Do not take this class under any circumstances. Every aspect of this class is unfair. The workload is condensed so that most of the work is in the last two weeks of the class and finals week, resulting in all of your time being allocated towards this class. The assignments for those last two weeks and the final have extremely unfair grading practices that result in receiving a failing grade if your submission is not perfect. Be prepared to appeal your grade. My original grade for this class was a C and the only reason my grade is now a B- is due to appealing my grade with Dean Wesel.
Overall Professor Srivastava is the ideal demonstration of an incompetent Professor as he refuses to recognize the deficiencies in his course and address them when they are presented to him on a silver platter. As a result he should not be permitted to teach this course again. Perhaps that will happen if ZERO people enroll the next time he is assigned to teach this course.

Amazing class. Professor Srivastava made lectures highly interesting and provided us with a very solid foundation of digital logic. There is a lot of content, and while the course does start out slow, it picks up pace quickly in the second half after the transition to state machines and datapaths. The labs are tough yet very rewarding, and Professor Srivastava's lectures and advice will help approach them. Overall, Professor Srivastava and this class have piqued my interest in digital logic.

Overall, Professor Srivastava is a great lecturer who truly cares our learning.

The course description is on par with other reviews, but I would say they are exaggerating in some areas. Professor Srivastava is tenured and has been teaching a long time and his demeanor is professional and fair. Of course if you do not come to class nor read explicit directions, he will not respond in the nicest manner. Lecture Attendance is around 20% of the class. I stopped by every now and then and found it very helpful to my learning. He's kind on Piazza and Office hours when you have good questions relating to course content. The workload is a tad bit too much, especially the second design assignment giving the time of it but with careful thinking (before even implementing any circuitry) it can be done in a reasonable time. Don't get me wrong the assignments and PSETS are hard but if you're finding yourself spending 10+ hours, then there may be a fundamental misunderstanding in your approach. Not sure if this was new each this quarter but AI and any online resources were allowed on all assignments and exams, which did help a lot in terms of reasoning out my ideas and verifying my work.

I was kinda afraid of the rating on bruin walk at first, but decided to attend the lectures to see how it was. After the first few lectures, I absolutely fell in love with logical designs and all the fun analysis.

Professor Mani gives amazing lectures, and you MUST attend all of them to make sense of the materials. The discussion was also invaluable and helped me so much in gaining solid understanding in practice questions. All lectures and discussions are recorded, well organized under piazza resource tab, and the assignments as well. Prof and TAs are almost 24/7 monitoring piazza, and I remember getting a reply at 2am right after sending my question LMAO. You really have to learn to access all the resources to do good in this class.

the rubric is as follows:
4 problem sets (google collab, short answer, auto graded): 20%
2 Design Assignments (logism design, autograded): 25%
2 Quizzes (online, synchronous, you can do it in your dorm, open book/LLM): 25%
Final (online, synchronous, you can do it in your dorm, open book/LLM): 26%
Discussion participation: 4%

I think the most challenging is the 1st PSET (took me 7 hours) because you have to get used to the materials and the format, as well as the last design assignment (took me 20 hours, there are points assigned for comparatively lower cost of design too). Also, if you have anxiety issue like me, there are explanation sections after each problem in the PSETs and Quizzes/Final, but don't fill all of them in exams because you will run out of time. Once you feel comfortable, you can also skip them for the PSETs on the questions you feel confident about. PSETs can be submitted for 3 times, 1 time you will see if your submission follows format requirements, the last 2 gives you score, so you actually get 1 extra shot to correct your wrong answers (sometimes prof realize the auto grader answer was wrong and change answer, which may lower your grade a bit, but it really doesn't matter that much if you are in a good shape for everything else). For exams, you can submit as many times as you wish, and it only tells you if your formatting is correct, not points/correctness given until after the exam.

