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.

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.

This professor was terrible. In my three years at UCLA, I can say by far this class has been the worst. The professor is degrading over Piazza and somehow failed to understand all of the questions I asked and would reply with either "I don't understand your question" or "its obv clear in the question description, so I'm not gonna answer that." I understand that professors have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, but if you have the time to refuse to answer my questions, why answer in the first place? Secondly, all of the assignments are pushed to the very end of the quarter and make it hard to practice the material throughout the quarter. We had a PSET, a Design assignment, and a Midterm all due in week 10!!!! The professor could work on spreading out the assignments throughout the quarter. Third, the way tests are designed, they are very unforgiving. If you miss one part of a question in the beginning of a 8 part question or mistake a 0 for a O, then you lose the whole question because you did not exactly give the correct answer.

In other words, you should avoid this class and prioritize taking the CS version as it is so much easier in terms of content, doesn't have 2 sets of 20-30 hour long Design assignments, and has better rated professors.

Wait for a different professor to take this class. I understood the material very well, and I did above average on both of the midterms and the final design project, but I still ended with a B because of the design assignments. The first seven weeks of the class were very light, but the professor assigned a quarter's worth of work in the last three weeks, including multiple design assignments (which none of the other professors for this class do). His instructions were so unclear that the median on the last design assignment was a zero, and this counted for a substantial amount of our grade. Even the TA's didn't understand the professors instructions on these assignments.

The professor thinks he is reasonable, but he is the least understanding professor I've ever had, and it is very clear he doesn't care about his students in the slightest. He took a subject that I was very interested in and made it boring. The only good thing about this class was that I liked the material.

Reviews are right about the assignment schedule, we had two 30-minute problem sets and 1 quiz in the first 8 weeks (basically nothing for the first weeks). Class material is not hard, and he tries to upload lectures. Most of his lectures were uploaded, but sometimes just looking at the lecture slides he provides is easier. He had a very generous late policy, giving 7 late days to spread out on a total of 3 assignments. However, the two design assignments had, one serving as the final, were slightly confusing to understand, and his Autograder was pretty rigid with errors so if anyone misunderstood the spec they just got 0's on the performance part of the grade. (I think a lot of students did this because the means were always like 15/40). Anyways, he curves/makes adjustments in order not to fail half of the class. He also grades on area cost (best score is used as baseline), so there was pretty cutthroat competition for about 20% of the grade. Wasn't too sure if I was failing the class or getting an A until the final grades came out, but I guess it worked out. Since you're reading this, I think you should be okay taking this class if you have no other choice. Know what to expect in the last two weeks and start early on the design assignments so you can ask questions about the spec.