DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS IF YOU CAN AVOID HER!! otherwise you could survive but it will be very hard

She teaches this class like you're supposed to know the material even though it's supposed to be for beginners. She throws the terms and concepts out there in lecture without explaining well or at all. Sometimes it's like she doesn't even know her lessons and code (probably because she doesn't write her own code most of the time). She is dismissive and her attitude when writing tests can be described in one quote: "I knew no one would get full marks on this question when I wrote it". I don't think that's how tests are supposed to work... The only thing that saved me in this class was my TA, Ely Jrade. If he TAs, try to get in his section!!! He is so helpful and nice, so clutch.

This class was OK given that this is her first time teaching. The lectures were quite straightforward. There're 7 homework assignments worth 50% of your grade, and the lowest one was dropped. HWs were not long/hard, but since there were no autograders set up on Gradescope, it can be tricky when it comes to edge-case testing and might lead to some points deductions. Plus, there were a lot of typos in the HW prompts, which might cause some confusion (she borrowed HW questions from another professor). Exams also contained some tricky questions but were doable for the most parts.

This was her first quarter teaching PIC 16A, but I felt like she handled the class decently! I stopped attending class after the midterm but her lecturing was okay, a bit unclear and not beneficial to my learning imo. Here's important points of the class:
- classes are NOT recorded but she posts lecture notes afterwards by the end of the day, so I never went to class and did fine (it's coding so really all you need is the syntax to do what you want, imo class isn't necessary)
- discussions aren't mandatory but turning in discussion notebooks during discussion gave us extra credit so i'd recommend going! my TA was also AMAZING and helped clarify a lot of topics so that's another benefit of discussion
- there's a group project at the end of the quarter (3 people in a group) and tbh it was pretty easy, you can honestly knock it all out within a day or two
- homework was weekly and ngl this was probably the TOUGHEST part of the course. the homework often felt WAY harder than what was covered in lecture, so DEFINITELY start early and attend office hours for that. they grade pretty generously but the homeworks can definitely not be grinded out in an hour or two. (in fact, the professor has said to allocate at least 5+ hours per homework -- which I feel is true).
- exams were easy since they were the typical pen-and-paper exam, just write down EVERYTHING on the cheat sheet and you'll be good to go (don't really have to study imo).

I liked PIC10A with Keating. She taught the class in a very clear and organized manner, which made learning the content easier. Although this class was challenging at times (certain homework assignments, midterm 2), it was never over-the-top and felt reasonable. There are also multiple grading schemes with how the midterms and final are weighted so not one thing determines your grade; I thought the first midterm was easy, the second was much harder (but not incredibly so), and the final was in between the two midterms in terms of difficulty. There were 7 coding HW assignments that focused on topics taught in lecture. Overall, I liked Keating's method of teaching and would very much recommend going to office hours if you have any questions because she was very helpful in fixing my code when it wasn't working. Definitely take PIC10A with Keating over some of the other professors (especially those who are hard to understand/have heavy accents).