The lab lectures were theoretically supposed to teach you R and apply the concepts from regular lecture to coding. However, there were no basics given, so it was really hard to keep up early on in the quarter. Later in the quarter, he gave up on connecting the material to lecture and instead would talk about stocks and machine learning, neither of which were relevant to the homeworks or exams. The only good part about this entire class were the TAs since they were really available to help us try to make sense of the material. When Rojas did actually go over coding material that was related to lecture, it was usually something from the homework that would be due THAT DAY. By this point, most of the class had already taught themselves the concept and googled how to code it into their homework, rendering the lecture useless. Overall, the lab lectures were a waste of time and didn't integrate well into the course.

Lab lectures were very unhelpful. This quarter we were required to complete homework assignments in R and essentially learn the language in a couple of weeks, but the lab did not help at all. Later in the quarter instead of teaching us new concepts that were relevant to the homework, Rojas introduced us to machine learning and other concepts that were useless for assignments and exams. Overall the integration of the lab with the class was not the best and lab lectures were a waste of time.

This lab lecture for Econ 103 is just as bad as the normal lecture. It's taught in STATA, which is probably one of the least useful languages. That being said, Professor Rojas allows students to use other languages if they wish (including R or Python), as long as you can understand STATA output, which isn't too difficult. Professor Rojas makes it clear what components of STATA programming you need to be familiar with, and after a quarter of never touching STATA and using R instead, it was still extremely easy to have the STATA comprehension ability required on exams. Professor Rojas is probably the best professor you can get for this waste of time class taught in a waste of time language.

Econ 103 and Econ 103L are the classes using Statistics knowledge at Economics Department. The good thing to learn Econ 103 with Professor Rojas is that he has a very decent knowledge of Stats and often make the points very clear to non-stats major students. Besides, he is very polite and helpful both during his class and his office hours. He likes to make sure every students are clear on the subjects. If you attend his lectures (highly recommended, very clear) and do the exercises, you should be fine on the midterm and finals as they are pretty straightforward. Highly recommended :) Professor Rojas is the BEST Professor ever! I would love to take more classes with him.