"Data Mining" sounds like a great class—until you realize that it means sitting through 1.5 hours of research papers converted into incomprehensible PowerPoint slides. Professor Wang is the epitome of a professor who does not know how to teach, because she clearly never received training in it. Examples are not worked out, complex diagrams, definitions, and tables are breezed by before they can even be fully examined, and every slide has a million items on it. Her style is to drop an unintelligible stream of academic jargon and acronyms before saying, "Okay? Great, let's move on." People have no idea where to even begin asking questions.

The tests are all multiple-choice, which sounds easy for the pattern-matching powers of most modern college students. Except, they usually require working out long algorithms. Now trying repeating 10-minute computations for 20 questions in a row with only 100 minutes for the midterm. The average and median came out to 13/20. You do the math, because she clearly didn't.

This is a common predicament in the math lowerdivs: a non-helpful professor and bad presentation of material. In that case, you could turn to the textbook (or better yet, KhanAcademy). In a CS upperdiv like this, you can only hopelessly Google for slightly more comprehensible slides from other universities. The professor also doesn't follow the textbook (which is similarly jargon and math-heavy). Your only saving grace is the TAs, and not even all of them were helpful enough.

To top it all off, you have a group project to struggle through for the last half of the quarter. Overall, CS 145 is a stinking example of all that is wrong with the theory-heavy CS curriculum at UCLA. Avoid it at all costs and go do something useful with your time. The world has many real problems to solve.

She literally just read the slides in class. Also, she came class unprepared - did not explain the important concepts and most of students were confused. I literally need to Google everything up. Professors were supposed to ease things up but she made everything so confusing, dull, challenging.

Midterm and final exams are extremely difficult. I was so frsutrated and definitely did not recommend taking her class.

Maybe from previous reviews, you might think this class is a tough one. But at least for online version, the professor explains concepts clearly and designed tests that are closely related to the course materials. Some of the concepts are hard to understand for sure, but as long as you do some practices, you will master them without too many struggles. Tests are fair and representative of the course materials. TAs can be really helpful for extra exercises and reviews of core concepts. At least from my experience, this course is not ambiguous as many other courses. Algorithms and methodologies are clear and straightforward. The only thing difficult is to understand the algorithm and familiarize yourself with those steps. Also, the extra group project to predict COVID trend is really interesting and applies what you have learnt.