Professor
Lara Dolecek
1 of 3
Most Helpful Review
I did not really like her. She basically wrote the course reader on the board. She has an accent and is hard for to understand. She is not very clear and does not do very many examples. Questions on the hw are impossible and u need to have past solutions. Midterms and finals were fair but her curve was non existent/bad. Did above average on final, average on midterm, 100's on all the hw's, top 10% on the matlab project and i got a B. The TA was pretty whatever, tl dr i would not recommend taking the class with her.
I did not really like her. She basically wrote the course reader on the board. She has an accent and is hard for to understand. She is not very clear and does not do very many examples. Questions on the hw are impossible and u need to have past solutions. Midterms and finals were fair but her curve was non existent/bad. Did above average on final, average on midterm, 100's on all the hw's, top 10% on the matlab project and i got a B. The TA was pretty whatever, tl dr i would not recommend taking the class with her.
AD
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2025 - Lara is genuinely of the best professors here. In my opinion, her ratings for this class are very saturated because she is easily a 5/5. Midterm and final were extremely fair, and honestly quite easy. Final questions were based from book, HW, and discussions. Midterm was mainly based off of the HW. IF you want to do well in the final, put a ton of examples from the HW and discussion sets on your cheatsheet because there was a lot of repeats. Go to lecture, understand all the homeworks, do some of the discussion problems. Guaranteed A, no fuss.
Winter 2025 - Lara is genuinely of the best professors here. In my opinion, her ratings for this class are very saturated because she is easily a 5/5. Midterm and final were extremely fair, and honestly quite easy. Final questions were based from book, HW, and discussions. Midterm was mainly based off of the HW. IF you want to do well in the final, put a ton of examples from the HW and discussion sets on your cheatsheet because there was a lot of repeats. Go to lecture, understand all the homeworks, do some of the discussion problems. Guaranteed A, no fuss.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2025 - In my opinion, Professor Dolecek is severely underrated on bruinwalk, and I definitely enjoyed her class the most this quarter. Dolecek's lectures reminded me of those MIT open-class videos that I have seen on Youtube. She was very organized and explained the concepts pretty well. She always answered questions that people had and encouraged class participation. This is why even though her lectures were recorded, most people still preferred to show up in person. I think the biggest downside about her lectures was that she handwrote all her notes on the whiteboard and it could be hard to read sometimes. Regardless, you could always ask her to clarity what each symbol meant. The exams were okay. I went over her past exams in the test bank, and I realized that her exams used to be a lot harder. Maybe that is why she has such bad reviews on bruinwalk. Anyway, our midterm and final were pretty well designed and similar to the HW, with maybe one or two questions that were kind of challenging/tricky. If you understand the HW, you should get at least a 90 on the exams. Be sure to check your answers though, we did not get to use a calculator during the exams and they did not grade our exams very nicely (you would lose a lot of points for making an algebraic error). Some of the HW questions involved coding in matlab and there was a matlab project. I did not find coding in matlab particularly difficult with the help of the internet.
Winter 2025 - In my opinion, Professor Dolecek is severely underrated on bruinwalk, and I definitely enjoyed her class the most this quarter. Dolecek's lectures reminded me of those MIT open-class videos that I have seen on Youtube. She was very organized and explained the concepts pretty well. She always answered questions that people had and encouraged class participation. This is why even though her lectures were recorded, most people still preferred to show up in person. I think the biggest downside about her lectures was that she handwrote all her notes on the whiteboard and it could be hard to read sometimes. Regardless, you could always ask her to clarity what each symbol meant. The exams were okay. I went over her past exams in the test bank, and I realized that her exams used to be a lot harder. Maybe that is why she has such bad reviews on bruinwalk. Anyway, our midterm and final were pretty well designed and similar to the HW, with maybe one or two questions that were kind of challenging/tricky. If you understand the HW, you should get at least a 90 on the exams. Be sure to check your answers though, we did not get to use a calculator during the exams and they did not grade our exams very nicely (you would lose a lot of points for making an algebraic error). Some of the HW questions involved coding in matlab and there was a matlab project. I did not find coding in matlab particularly difficult with the help of the internet.
