* COVID-19 Quarter*

I feel like this guy gets a bad rap from a lot of students, but compared to some of the other professors in the department Pau is pretty tolerable. CS118 isn't coding heavy or math heavy, it felt kind of like CS111 if we only did half the chapters. Extensions were given on both coding projects, and the final exam had a 48hr window which is extremely generous in my opinion (with extra credit questions!). If you talk to Pau / listen to lecture, it's clear he really wants to help students learn and is very open to answering questions in/out of class.

Pau follows the PPT slides provided by the book authors 100%, so if you read the book you will pretty much cover everything you should know, aside maybe from variations due to different editions.

The homework sets (4 total) are doable since we have weeks to complete them and Google + textbook + TAs at your disposal. Project 1 was hilariously easy, especially when compared to CS111's socket programming assignment. Project 2 is a LOT more involved, but he gave us a manageable watered down version due to COVID and we were allowed to have 1 partner to help out.

Now, onto the exams. Man are they wild. The man chose to do a rapid test format for the midterm (40 minutes long?), and it included 5 math questions relating to packet delays, bandwidth allocation, etc. Point being, math questions were NOT AT ALL stressed in class or in the book, and some questions required equations that never appeared in class (but were tucked away in the book). Average was ~60% for the midterm, not too surprising. His exams are probably why people dislike him, but if you read the book you would've seen the equations and been able to answer enough of the math to survive.

Overall, I learned a good amount from the class (primarily from reading an easy-to-grasp textbook), and don't think Pau is a "must avoid" professor. He doesn't offer much additional insight into networking as some others might but he drops random interesting nuggets here and there, and is definitely out to help.

TLDR: I took this course with a handful of friends and we all strongly agreed: we didn't learn anything and the difficulty/content in the exams were extremely unfair. I would recommend trying to take 118 with any other professor but if you are stuck with Giovanni, be ready to expected know a lot of content which you ultimately will not be taught.

I believe the COVID-19 reviews definitely have a strong bias, but during this quarter it's really hard to provide him a lot of pros aside from him providing his lectures through recordings (oftentimes delayed in release) and the exams being online (which to be fair was more of a negative, but more on this in a bit). Giovanni's lectures were a waste of time. This is especially evident because during this quarter he took a vacation to Europe and left half of the class to be taught by his assistant professor and there was barely any impact on the quality of the lectures. All of his lectures are not written by him, but go over slides that were made by professors who created the 118 textbook which he recites verbatim during lecture (this also resulted in the professor being quite behind in his pacing during the first half of class - he talks very slow -, leading to him being very light on subjects in the later half of the class). The unfortunate consequence of this is that those slides are expected to be accompanied by a competent professor who can supply context which is provided in the textbook. Long story short, if you are forced to take Giovanni, I highly recommend reading the actual chapters in the textbook over the slides, the diagrams and content is identical, but the textbook does a much better job in explaining the material.

The projects were a snooze, and the HWs were questions that were ripped from questions provided by other universities, but somehow graded incorrectly.

The midterm and final were both online. This would a huge plus if Giovanni didn't preemptively warn the class before providing the tests that he would "adjust the difficulty of the test as he couldn't be sure that we weren't using ChatGPT or didn't have USC professor sitting beside us as we took it." That is he justified making the tests impossibly difficult because he expected the class to cheat on them. This is all fine, but take my word, even if I had Giovanni himself sitting next to me feeding me the answers to the test while I was taking the midterm, there was a near 100% probability that I still wouldn't have time to finishing all the FRQs. What this also does is provide HEAVY advantage to students who can get the exam questions from fellow students in class, essentially messing up the eventual curve that Giovanni would place once the other half of the class who took the exam honestly (that is honestly doing it solo, with ChatGPT, god bless the souls that chose to do the exams without any internet/outside help at all) get 50% or lower (the average on the midterm was somewhere about 50-60, with high variance because of the cheating).

The final was a circus show. After releasing all the lectures, and the final being scheduled for Tuesday of finals week, Giovanni provided absolutely no announcements on how the test was going to be given (we didn't know it was going to be online or in person until the Monday of that week.) The class discord popped off, I believe the VP of engineering was contacted, some of the TAs were spammed and finally Giovanni remembered that he was teaching a class on Monday afternoon and sent an announcement that it would be held online. To be fair, the final was much easier than the midterm and we were allotted more time to be able to take it, but the pattern of being tested on material that we were ultimately not taught remained (at a much lower percentage for the final, but it was still there). My biggest gripe about the exams is that they promote cheating, providing students that don't take these exams in groups with a grade cut for no reason.

Interesting class but Prof Pau was very last minute on some details for the final. We were not totally sure of the format until the night before the exam was scheduled.
3 homeworks that consisted of multiple free response questions
2 projects, they were both doable and interesting. The second one was difficult, but we had lots of time for both.
Both the midterm and final were online. The midterm was 60 minutes for 40ish multiple choice questions that required a lot of reading to answer, plus multiple free response questions. This was not enough time, and the average was 50 something. The final was the same general format but had easier questions, I think it was fair.
Lectures were recorded

Tldr: course has adequate assignments, the textbook is great but instructor communication is bad, and the exams are difficult if you suffer from multiple choice.

