Virtual Reality - 188

Class was great! You do have to learn the game engine almost by yourself, but you learn a lot. No tests and just a term long project! You work with 2 other people to accomplish this task.

You have to spend a lot of time for this class but in the end it is worth it!!! One of my favorite classes at UCLA!

Just to be clear, Ford didn't do any grading. The undergraduate chair Korf and the CS department were the ones that curved the scores down. Diana didn't do any of the grading.

3D Realtime is a great class and uses Unity, her classes with Unity is safer in my opinion since you can spend more time programming and less time having problems with the game engine.

Professor Ford was not good. She was not nice and she graded really harsh. I thought the class was organized bad and it was not as fun as it should have been. She made a lot of changes to the class organization and wasn't good at communicate with her students. I don't recommend her class~~

Easily the worst CS professor at UCLA. Extremely rude and uncaring towards the students and is a horrible teacher. Do not take her classes. You will get nothing out of it because Professor Ford is an incompetent lecturer. She is ineffective conveying even the most trivial bits of the lecture and you will end up doing self learning for the class. Wait for Terzepoulos but avoid Ford at all costs. She is terrible!

This professor should not be teaching this class. She does not care about the students and has one of the worst attitudes towards teaching I had ever seen. She flat out said that she didn't want to teach the class, which is appalling. She also lacked understanding of the material and relied exclusively on the slides of another professor. Her grading scheme was also ridiculous in the opposite direction of her Fall 2015. She is absolutely despicable and taking any of her classes will probably be the worst experience of your life. She does not deserve to teach at a university of UCLA's caliber with a professional attitude like that.

Never have I seen a professor with such an inconsistent standard of teaching. She was basically non-existent for the entire quarter in terms of teaching ability and responding to emails. When she did respond, she acted very defensively in the face of very honest and valid questions. I did not enjoy the way she treated her class and she was rude, disrespectful, and unfair for many of the deadlines. I am not sure how she was in the past, but she was an awful professor for CS 174A this quarter. I would not recommend her based on this experience.

Let me be clear. Diana Ford was an absolutely horrid professor for the Spring 2016 offering of CS 174A. She is apathetic towards students concerns and believes that "good teaching" is synonymous with "read off slides and fail to answer questions." Her projects (really Terzopoulos's projects) are quite interesting, but have fun being taught by the TAs and being confused on what to do.

The TAs for the class are spectacular. Garrett knows his stuff and knows it well. Same can be said for Sam Amin. They will be your professor for the quarter, because Diana and her lectures are utterly useless.

Diana was under pressure from the CS department to get rid of her inflated grades, so she curved our class DOWN to the B/B- average that is typical of HSSEAS. I got a 93% raw in this class. My transcript says thats equivalent to a C+. Hard work in this class is not rewarded, and its clear that when Diana doesn't want to teach, she won't be bothered to teach or help in any way. She played political games with TAs numerous times over the quarter, and as a student I don't know whose fault all of that was. However, she totally and completely failed as an educator for that quarter. Word of advice - wait for Terzopolous, or make sure that Diana wants to teach the class and if she doesn't, drop.

If you really like graphics or are willing to overlook Ford and the infuriatingly inefficient way she runs this course, get a copy of the textbook. It'll be your bible and best friend, as will your TAs. Its a doable course, but please do not look at her distributions and think "Great, an easy A!" That may have been true in the past, but it couldn't be further from reality today.

Worst course I've taken in UCLA by far. I still don't know what happened with the "email fiasco" or whatever. All I know is that she didn't grade according to syllabus and she obviously couldn't care less about her class.

Students who took Diana's class in Spring 2016 should file a petition together in the incoming Fall urging the University and the department to investigate her deliberate misconduct in grading and her irresponsibility, indifference and even orneriness toward students.

Here are the facts:
1, Diana did not grade according to her syllabus.

2, Quizzes were promised(both verbally and written on the syllabus) to be counted as extra credit, but were completely excluded in the final grade in the end.

3, In the middle of the quarter, Diana decided to hand over the grading to the department (according to her sayings) and put away the original grading scheme(which had been used for previous quarters and was a lot easier than the average grading of the department). Finally students got the lowest grades of this class in recent years. We have reasons to suspect that the decision she made was retaliatory and punitive in response to complaints from students about project timeline which infuriated her.

4, She changed the date of the midterm a few times, and finally set on a day close to the due of project 2. She suggested that she would postpone the due of project2 in her lecture but actually she was unwilling to do so. She made very unclear statements so even the TAs were misled by her words. The timeline for the midterm and project were very tense and a lot of student needed an extension on project2, so they posted their requests on Piazza. When everyone was expecting an official extension, she made a claim on Piazza saying she refused do so.

5, A number of students complained about not extending the due data on Piazza, then Diana was infuriated. She was angry at the whole class. She expressed her anger in a strong tone in the beginning of the next lecture. She condemned those who were unsatisfied with the due date. And then she raised a survey with very biased questions to force the students to acknowledge that she had been "abused" by the students' comments regarding extension. She forced students to do the survey by saying that she would not grade the assignment of those who did not complete the survey .The survey was NOT anonymous.

6, She rarely replied student emails and inquiries.