Absolutely horrible class. The homeworks are way too difficult and uncomprehendable, so you cant even get a normal basic understanding of the course material. HW is graded 1 to 3 subjectively, so you can't even really know if you're doing well on the HW since there is no rubric! Absolutely horrible, if you can avoid this professor, please do so. Take Reinman, who is actually an amazing professor.

Horrible class, Avoid this class if you can.

...this class was one of the worst classes I took at UCLA after 3 years. The homeworks are impossible, though they don't count for much (7% of the final grade). The tests are equally as difficult, and during the online learning he made us type our solutions in LibreOffice, a terribly designed Word knockoff that is a pain to work with. We also had to type our exam solutions in LibreOffice, and it was so unnecessary and confusing that he even made us take a practice dummy test to get used to the interface. My biggest regret is not taking Reinman for this class. WAIT AND TAKE REINMAN IF YOU CAN!!!!

好人一生平安

I definitely got baited by the one (1) positive Bruinwalk review from Spring 2023. This class is still incredibly rough. The class is still 10% homework, 40% midterm, 50% final. Homeworks are still ridiculously confusing and convoluted, and there's often trick questions throughout the homework that nobody gets right (our TA in discussion would frequently say, "I don't think anybody got this right"), and don't correlate to lecture at all. Yes, there are practice problems, but they're unhelpful for the actual homework problems.

You're forced to buy the textbook (open book, closed note exam, no printed copies of the book allowed, the online pdf has no page numbers). Homework grading was delayed, but I don't think that's specific to this Professor. The Professor himself is very strict, far from the best teacher, and can come off as rude. To make up for the poor teaching, the grades on exams are curved *heavily*. I thought I was for sure going to fail the class, and yet I ended with a B (he curves such that the average is an 80%).

I would not recommend taking this class, but if you're forced to, just know that with the curve, you probably will be okay, even if your scores are very low. You will suffer throughout the quarter from the lack of support from the Professor (he frequently mentions office hours - I had gone, and he was not very helpful there either). TA office hours were valuable and genuinely helpful (thank you Jack Yu). I would say I learned, although I can't speak on how much of that was through the Professor's lectures vs. independent study with the textbook/YouTube lectures of other Professors (I showed up to nearly every lecture, taking notes). That Spring 2023 review is definitely a bit delusional, and I can understand why all of the other reviews have such harsh negative sentiment. It's pretty awful, and if you can wait until the Fall to take it, I'd definitely recommend doing that instead - you'll save yourself a lot of suffering. Although, if you have no choice but to take this class, don't worry too much about your grade. You'll more than likely be okay :)

Do not take this class. The professor cannot explain things, has terrible homeworks, terrible grading, is extremely rude, doesn't know how to run classes, doesn't know how to communicate, and is unaccommodating. Going to class is unbelievably useless.

Do not listen to any positive review, you will not enjoy this class. Take it with someone else.

Professor Tamir is G-O-D!!! If you think he's a bad professor just because of the previous reviews, screw them, because he's completed different starting Spring 2023~ Now, let's get a feeling of how great he is as a professor of CSM151B for Spring 2023:

First of all, homework 10%, midterm 40%, final 50%. Both midterm and final are super fair! He graded thoses exams strictly, but listen, listen to me (if my previous words of this sentence makes you feel uncomfortable or break your mental, then you seriously needs to improve and get used to it, because UCLA CS major won't treat you nicely): there are two curves! Those scores are not your actual scores, your actual score will be bumped up by 20+ points, given the average for both exams are around 60. Moreover, the average grade for his class will be 3.5-3.6, which means if you score for both exams is just a little bit higher (1-2 points) than the average, you get A- for this course. You can see that it's so easy to get an A if you do well. There are 9 hand-written homeworks in total, and there are no coding questions. I assure you that all homework questions are super doable once you get "the trick". If you took math courses before, this class and math classes are a lot alike!

Prof. Tamir is always willing to help his students. He mentioned like at least 10 times during lectures that we should go to his or TA's office hours to ask for contents of the lecture, textbook, and solutions to those homework problems. He also values his teaching quality. He reduced some amount of lecture contents compared with previous quarters just to lower down the pace for students. He once sent out questionaire during the class, asking for our feelings and opinions about his lectures and how to improve his teaching. You can't ask a 65-year-old professor for more!

CSM151B is an interesting and useful class to CS students since it focuses more on hardware knowledge. I feel so good learning all those materials. Also, I don't need to code for this class, which is really a break and savior for me from freaking debugging process every day.

In conclusion, take his class and enjoy! You will end up with abundant hardware knowledge and much more joy than other CS classes at UCLA.

Unfortunately this is a terrible class taught by a terrible professor. He is unhelpful and rude to students during lectures, calling them out when they can't answer his questions. Homeworks and exams must be completed in a weird old program that's hard to use. Tests are completely opaque and subjective, graded very harshly--the average score on our final exam was around 25%. Avoid this professor if you can!

Tough class, but pretty fruitful, learned a lot , but worked a lot too. Keep in mind, there is a lot of difficult work but you'll end up understanding a ton of hardware stuff.

This class may be just another hard CS class for some, but to be honest, this class gave me a much deeper appreciation for CS than any other class at UCLA. It helped me connect my understanding of coding by itself into the more comprehensive understanding of how computers interpret those instructions at the processor level. Bringing all those concepts together really sparked a greater interest in CS in my mind, and I have Yuval to thank for that.

Yuval is not the greatest professor I've ever had. But he's a good one, all right. And make no mistake: this class is hard. Processor logic and computer architecture are nothing to scoff at. But frankly, this is what I would call a fair class. You know what's expected of you, the class material is difficult but straightforward, the professor is always available to answer questions (even giving us some advice for grad school, of all things) and he was very concerned about our growth and learning in this class. The homeworks were a bit long as others have mentioned, but they were incredibly satisfying when you finish them. It doesn't feel like a lot of this work is unnecessary like in, say, one of Eggert's classes. It serves a purpose in understanding specific concepts and preparing for exams, and I feel much more knowledgeable after having taken this class. Also, I'm not sure if this is different now, but when I took the course, almost half of the homework questions were optional, there in the course website to help you hone in on stuff you need more practice with. The required homework questions were never excessively long in my opinion.

My advice would be to focus on the homework questions, find someone with whom you can study homework questions together (being mindful of course to always write down the answers yourself and note your collaborators), ask good questions and be engaged with the material, and you're honestly all set. Thank you, Yuval, for a great class.

Great lecturer, concise and clear.