- Home
- Search
- Miles Satori Chen
- All Reviews

Miles Chen
AD
Based on 146 Users
Such a fun class! Although the lectures are at 9 am and mandatory, they are so engaging and fun and you feel like you are learning. He requires lecture view quizzes, where he tells you 3 arbitrary letters throughout the lecture so that you can just answer the quiz on BruinLearn after. Luckily, he records lectures but you will only get 2/3 of the letters but it won't really affect your score. His homework is nicely paced and he requries you to participate on CampusWire which is nice as someone is always online to answer your questions. No midterm!! And the final was online, idk if it was cause of the protests, and really fair. 10/10 would take again!
Miles is definitely one of my favorite professors at UCLA! The lectures are clearly delivered and engaging as always, and what we are expected to learn and to be tested on are clear as well. Also, Miles is always very nice and patient, I can tell he cares about his students and is always willing to help. I enjoyed taking classes with him so much, and would definitely recommend his classes to everyone. It was a very great experience, and I think I have learned useful knowledge which would help my future studies and career as well as gotten many invaluable life advices from him.
This is probably my favorite class that I took at UCLA so far. Prof Chen has amazing notes and a very fair grading scheme. His homework is often kind of long but very manageable and useful. The final is worth only 25% of your grade and is a tad bit tough but as long as you do well on everything else, it is very manageable to get an A. Prof Chen is a goat!
Great class. Good professor, though slightly overrated in my opinion (but I'd definitely take him again lol). Odd tests.
This is basically a ML class (less intensive maybe as CS). He uses his slides and explains well. He records it too.
We learn the standard algos like KNN, K means, Neural nets, EM algorithm, Bayes classifier, SVM, PCA and their math behind it. He teaches the concepts well and makes it extremely concise (dims it down to make it simple to understand, maybe too simple).
His homeworks are heavily weighted, so make sure to finish them well. 6 of them, each being 6%. The view quiz this quarter changed such that he'd provide the last one after the recording stopped to incentivize people to come in person.
The tests are pretty weird. They are easy and seem like high school style. The thing is he doesn't give much partial credit at all. And since the style is like high school, some questions about machine learning and long math calculations are all for a fill-in-the-blank. And so even with your work, you can end up getting 0. So double check your work.
People love this guy for some reason and I really cannot for the life of me figure out why. He's not the worst professor in the world (or even in the UCLA stats department lol) but imo, the glazing in these reviews is excessive.
-
Starting with the good: he's a decent lecturer and it's really nice that he records lectures (especially for the 8am section), but it's also a bit funny that he'll do that and then make these snarky comments about how nobody shows up to class in person lol.
There's also a ton of extra credit on homework assignments, Campuswire participation, he even gave everybody an extra 5% on the midterm just because he felt like the average wasn't high enough. He also tells you exactly what's going to be on the final. That being said, the class is not hard and really does not require all this hand-holding whatsoever, but I'm not going to complain. He also holds office hours very frequently, but see above.
-
The bad: Oh boy. On the first day of class, he'll casually say something like "I'm not very good at replying to emails, so don't email me" and just leave it at that for the entirety of the quarter. And I'm supposed to just accept that a college professor who is supposed to be a professional in his field just doesn't check his fckg emails? You'll email him about something and he doesn't respond, so a few days later you go to his single office hour per day, wait for the other 10 people there to get their questions answered, and finally talk to the man himself just for him to address you with this honestly bizarre air of condescension like you've made the most heinous remarks about the dplyr package just for having the audacity to ask for some sort of accommodation.
Homework rubrics are not clear. Very rarely do they range beyond "correct" and "wrong," and for clarification, you of course have to go to the aforementioned office hours. If you're not free, with Miles' refusal to check his emails, you're pretty much SOL. Campuswire is full of people giving useless non-answers so they can farm upvotes for the mandatory participation points. I don't know if the TA even exists outside of discussion. Submit a regrade request on Gradescope and say a Quran verse, I guess.
-
Rant over. To be fair to the guy, he does hold office hours an insane four times a week.
-
All in all, my Miles Chen Stats 102a experience was probably more of a personal problem - I don't think he liked me and clearly, I'm not the biggest fan of him either. You're unlikely to have as much of an issue as I did - Chen is a perfectly adequate lecturer for this class, and I do recommend taking him, but mainly because I think the alternatives are likely to be even worse. He isn't bad from a high-level standpoint, he just gets all of the little things (communication, being accommodating, professionalism, etc.) completely and absolutely wrong.
-
TLDR: Take his class, but keep your expectations in check.
Miles's lectures are great and the hw actually helps u. much love
He's Miles. He's amazing. Very clear and explains things well. Assignments are fair.
