Dr. He is a good man.

Right now the Winter 2015 CS31 class is very divided between students who love and hate the professor. I still like him but the haters have valid points.

CONS:
- The homework assignments and grades are usually posted later than anticipated (although he usually pushes back the deadline when this happens).
- He has a fairly thick accent and a gentle voice. Not unreasonable though.
- If you like missing lectures, his style of posting slides (often including snippets of code and then saying "What happens when you compile it?" with no posted answer) will not be super helpful. I mean they're alright but not always self-explanatory.
- The midterm was pretty hard. Not even hard, more like... unclear what he was asking. It had some self-contradicting questions (like asked us in one to do something impossible, until halfway through he made an announcement changing that). Average was a 65% raw score. There are also often self-contradicting instructions on homeworks, and occasionally he will just reply like "figure it out."
- Homework grades have been fine for me (and I didn't know any programming before CS31), but I guess for some people there were unfair grades. Like if the assignment required you to say "Error" and you had "Error. " then it would mark it as wrong, and if that's repeated many times then you can lose a lot of homework points with the automatic grading system. But just read carefully and you're fine.

NOTE: We haven't actually gotten grades yet so who knows how he really curves the grades overall. Some people are dropping really late (like Weeks 9 & 10) because they're afraid of their grades though.

PROS:
- He really cares. If you have a question you can totally go to him after and talk to him. I'm shy, I hadn't been to office hours before, but I went to his.
- The lectures are well-prepared.
- The TA I had (Brandon Wu) was awesome, I know that's luck though. Very clear and helpful sections.
- He tells a joke after break, usually something so not funny that it's funny. But it's engaging.
- He's very accomplished (he works at JPL), I trust he knows what he is talking about.
- I'm going to take CS32 and I feel prepared.

Professor He is probably the worst professor I've had at UCLA. Keep in mind, I've had almost exclusively good professors thusfar, so his being my worst is not necessarily as bad as one might think. Professor He is clearly very busy with his other work at JPL, and therefore the class (and his office hours) were during rather inconvenient times. This I could deal with, but was a little bit of a pain. He also has a very thick accent, but I got used to it after a while. Overall, he seemed like a nice person, but he definitely failed as a professor.
My real issue was with how unorganized he was. All quarter, it was a guessing game as to what would happen next. He was incredibly inconsistent with his homework assignments, and his constant updating of the spec meant that your code could be completely wrong without you knowing it. His midterm was even worse. A couple of the problems had typos (which with CS are very crucial), and it was incredibly difficult to understand and finish in the allotted time.
Secondly, probably due to his time restrictions, it took far longer than was reasonable to receive grades. It took up to 8 weeks to get one homework grade back, which makes it incredibly difficult to gauge our progress in the course when we don't know how we're doing. Even as I write this, the deadline to process final grades has passed and I still do not know what I got in the class. I understand that grading is a demanding process, but we had 11 instructors working on the class. It is completely reasonable to expect to know how you're doing in the class by the time you get to the final, which we didn't.

tl;dr: pretty nice guy, but super unorganized and the class was unclear. Don't take him if you're new to C++.

Yutao He is the worst professor I've ever met during my two years in UCLA. Maybe his lecture is fine. But the project he posts, the tests he gave suck. I mean literally. SUCK. Why so? As a student, what we should focus on is the understanding of the material. But in his project, the most important thing we need to do is to understand WTH he means! We waste a huge amount time on the project because of his misleading, confusing, ambiguous wording. That is not fair!

For the exams, they are worse. The midterm is like questions no one can understand. I almost get a whole question wrong because of his wording! I totally understand the knowledge required for that question. But his wording misled me. For the final, fk it. There is a question he asks us to find and correct the mistake in the code. There are two functions. After I corrected the first function, I continued. When I checked after finishing, I did not go through the second function, because I was so sure about my correctness. However, the true mistake is in the second function. The mistake in the first function is a freaking typo? Are you freaking kidding me? I lost full 15 points because of a freaking typo you made? You know what 15 points mean? It is half of a letter grade. I lost a half of the letter grade because of his careless typo. How unfair it is! The exams are supposed to test students true understanding of the material. However, his wording and typo made those students who did understand the materials ended up with a same score as those who did not show up for lecture. You call it fair? I don't think so. The grade did not reveal my true ability and understanding. I am upset with the result I get.

this guy doesn't know how to teach anything. His course materials - Complete BS. I took this class thinking smallberg was teaching it but Prof He came along. Instead he teaches about fucking history of CS. His problems - he never gives out the answer in lecture material so if you miss his class, you won't know how to do it.

tl;dr - don't take this guy if you don't have previous experience in c++