AD
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2020 - Prof. Dolecek is a good person, and she is very knowledgeable when it comes to the course material. I want to make this clear that she is NOT a bad person or mean or anything. That being said, there are some points that you should know if you were to choose her lecture (especially for remote learning): 1. She didn't use zoom. All lectures are pre-recorded and posted on CCLE for my quarter. 2. She has terrible, terrible handwriting. Sometimes you cannot tell subtractions apart from multiplications (she writes · and - really casually), also from time to time her writing becomes unreadable and you have to rely fully on listening. 3. For some reason, in the middle of the quarter she switched from ball-point to highlighter to write on her slides, just when you think her handwriting cannot get any worse... So pretty much her handwriting has made this course harder than it should be, and the highlighter is plain suffer for remote learning. But again, Prof. Dolecek is a good person, she would answer questions and can explain stuff for you when you are stuck.
Spring 2020 - Prof. Dolecek is a good person, and she is very knowledgeable when it comes to the course material. I want to make this clear that she is NOT a bad person or mean or anything. That being said, there are some points that you should know if you were to choose her lecture (especially for remote learning): 1. She didn't use zoom. All lectures are pre-recorded and posted on CCLE for my quarter. 2. She has terrible, terrible handwriting. Sometimes you cannot tell subtractions apart from multiplications (she writes · and - really casually), also from time to time her writing becomes unreadable and you have to rely fully on listening. 3. For some reason, in the middle of the quarter she switched from ball-point to highlighter to write on her slides, just when you think her handwriting cannot get any worse... So pretty much her handwriting has made this course harder than it should be, and the highlighter is plain suffer for remote learning. But again, Prof. Dolecek is a good person, she would answer questions and can explain stuff for you when you are stuck.
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2019 - This was the first time Professor Doleček taught Machine Learning. Having taken Electrical and Computer Engineering 131A (Probability) with Professor Doleček, this class was a minor disappointment. Especially near the beginning of the class, the lectures were fairly unclear – to this day, I don't have the strongest grasp of Bayesian statistical terms (prior, posterior, likelihood) that the student is expected to know for the rest of the class. However, her teaching settled down a bit after a few weeks, but it somehow never quite seemed to reach the clarity of her 131A lectures. Compared to 131A, this class was around the same difficulty level. The homework had a lot of strenuous calculus in it, but you do learn a lot if you were to put in the effort to do them. (Apparently the TAs explain them in some level of detail, but I found it difficult to understand them so chose not to go to discussions most of the time. They did post notes though, which I didn't find out till week 7 or so. Oops.) On the other hand, the exams were a few orders of magnitude easier. Perhaps it's just because it was the first time Professor Doleček taught this class, but the exams were pretty much the same things as homework problems, with some conceptual questions mixed in. Also check out my review for course 131A: https://bruinwalk.com/professors/lara-dolecek/ec-engr-131a/, and search for “one of the hardest classes.”
Spring 2019 - This was the first time Professor Doleček taught Machine Learning. Having taken Electrical and Computer Engineering 131A (Probability) with Professor Doleček, this class was a minor disappointment. Especially near the beginning of the class, the lectures were fairly unclear – to this day, I don't have the strongest grasp of Bayesian statistical terms (prior, posterior, likelihood) that the student is expected to know for the rest of the class. However, her teaching settled down a bit after a few weeks, but it somehow never quite seemed to reach the clarity of her 131A lectures. Compared to 131A, this class was around the same difficulty level. The homework had a lot of strenuous calculus in it, but you do learn a lot if you were to put in the effort to do them. (Apparently the TAs explain them in some level of detail, but I found it difficult to understand them so chose not to go to discussions most of the time. They did post notes though, which I didn't find out till week 7 or so. Oops.) On the other hand, the exams were a few orders of magnitude easier. Perhaps it's just because it was the first time Professor Doleček taught this class, but the exams were pretty much the same things as homework problems, with some conceptual questions mixed in. Also check out my review for course 131A: https://bruinwalk.com/professors/lara-dolecek/ec-engr-131a/, and search for “one of the hardest classes.”
AD
1 of 3
