I trusted the decent reviews this class had before Winter 2021 and I feel bamboozled. Prof didn't even have a syllabus until like week 4 of the course, randomly decided that the midterm was going to take place at 6pm on a Monday with no exceptions (people have jobs/are in different time zones/do things outside of class time??), was all over the place with regards to lecture material (didn't end up finishing a lot of material we were supposed to cover), admittedly made the midterm super hard to "ensure a normal curve," acknowledges that 15% of the class will fail, and was just generally rude to students. He would sometimes laugh when people when they asked questions during lecture :(

His questions on problems sets and tests are also sometimes so vague and subjective, even the TA's have no idea wtf he's talking about. Also, don't get me started on his grading rubrics. You will get marked down on the most silly things. Anyway, don't take this class unless its literally your last quarter at UCLA and you have no choice.

Don't take his class. He is not accommodating at all, I had to take the midterm in the middle of the night. The final was insanely long and no one I spoke to was able to finish it with time to fix their answers. He is very intolerant towards his students, but very lenient with himself. He thinks very highly of himself, which makes it seem like he looks down on his students and is very condescending. He's an okay teacher. The problem sets and worded weirdly and graded arbitrarily. The midterm and final were too long and a bit confusing, they too were graded arbitrarily. Avoid him if you can .

The class martial itself isn't hard, but the professor can make it hard.
The instructions and syllabus are not clear, and he always announces new changes/deadlines very late. Even on the day before the final, there is no zoom link. And yes, his emails always have the wrong content.
A person who makes the rules so strict and cannot accept any exceptions is not a self-disciplined and rigorous person himself. Be tolerant to himself but strict to his students.

Because of him, I doubt anyone can be a professor at UCLA now.

If you have other choices, AVOID him! :)

Avoid him and wait for another professor to take this class. The class material itself isn't very hard, but this professor managed to make it so much more difficult. To start, the problem sets are super vague and even included material that he hadn't taught yet. Also, he often times would rush through material because we had "limited time" this quarter due to the same holidays that occur during the same weekends every year. Like what??? He also thought we were in middle school again and felt the need to manage our studies by making section attendance mandatory, despite them not being useful since the TA's were even confused by what he taught. However, his tests are by far the worst parts of this class. They are loaded with a completely unnecessary amount of questions that make these exams more of a race to finish than something that actually tests your knowledge of the material. The crazy amount of questions also cause grading to take FOREVER. For reference, I finished this class with the same grade that I had in Econ 11 :)

He might be a good professor for in-person, but not for virtual classes. His problem sets/ exams are vaguely written and confusing. He takes off points for every little thing and doesn't give enough time to upload our work for the exams. Super unaccommodating during COVID. Avoid this professor at all costs. Not worth it.

thank god this shit was open note

He is VERY KNOWLEDGABLE about the material. He makes his class very participatory and is one of the few econ professors who always answers questions from the zoom chat.

His lectures are a mixture of economic theory and their application to current real life economic conditions eg COVID19 - which makes the class very useful.

His tests are hard but if you do the practice finals, midterms, and the TA handouts, there should be nothing unfamiliar in the test and you should be set for a very good score.

If you have the option to take Baqaee for 102, take it! Yes, his lectures are boring as shit, but the problem sets, which you have WEEKS to work on, are 40% of your grade. You can find all the correct answers from reviewing his slides. Also, the midterm was decently easy and super concept-based, so when studying focus more on applying the general ideas rather than memorizing specific examples.

The one detractor for me is his wack lecturing. But all the other econ profs are just as bad if not worse, so take that with a grain of salt. If you got through Rojas, you can get through him.

You can tell this professor knows what he is talking about but he goes much too slow. On top of this, the material is very conceptually simple, which makes this class that much more boring. However, the homework constitutes a large portion of the grade and is very easy. The midterm was also fairly easy.

David's.... Okay. For an econ professor, he's definitely one of the better ones. His lectures were pretty dry, but I don't really blame him for that, Macroeconomics isn't one of the most interesting topics out there. A lot of the questions he asked for Problem Sets/Exams were PRETTTTTY subjective. To the point where, I don't think there was exactly a correct answer for some of them. If you try googling any of his questions, either nothing comes up for the topic, or every source has a different answer. I get it, you don't want people cheating. But, if there's no answer available for these questions in your slides, in your PHD student TA's discussion sections, or online, how the hell do you expect some undergrads to come up with the answers? That's another thing that pissed me off. Questions asked on exams were never covered in lecture or on his slides. So are we honestly expected to scour the macroeconomics web to study for exams? Hell no. He was a nice professor, and obviously cared about his students, but some of the little things made me mad.