There is a Kaggle competition to see the best machine learning model you can fit. A tip is to probably start early and just try out different models and parameters
Professor is very understanding. Homeworks are really hard.
Such a fun class! Although the lectures are at 9 am and mandatory, they are so engaging and fun and you feel like you are learning. He requires lecture view quizzes, where he tells you 3 arbitrary letters throughout the lecture so that you can just answer the quiz on BruinLearn after. Luckily, he records lectures but you will only get 2/3 of the letters but it won't really affect your score. His homework is nicely paced and he requries you to participate on CampusWire which is nice as someone is always online to answer your questions. No midterm!! And the final was online, idk if it was cause of the protests, and really fair. 10/10 would take again!
Miles is definitely one of my favorite professors at UCLA! The lectures are clearly delivered and engaging as always, and what we are expected to learn and to be tested on are clear as well. Also, Miles is always very nice and patient, I can tell he cares about his students and is always willing to help. I enjoyed taking classes with him so much, and would definitely recommend his classes to everyone. It was a very great experience, and I think I have learned useful knowledge which would help my future studies and career as well as gotten many invaluable life advices from him.
This is probably my favorite class that I took at UCLA so far. Prof Chen has amazing notes and a very fair grading scheme. His homework is often kind of long but very manageable and useful. The final is worth only 25% of your grade and is a tad bit tough but as long as you do well on everything else, it is very manageable to get an A. Prof Chen is a goat!
Great class. Good professor, though slightly overrated in my opinion (but I'd definitely take him again lol). Odd tests.
This is basically a ML class (less intensive maybe as CS). He uses his slides and explains well. He records it too.
We learn the standard algos like KNN, K means, Neural nets, EM algorithm, Bayes classifier, SVM, PCA and their math behind it. He teaches the concepts well and makes it extremely concise (dims it down to make it simple to understand, maybe too simple).
His homeworks are heavily weighted, so make sure to finish them well. 6 of them, each being 6%. The view quiz this quarter changed such that he'd provide the last one after the recording stopped to incentivize people to come in person.
The tests are pretty weird. They are easy and seem like high school style. The thing is he doesn't give much partial credit at all. And since the style is like high school, some questions about machine learning and long math calculations are all for a fill-in-the-blank. And so even with your work, you can end up getting 0. So double check your work.
People love this guy for some reason and I really cannot for the life of me figure out why. He's not the worst professor in the world (or even in the UCLA stats department lol) but imo, the glazing in these reviews is excessive.
-
Starting with the good: he's a decent lecturer and it's really nice that he records lectures (especially for the 8am section), but it's also a bit funny that he'll do that and then make these snarky comments about how nobody shows up to class in person lol.
There's also a ton of extra credit on homework assignments, Campuswire participation, he even gave everybody an extra 5% on the midterm just because he felt like the average wasn't high enough. He also tells you exactly what's going to be on the final. That being said, the class is not hard and really does not require all this hand-holding whatsoever, but I'm not going to complain. He also holds office hours very frequently, but see above.
-
The bad: Oh boy. On the first day of class, he'll casually say something like "I'm not very good at replying to emails, so don't email me" and just leave it at that for the entirety of the quarter. And I'm supposed to just accept that a college professor who is supposed to be a professional in his field just doesn't check his fckg emails? You'll email him about something and he doesn't respond, so a few days later you go to his single office hour per day, wait for the other 10 people there to get their questions answered, and finally talk to the man himself just for him to address you with this honestly bizarre air of condescension like you've made the most heinous remarks about the dplyr package just for having the audacity to ask for some sort of accommodation.
Homework rubrics are not clear. Very rarely do they range beyond "correct" and "wrong," and for clarification, you of course have to go to the aforementioned office hours. If you're not free, with Miles' refusal to check his emails, you're pretty much SOL. Campuswire is full of people giving useless non-answers so they can farm upvotes for the mandatory participation points. I don't know if the TA even exists outside of discussion. Submit a regrade request on Gradescope and say a Quran verse, I guess.
-
Rant over. To be fair to the guy, he does hold office hours an insane four times a week.
-
All in all, my Miles Chen Stats 102a experience was probably more of a personal problem - I don't think he liked me and clearly, I'm not the biggest fan of him either. You're unlikely to have as much of an issue as I did - Chen is a perfectly adequate lecturer for this class, and I do recommend taking him, but mainly because I think the alternatives are likely to be even worse. He isn't bad from a high-level standpoint, he just gets all of the little things (communication, being accommodating, professionalism, etc.) completely and absolutely wrong.
-
TLDR: Take his class, but keep your expectations in check.
He's Miles. He's amazing. Very clear and explains things well. Assignments are fair.
There is a Kaggle competition to see the best machine learning model you can fit. A tip is to probably start early and just try out different models and parameters