Strengths of the course include the interesting material, fast and transparent communication for some material such as homeworks (not exams), as well as recorded lectures that allow you to fully understand material (for instance if you miss details due to internet connectivity or accents). There are several weaknesses to the course, but mainly the rapid fire format of both midterms and finals, and questions phrased without the student's learning in mind. For instance, these questions often have long descriptions laced with irrelevant information (on purpose), and there are several of these questions, for the purposes of preventing cheating. However, this fails to consider the time needed to read questions (especially for those whose first language was not English and reading might even be slower than using the internet by copying and pasting questions) as well as the inherent time needed to think through questions as many involve mathematics. The fact that all of the questions are select all of the above multiple choice is highly misleading, and this resulted me in studying for several days, going to lectures live, as well as reading the textbook and doing all assigned work and yet doing less than ideal on the midterm due to my slower reading speed. This test format with questions too complicated to read and compute in time coupled with a curve based on student performance, incentivises cheating, which was the reason why they said this format was originally instated.

Finally, the fact that the course instructors failed to consider these viewpoints when creating the final really disappointed me, especially as they said they were going to make the final "harder" than the midterm and still maintain the rapid fire question format, even though the midterm average was already pretty low. There is no need to make the final "harder" than the already clearly difficult midterm, and this really reflects their lack of concern for their student's mental health. The course is the worst class in my 4 years at UCLA, and the exams include several variables that do not reflect the amount of effort students have put into this course or their mastery of material. It would be much more preferred to have standard 1.5-3 hour finals and midterms that are in person (or for this option to be offered adjacent to the online format), rather than online exams with the current format.

Does not lecture well, makes the concepts very difficult to understand. Used an online lecture series to get thru this class. Does seem to care about students.

LOVE Professor Pau. I didn't interact with him a single time, but watching his lectures on 1.5x were so much fun. He is a funny dude, and incredibly smart, and his lectures are super easy to understand (it helps that he uses these very well-established and easy-to-read slides).

Some number of "homeworks"
2 projects
1 midterm
1 final

Homeworks: really long term quizzes on CCLE. Mostly were multiple choice, easy to look up, and the grading policy was very lenient (could submit multiple times and check answers with classmates).
Projects: simple concepts and clear documentation/responses on Piazza, but BOY did we have to code. The second one was a group-optional project, I did it by myself, and I was working on it for at least 30+ hours. Both of the projects were really fun, though, and I felt like I was doing real coding.
Midterm was much harder than the final for some reason. He also reused midterm questions on the final so we could view the correct answers on the Midterm, because it was still viewable on CCLE. Midterm was tough because of the *time crunch* and because some of the questions involved math that wasn't immediately obvious, as opposed to the multiple choices that were just sort of testing surface knowledge.

Would definitely recommend Prof Pau!

Professor Giovanni isn't the most engaging professor in the computer science department, and he uses the textbook slides to teach. Compared to previous quarters, we definitely covered less material in less depth as well. The midterm was brutal because there were 30 questions given in 30 minutes with the math questions taking quite a long time. We had two projects, project 1 being a much easier version of the TCP project from CS111, and project 2, a router project with much more of the implementation already completed for us than previous quarters (since we didn't cover enough material in time). The four homeworks were fairly straight forward though (took about 1 to 2 hours each), and the TAs did their best to answer questions.

Because of the backlash of the midterm, Pau made the final super easy. Most of the questions were taken straight from the midterm, and there was extra credit. On top of all that he gave 2 min per question, and since we had already seen most of the questions, there was way more time than we needed. He also tried to be nicer by curving the class up.

Overall, the class wasn't the most well put together, but I still learned a decent amount. Pau was also very receptive to any question and gave fairly detailed and comprehensive answers. As a comparison, it felt like I did 10x less work for this class than for CS 111.

Total garbage. Lectures are done over textbook-provided slides. Exams have incomprehensible prompts: no units, no rounding, even Italian words. There are two types of questions: conceptual and calculation. The answers/formulas for both can be found directly on the slides, but some of the calculation problems have assumptions you just cannot predict. The raw average on the midterm turned out to be ~61%. The final is *extremely similar*, and there the average turned out to be ~97%.
The TA-controlled aspects of the class were fine. Four homeworks and two projects, whose content actually made sense. That being said, they won't prepare you at all for the exams.
To summarize: DO NOT TAKE. I think at least half the class ended up getting an A or higher (alternate grading, curving, extra credit), but it is not worth the bs you need to put up with throughout the quarter. I also have no idea how the exams translate into an offline setting, where it may not be open-note.

the midterm was way too fast pace and do not accurately represent students understanding of the material at all. we were given 1 minute for calculations that require looking up an equation we never used before in the textbook, understanding the equation, and plugging in a whole lot of numbers to calculate it.

nevertheless, because of the difficulty of the midterm, the prof made the final very very easy. so, i guess it balances out so most ppl were able to make up for their poor performance on the midterm.

the professor's lectures were very very mediocre, but it would be nice to have more concrete examples of lecture materials versus just going over the general concepts, and expecting students to be able to do concrete examples on the hw on their own.

the hw and projects were nice and reinforces the material. overall, take this class with giovanni at ur own risk, his assessments are unpredictable. but if ur lucky, you will be able to get a decent grade without too much work.

Course: CS 114

He is worse. His Italian accent make him even worse. He doesn't teach anything at all. His lecture is worthless. You probably don't show up unless there is a quiz. You probably learn everything from reading material. He is late, slow, and unorganized in course material and course progress.