The curriculum for this class has changed as of Fall 2019 to try to better prepare students for Stats 102A. As such, the course is now more rigorous, and the reviews/grade distributions for this class up to this point are no longer accurate. They're trying to turn this class into a stats weeder.

The workload is unmanageable -- hours and hours of work per homework assignment, and Mike sometimes assigns multiple at once. Plus they're not even graded fairly; the average for the first HW was like a C-. The exams are also terrible and had a 58% average. I don't know how the folks without programming experience are alive.

The cherry on top is Mike's constant virtue signaling -- he'll constantly try to plug messages like "your wellbeing is more important than grades; find time to take care of yourself" as if he's not the one assigning 10-20 hours worth of work per week.

If you love yourself, do not take this with other difficult classes. This class contains enough headache for your entire quarter.

There is a very large amount of homework for what should be an introductory course. To make things worse, the homework is rather difficult and time consuming. To make things even worse, the material tested on the midterm is pedantic, and some questions require you to know minute details of the language that wouldn't be useful in any meaningful context.

Professor Tsiang is such a great professor! This is a hard course but he truly cares about his students and wants to make sure everyone is understanding the concepts. His exams and homework are very fair, but challenging at the same time so you end up learning a lot in a short amount of time, and he and the TA (the hot one) are always willing to help. He is very approachable during office hours or on Campuswire where you can ask homework questions or lecture questions and he, the TA, or other students can answer. He is one of the best professors I have had at UCLA because he cares about his students and wants to make sure his class is fair and doable but also wants to challenge his students. I learned a lot from this course about RStudio and about myself as a student and it is all due to Professor Tsiang and TA Edouardo. While we are here let me also give a mini-review of Edouardo, the TA, who is also very understanding and knowledgeable on the subject. The class has changed a lot in the last few quarters so I would ignore previous reviews because the class is very different now in my opinion. Edouardo and Professor Mike are on your side, even when the course gets hard, they are not out to get you. They are both funny and it was a pleasure having them as instructors for this course because they taught their students not only the basics of RStudio but also gave us great mini TedTalks on study tips and life tips. This now has turned into me raving about them but I have nothing but good things to say about this course and them.

Okay maybe this class was an easy class before but for this quarter it clearly is not. Just as the review below says, this class is actually fast-paced and if you're a total coding beginner like me, you might have a difficult time keeping up. Also, the homework is really hard. The second midterm is the day after tomorrow and the practice midterm was just posted today. Also, there is one homework consisting of 26 questions due that day as well. Besides the homework, the way this class is designed is just very confusing. No solutions for the homework is posted. Homework is based on some mysterious rubric (which is also posted). You'll lose points for not writing a response in text, solutions not being efficient... I just feel tired at this moment. Don't be lied by the high rating of the professor and the high A rate. Maybe it was true for the previous quarters, but I believe the A rate will be much lower this quarter. As for the professor, I believe Mike is a nice guy but I didn't feel his lecturing skill is as good as his rating (don't get me wrong he still gives good lectures).

First, a bit of background about myself-
I'm a UCLA student currently leading a software-heavy engineering team (20+) with several years background in coding (Python, C++, Java, R, Mathematica, etc) and experience in several different development environments.

This class is too much. When the Stats dept changed the scoring metric so this becomes a weedout class, they also heavily affected the core meaning of this class. Mike is an, overall, good professor who seems to care about his students (although not enough). His constant virtue sigaling is a huge problem, however- when you assign a heavy final project and a heavy homework set during thanksgiving, you don't care about your students' well being that much.
Additionally, Jake (the lead TA) seems to delight in taking away points from his students, frequently grading on pedantic issues and 'stylistic choices' (I've issued several documents to my team detailing "proper style" and would never dream to be as controlling as him).

Overall, however, it speaks to the decline of Statistics at UCLA when the lower level classes are being squelched this badly. Don't take this class if you can help it.

Real d*ck move by the stats department to try to turn this class into a weeder. Don't believe any reviews from before Fall 2019. Mike and Jake are both terrible humans. Don't take this class if you can help it.

