This class was great! Davoyan is a great professor who gives engaging lectures and clearly cares about the material. He also cares about learning more than grades. His class was fun and the assignments were easy: homework assignments that you would get extra credit for completing, a take home midterm, and a take home final. We were given several days for the take home tests. Would take again!

*** Disclaimer: This review is for 161B with Davoyan ***

This class was very helpful for me personally because I have a spacecraft systems engineering internship this summer, and it helped me to gain some breadth on the roles of different subsystems in a space mission. I also have an interest in space exploration and astronomy, which made the subject matter very interesting for me. Lectures were very well done, and they taught me a lot. Previously someone informed me that Davoyan is a bad lecturer but I found that to be absolutely not the case. We also had two guest lectures that gave us valuable insight into how space mission principles are applied to actual missions (like the JWST). If you've ever taken a class with Davoyan, you know he tries to make his classes as stress-free as possible. For 161B this consisted of three take-home, week-long quizzes (though four were planned) and a take-home, two-day final. While these contributed to the entire course grade (60% for the quizzes and 40% for the final), he also assigned optional homework assignments graded on effort/completion that were worth up to 15% extra credit. Although it may be tempting just to skip all of the homework, they provide good practice representative of quiz questions - in some cases they're the exact same problem just with different numbers. Additionally, there was a plethora of extra credit opportunities via multiple surveys. It's definitely the most relaxed upper-division class I've taken, and I'm glad I did so in a quarter where I had to take 19 units. I highly recommend you take this class with Davoyan.

No midterms, just quizzes throughout the quarter. They were take home with plenty of time to complete. The final was in the exact same format, just a little less time to complete and a couple more questions. As professor said, he doesn't want you to be concerned about the grade, just learning. The grading scheme follows that very well (homework is extra credit, extra credit problems on the quizzes). The book covers the content very well and is useful for the quizzes.

Really cool class, and Artur was a cool professor. He wasn't very responsive outside of class, but he was fine over Zoom.