weekly problem sets and bi-weekly papers that are 2 pages (double spaced). I wouldn't call this class super easy, but definitely easy enough especially because he makes it interesting and relevant to today's economy. I enjoyed it, definitely a 10/10.