This is a review for the STATS 20 course taught by Professor Sparks.

Professor Sparks is a good lecturer, and he has a lot of enthusiasm when he teaches. He teaches mainly off slides, so it can get dry and boring after some time, but he tries his best to engage the lecture hall when he's teaching. He is also super approachable with questions about the lecture content and about any homework problems. I had a good amount of programming knowledge coming into the class, so I felt that the content was not that hard; however, I felt that the slides were helpful in explaining useful programming concepts and Professor Sparks did a lot of demos in RStudio pertaining to the slide content.

As for examinations, the midterm/final content was basically all of the stuff on his slides. All of the questions are manageable. The only "iff" I have is that he sometimes pulls things that were barely covered in class and puts it on the midterm. It wasn't a big deal in the end because he only asks a couple of questions about those concepts and offers 10 points extra credit (on both the midterm and the final). The final was a little tricky if you didn't have programming experience because it did require to you to write some complex data cleaning algorithms in R, but he did give plenty partial credit. The average was ~80% for both exams.

TLDR; I would take Professor Sparks again. He's a good teacher, explains concepts well, and his examinations are fair (just the content on his slides).

I hated every moment in this class. I would attend lecture and pray that like Matilda, my mental fortitude would be enough to blow the professor up. Sparks yells constantly throughout the lecture, which gets incredibly annoying throughout the quarter. However, no matter how much you don't want to show up, you may get hit with a -1% grade deduction/marked absense. However, you won't know until the grade is uploaded or your friend tells you about it.

Additionally, in his annoyingness lie the fact that he augments statistics so you HAVE to use HIS methods for stats analysis. If you try to self study off the slides (which often don't include verbal elements of his lecture, which ARE tested about), or use previous knowledge, you will get a LOT of answers wrong, as he is incredibly particular (to a b*tchy extent) and will mark you wrong if you don't do things in exactly his way.

The workload is manageable with around weekly or biweekly assignments and a weekly open-note online quiz. The labs are copying sessions and you will not learn anything new about R.

I hated this class. Do everything in your power to not take it with Joshua Sparks.

He is a very loud and engaging lecturer; he kinda reminds me of jake peralta from b99. Stats was always a pretty boring subject to me but he makes it a lot more enjoyable. His midterms are doable as long as you do the content. The labs are a bit iffy based on what TA you have—it is more of a copying thing rather than learning. You have to put extra effort and time into learning it beforehand if you actually want to learn the coding aspects

Sparks is an annoying c*nt. His lectures include extremely long explanations of elementary school level ideas while simultaneous glazing over all of the important/more complicated concepts and vocabulary. His lectures are truly mind numbing and he has worksheets for participation so you have to go. Whether you find his overly-dramatic spiels entertaining or soul degrading is really a matter of personal preference; I found the latter. Finally, my TA would speed through the labs. I found that rather than teaching us coding, they taught us how to copy what the TA typed as quickly and accurately as possible.

The midterm and final were overall not hard if you know basic stats and study the slides that he gives you. I just didn't study for this class at all. Professor is pretty interesting. He tries to keep lecture engaging but lowkey he's pretty quirky.