I think I really enjoyed the Design Assignemnts, though sitting in the study connecting wires for 8 hours straight wasn't the more pleasant thing my back and arms have experienced. I'm really proud of the optimization I did for my DA2 (still some genius in class easily got full credit with 1500+ less area cost than all of us. There are geniuses out there, and I'm just gonna chill as long as my design works lmao.)

I think the key to this class is to start early for projects and stay on track. Office hours also helped a lot too, so go visit the professor if you have any concerns or conceptual questions, he will be happy to explain things in class again as long as you think before asking and understand the basic concepts.

Again, I understand why people are so afraid because of the autograder, but you will learn your grade one way or another, eventually. Just be conscious of what your are learning, always ask questions and answer them in lecture/piazza once you meet any confusion, and you will be happy that you took this class.

DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS IF YOU CARE ABOUT YOUR MENTAL HEALTH. Unfortunately, I made the same mistake and thought some people in the comments were exaggerating. THEY ARE NOT.

I tried to put words to why this professor made me feel uncomfortable throughout the quarter. He sees his students as his enemies who are constantly trying to find loopholes in his system, so he comes up with complicated rules that are almost just there so you could accidentally mess up—and when you do, he's gonna say, "I already talked about this in one of the million Piazza posts I made :-) (He still gives you the answer though, but he has to prove that he is right first, and yes he's gonna add that smiley face)” He wants his students to be really, really perfect with zero human mistakes like skimming too fast through a post or making a typo. He may allow you to correct that mistake by answering your questions or doing regrades, but he will make sure you feel bad when you're just human. He does not feel like a professor who cares about his students at all, but like the absolute authority you're supposed to tiptoe around throughout the quarter.

That is a more feeling-based rant. More on class logistics, he releases 4 problem sets and 2 design assignments, and they were supposed to be evenly spaced. But he messes up the schedule, and during the last two weeks, the last problem set, the second design assignment, AND THE WEEK 10 MIDTERM were all squished together. The psets aren't that time consuming, I probably spent 1-3h on each. The quizzes are bad, but he curves so that the median is 80%.

However, the DAs were horrible. I started every assignment the second they were released and it was still a huge mental toll. Specifically, 25% of the first DA and all of the second DA are graded partially(25%) on efficiency. Only people who get within 1.1 times the lowest design cost get full credit, and people with more than 2 times the cost get 0.

But the second DA itself was already pretty impossible—so much so that he realized it and changed the problem specs ONE WEEK AFTER HE RELEASED IT, when there were only TWO WEEKS to do the whole thing!!!! I had already spent more than 20 hours struggling on the assignment before he changed the specs. I even went to tutoring sessions with upperclassmen, and they agreed this question is insane for an intro class.

And guess what—the class average for the design problem was freaking 7/45....

Again, he curves everything so that the median is 80, so your grade may not be too bad. But believe me—it’s not worth it. I honestly feel like if I started the DAs late I would have had better mental health since I wouldn't realize that early that I am doomed. Mind you, my score on the DAs were pretty good, but that does not improve my experience one bit. Also, throughout the class not a single correct solution of the DAs are released. I am curious how we're supposed to learn how to optimize our designs. When you ask the prof, he will just imply you're not smart enough and the "clever people" in the class can find really good solutions :-)

I know people who took this class in different quarters, and they all say they enjoyed the content and that the class wasn’t that hard. JUST TAKE THIS CLASS ANOTHER QUARTER. OR YOU MIGHT BE THE PERSON WRITING A DESPERATE COMMENT AT MIDNIGHT BECAUSE YOU WERE GIFTED TRAUMA. :-) :-) :-)

He is very unhelpful. Basically left to your own devices for assignments. The first few weeks of the class are very easy with little to no work. But, in the last 3 weeks he assigns 3x more work than he did in the first 7 weeks. Why you may ask? I don't know. Don't take this class.

The professor had to teach in pretty difficult circumstances so I think a lot of the criticism given is unwarranted and honestly whiny.

