I didn't like Professor Montufar's class at all. During lecture, he reads off the slides, elaborates somewhat on the topic (but it's so closely mirrored to the content on the slides that it just doesn't help), and he doesn't go over any practice content in class. I approached the professor multiple times after class to ask him about clarifying the material he had covered in class. Still, after I finished talking to him, I was more confused than before I approached him. The only reason why I give this class a somewhat decent rating is that the content isn't bad by any means, and the TA for this class was awesome, hosting really helpful office hours and giving us weekly problem sets and a handy midterm review sheet.

That being said, I was completely flabbergasted by the midterm. I felt that the grading was easily one of the harshest grading schemes from the classes I've taken. Even if the setup of the problem is correct, if you make a silly mistake, the professor/TA takes off 70-80% of points for that question. The grading scheme on Gradescope is one of three things: you either got the answer right, you got it wrong but you wrote something down (even with that, you lose the majority of points for that problem), or you didn't write anything for that problem.

That being said, Professor Cuartas is a nice guy, and he's willing to help his students. His lectures aren't necessarily engaging, but he's approachable. I had a pretty bad experience with the class this particular quarter, but take him if you know the material well enough beforehand.

This is supposed to be a foundational stats course that the other upper divs build upon, and yet he has failed to convey meaningful theory to most students. The slides are copy pasted text out of the textbook and are hard to parse. Going to lecture is not valuable as he does not explain much properly. The way he sometimes responded to honest questions from students on canvas was condescending. The final lecture was review for the final, in which we failed to get through 1 question out of 7 and no one was happy. I found him to be quite friendly in office hours, but the overwhelming impression is that he is a researcher who didn't want to teach in the first place. Whether that's true, it's the vibe we got! The tests are of reasonable difficulty, but the grading scheme is very harsh. This may just be the TA, but there was little/no partial credit, so minor mistakes are costly. The TA and professor both admitted to not having communicated about grading, or really anything at all. This class is apparently not difficult or confusing when taught by other professors, so do yourself and your stats understanding a favor and avoid.

This class seemed pretty standard for the most part. I feel like the professor could have been a little more engaging, but you can't really have everything you ask for I guess. I do think the participation assignment was one of the most ridiculous things I've had to do at this school—I don't understand how having a baseline of nine questions asked on a discussion post is in any way helpful. I feel like the hardest part of this class was to honestly come up with nine unique questions (like clarifying questions about material) to ask, as I felt pretty secure about most of the content. I understand having a discussion board requirement, but I feel like it should have a purpose, and this assignment just ended in the discussion board being flooded with questions like "Where is the final?" or "What day is the midterm?" just to get points, and many questions I could be interested in were buried under these.