This class has gone through a lot of changes, but I believe that this past quarter had the best iteration of the course. TLDR: This class is very good! You just have to put in the time and make an effort to go to office hours and practice outside of class. This class provides a very strong foundation in R and prepares you for the 101 & 102 series, other classes, and even research! If you read the past reviews, just go into the class with an open mind and don't stress! I took this along with 3 other STEM classes and found this to be a decent time-sink, but rewarding and not too stressful.
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STRUCTURE: ~8 homework assignments, 2 midterms, Campuswire participation, discussion attendance, and a final (additional final project was cancelled)
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INSTRUCTION: Professor Tsiang and our TA Edouardo are extremely knowledgeable about R and statistics in general (he teaches 100C as well) and emphasize student learning entirely over stressing about grades. Some may interpret his constant concern as disingenuous, but if you go to OH and/or talk to him outside of class, you will see that it is genuine! They say that you don't need any coding experience but I HIGHLY recommend acquainting yourself with some form of programming beforehand, it doesn't have to be much or even a whole course like CS 31 or PIC 10A. Some folks were struggling with functions and control flow late into the quarter which surprised the instructors. In each asynchronous lecture, Professor Tsiang explained topics in detail and performed examples. These were mainly covered in lecture note PDFs, but there's some conceptual questions for you to think about on your own; I highly recommend you try to do each one and go to OH if you can't think of a solution. R has a few intricacies such as vectorization (which makes many for-loops you would typically make in C++ or Python inefficient and actually discouraged) and indexing from 1 which make previous knowledge start to hurt more than help, so again, go to office hours! In discussion section, Edouardo went over difficult concepts and commonly-made mistakes on past and current homework assignments. The LAs also had their own office hours and were very helpful when going over your own exams and homework assignments.
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EXAMS: It seems like the grading and type of questions are much less strict than previous quarters. The average scores were in the 70s or 80s which is typical of any slightly difficult STEM lower division course. They include function-writing, finding and fixing errors in code, and a tiny bit of data analysis. These exams were quite stressful but as long as you have been paying close attention to lecture and doing the homework, you should be able to get a decent score. There is a massive curve at the end in which about half of the class gets some form of an A, so don't expect to need a 90%+ or third-quartile (or even median sometimes) score on exams to get a good grade in the class. Don't stress and try to focus on learning the material, not achieving an A. If you want an easy A and aren't concerned about having a solid foundation in R, there's nothing wrong with that! I just wouldn't recommend this class however.
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HOMEWORK: These are similar to exam questions, except they are graded on completion and effort! There are easy-intermediate-optional hard questions on almost every assignment, however once they're graded only the easy solutions are posted. This was a bit annoying, but it forces you to think about your code and maybe go to OH to find out what's wrong with it. I liked that a lot of the questions made you create your own versions of base functions in R because it makes you really understand the base functions and their intricacies. The homework may take a few hours to do, so start early and take breaks. Use Campuswire to discuss the questions you are allowed to, it really helps! P.S. Asking questions and answering other people's questions gets you free points, and if you do it enough then a tiny bit of extra credit!
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I hope whoever reads this finds this useful and accurate; details such as exam structure and lectures will be different since I took this online during the pandemic. Best of luck!

OK I dropped this class on week 7 almost before last minute I am able to drop a non impacted class. Although it causes an Incomplete on my transcript, i don't care because my mental health is much more important than this shitty class. And please, if any of you are going to take this class in the future, ask Micheal not to put the sentences "I care about your mental health" or "grades don't define you" in his emails. I just wanna vomit every time I see them. Anyhow, I don't want to comment on Michael because I think he is fine except those hypocritical sentences he likes to say. You can't expect everybody to teach programming like Carey Nachenberg. But here's the thing, the TA Jake Kramer is the MOST AWFUL TA I have ever met, and presumably, the WORST PERSON ever. I really don't like to judge a person when writing evaluations but every clue leads me to the conclusion that he is not only a bad TA but a bad person. It seems that he really enjoys failing students and destroys others confidence. And there is a guy who wrote a little bit more after the exam time ended, Jake refused to take his exam and even tried to stop any other TA to take his exam. Also, they gave extremely hard or tricky questions on exams and homework while not providing answers to them, BTW, you are NOT ALLOWED TO BRING CHEATSHEETS FOR A PROGRAMMING EXAM, meaning you have to memorize every bit of detail of numerous built-in functions in R. and REMEMBER, they will ask you the most tricky part of the functions and they expect you to be perfect, just like the help() function that knows every bits of detail in R. Jake likes to say "Oh I solved this questions with only 6 lines of code" or "my fastest algorithm takes around 2 seconds to run". Fine, I know you are good at R so just (*swear word) TELL US WHAT IS THE ANWER CUZ WE ARE NOT HERE TO LISTEN TO YOU BRAGGING. And guys, if you have taken any CS classes, you know that your instructor will make instructions on your homework very clear, but definitely not in this class. If you ask whether certain output is valid or whether we need to consider edge cases on campuswire, their answers can simply be translated into "do whatever you think is right". And the result of following this answer is that they will take lots of points off on your homework. And moreover, the style checker. This is the first programming class I have ever take that deduces you points for every tiny mistake in your style of code. Although they give you style checker, I have to spend half an hour every time checking styles before submitting the homework. This is just a waste of time and will only ruins your interest to write code when you have to always keep Jake's pedantic rules in mind.
I really wanna end this comment with some good things about this class, but I just can't come up with any. Ok, I have one, I would like to thank Jake forcing me to have the first withdrawal in my transcript, and letting me know how bad a TA can be, and also, to experience the extreme happiness after I clicked "Yes, drop" button on class planner on the last minute.

This class has changed from Fall 2019. The Stats dept. and Mike seemed to realize how hard Fall 2019 was, and made it a more accessible course.

For starters, I had TA Edouardo (I don't think Jake TAs for Stats 20 anymore?). He was very clear and very helpful and made sure any and every question people had received a clear answer.

In addition, all the homeworks were based on satisfactory completion (not correctness) to alleviate some stress.

The lectures would be posted onto CCLE (asynch) and the live lecture time was used for office hours with Mike. Mike was always helpful and very friendly!

The exams were tough but they were fair and on par with what a intro to programming course should look like.

Overall I think the Stat dept. has heard the grievances posted on Bruinwalk. They have made this class more accessible. It is still difficult (as is any intro to programming course), but it is a reasonable amount of workload and doable. Mike and Edouardo have done a great job teaching this course and I am glad I took it!

Mike is one of the best Prof in the Stats Department. Unfortunately, this class is ruined by the TA "Jake". If you ever have this person as a TA, just drop the class, he is terrible. I totally agree with the comments below.