For context, Professor Mani has been dealing with a pretty serious family issue throughout Spring 2024. He's been forced to teach remote as he cannot be in UCLA in person due to the circumstances. I imagine this is probably part of the reason for some of the complaints about the professor's strange schedules.

I personally found the piazza responses hilarious - honestly, the professor is not being personal or "hostile" just because he decided to use a couple more adjectives in answering a question he's probably seen 1000 times already in a course that hes taught for many years. I appreciated the humor he tried to add to an otherwise dry subject matter. I think the fact that the class did so poorly as a whole of the quizzes is reflective of how well we truly learned the material - which was rather poorly for the most part, and that is not the professor's fault. Besides everything gets curved in the end. Just because your ego got hurt by the raw 19/62 for quiz 1 doesn't mean that will be your actual score, even if it is reflective of your actual level of grasp of the content.

One thing I genuinely did not like was the wacky grade calculation system. I think he made it in part to discourage people from trying to calculate/predict their grade? Whatever reason it is, it's complex enough that I've given up on trying to calculate it myself.

Alright rant over. Now for the actual review:

The class was tough. The homework were challenging. The exams were online and were very difficult. All of the averages on exams were consistently below 50%. Despite what some other reviews say however, this class was not a time consuming one.

A lot of the times being thrown around are grossly exaggerated. For example, none of the design assignments took more than 10 hours each, which considering we only have 2 in the entire quarter honestly wasn't a ton of time. If you could not commit 20 hours to working on basically the project for a class I don't see how in any universe you'd end up doing well.

The content of this class had a fair amount of overlap with CS33, so if you took that recently the knowledge is pretty transferable. You'd still need to study for the stuff about kmap and delays, but I think those aren't very difficult topics either. I handicapped myself by never going to lecture and only learning from textbook and slides, but most people who did go to lecture seemed to have a good understanding of the material when I spoke to them.

I really liked the design assignments and wished there were more of them, However, the professor decided to give a final this year instead of a take home design assignment.

If there was one thing I think I would change about this class is I would've preferred a design assignment over a final. I think it would've been a more meaningful challenge and I would've probably had a deeper appreciation of some of the design patterns and algorithms discussed in class.

Overall this class is not for the faint of heart. You should know what you signed up for when you take this class.

Oh Mani B Srivastava where do I begin. This professor is so incredibly rude, aggressive, and disrespectful on Piazza -- the god awful platform he uses to "help" and "answer" questions. He also uses Piazza to send crucial course info after midnight which will likely be him fixing his own mistakes on a problem set. Ironically, despite the numerous errors in quizzes, psets, and da assignments, the nonexistance of partial credit makes the quizzes so incredibly brutal. His callousness and hatred towards undergrads extends to his twice a week two hour long lectures where he'll ridicule and demean anyone who attempts and fails to answer his questions. I even remember him off handedly mentioning how "UCLA 'used to be' a prestigous university". The worst part is that he'll probably never stop teaching this course so all I can do is warn others. DONT TAKE HIS CLASS. HEED THE WARNINGS OF OTHERS!

This class is highly important and had interesting material. The professor's lectures were okay, and got the material across. However, none of these things can excuse this professors absolute cruelty to students. This professor is absurdly active on Piazza, and will respond to questions and post late at night or at any time of day. However, his responses are just outright aggressive to almost any question asked of him. One student asked for clarification on instructions for a problem and was told to "not go down the path of unusual interpretations of plain English". Once, a student answered a question during lecture incorrectly and was told that the right answer was "obvious". Alone, these responses suck, but over and over again throughout the class, they simply build a disgusting environment to learn in. This professor gives the impression he hates teaching undergraduates and expects them to operate at a graduate level capacity on a topic they are taking an introductory course in. I have never met a teacher who felt so actively aggressive towards students seeking help in my entire learning career. Please avoid this professor if you don't want to feel unreasonably angry late at night because of a question you posted on Piazza.