Don't get it wrong, et is a great guy. But he absolutely sucks butt as a professor. I went into this class thinking that it was going to be not easy but not super duper hard. Tldr: it was super duper hard.

This guy just reads off the slides that he made back 10 years ago and doesn't really add much to what's already on the slides. Lectures were sooooo boring. I stopped going around 3rd week, and sometimes I would come back but he would be even worse at presenting the material.

Discussion was even worse holyyy. I got the worse of the TAs which was Devasmitt. Bro did NOT know what was going on and I remember in week 3 I asked the same question 5 different times cuz his explanations did not make sense. I remember one day he sent out a bruinlearn notification that said that no one showed up to discussion. Hmmm I wonder why. Bro also wrote on the WALL thinking it was the whiteboard when there was a clear border between the wall and whiteboard. All he said was "oh oops! It's okay though because someone also wrote on it before" pointing to the wall with a marker line on it. Bro forgot that that was him 30 minutes ago writing on the wall to test the marker. That's when I knew this class was officially cooked. Not the other TA though. My goat Haorui would never.

The grading material consisted of 1 midterm 35%, 1 final 40%, 8 homeworks for a total of 25% of your grade. You'd think that the homeworks would be the easiest part. You would be wrong. Homework was insanely work heavy and required you to know MATLAB with your whole heart and being. Combined with the poor presentation of difficult material by the professor and the insane homeworks, these things took so long to do. Even A.I. couldn't help very well. The midterm was by far the easiest thing ever. It was basically a word-for-word copy of the practice midterm that the professor gave you. The average on the test was a 90%.

So that leads me to the final. Ohhhhh that final still gives me nightmares. Everyone thought the final was going to be just as easy as the midterm and so most people just reviewed the practice final exam and maybe went over the homeworks and all that. There were 5 questions on that final. Tell me why I could only answer 1 out of the 5 questions fully and even that was with uncertainty. There was material on there that we had never had a chance to practice or even cover during the school year. Normally when people are taking the 3 hour final, there are the geniuses that finish an hour early, or the people that give up and want to go home an hour early. No one left their seats for 2 hours and 45 minutes. The only people that did was because they had another final in 15 minutes. I'm being so serious when I say that 95% of the students could not answer every single question. So we begged the TA for more time because at 2 hours and 50 minutes, I was still on question 4. We ended up getting 30 more minutes extra, but I don't know how much that helped. Professor comes in when the exam was supposed to end and was surprised that everyone was still taking the test. He says "Oh you're still taking the test?" We say "yes." He says "it's hard right?" We laugh and say "yes it's pretty hard." And then he says the kicker, "That's what you get for the midterm being too easy." MF YOUUUU MADE THAT TEST!! WHY WOULD YOU MAKE THE MIDTERM EXTREMELY EASY, SEE THAT THE GRADING DISTRIBUTION WAS INSANELY HIGH AND THEN TORTURE US FOR THE DECISION YOUUUUU MADEEEE????

Anyways, the reason I ended up getting an A- is because he did feel bad for making the test too hard so he offered extra credit that added 4% extra to your total grade, which is very generous. The caveat is that it was during the start of summer break, so I had to do a little more work even after finals.

In conclusion, take it with Margulis the goat. If you have no other choice, just go to Haorui's office hours. Thank you coming to my TedTalk.

This was one of the most challenging C&EE classes I've taken at UCLA. His midterm was lightwork with the class average being an A- but his final was outrageously difficult that most people didn't finish the final and wrote gibberish to scavenge as many points as possible. The MATLAB assignments were insanely difficult and long that my friends and I used Claude AI or ChatGPT to finish within a reasonable amount of time. For the midterm, STUDY the practice midterm but the practice final was useless.

This class was one of my least favorite classes at UCLA. As cool of a guy ET is, I never want to take a course offered by him again after this. Lectures were so dry and all he did was read over slides containing complicated derivations and equations that were incredibly difficult to follow. The homework assignments were brutal. Basically ALL matlab and super tedious. I would often find myself blindly promoting AI to write code that I barely understoood because the concepts were so tricky to tie together. ET was also pretty annoying at times. He didn’t post review videos when he said he would, we did have one bonus assignment but this was posted AFTER the final due a week after the quarter ends. The midterm was pretty light but since the class did so well on the midterm he decided to make the final much more difficult because apparently we did too well on the midterm than what he expected. And WOW that final was insanely difficult and frankly quite worrying considering it’s 40% of our grade. It wouldn’t be so bad if we had some handwritten practice before hand. But since all the homework was matlab based and lectures based on equations, we were kinda screwed. Honestly I don’t like hating on professors and at the end of the day it IS possible to do well in this class if you are extremely studious and attend every discussion and lecture and do practice problems on the side to prepare yourself. He does give homework extensions if you ask which is nice and very needed but no late homework is excepted so get started early. The content starts off really easy but builds on itself and can get very complicated forwards the end of the quarter. If ET is teaching this class hold off until someone else like professor Margulis offers it, he’s a much better better lecturer and properly explains the concepts from what I’ve heard. I surprised I got an A in this class tbh so I guess on the bright side he does adjust grades at the very end it seems.

This class seemed really hard at first but it ended up being okay. When studying for the midterms and finals, DEFINITELY do the practice exams (the concepts & questions are very similar) and go through his powerpoints--know all the material covered in them. It's not too hard because you can write everything on a cheat sheet. Homework is pretty time-consuming because you're using Matlab, but it gets easier because sometimes they provide you with codes. I stopped going to lecture, studied on my own, and got an A-. And he's a really nice guy so it's challenging but you learn a lot! Def recommend him.