EHH. The only two plus's is that practice exams match the level of the actuals, and that he has lecture notes.

Since the projects are most of the grades, if you have a good grade and study for exams, you'll be fine. However, the professor is not clear at all (frankly I think he's so smart that he doesn't understand that students don't get it), so it felt entirely self-taught as lectures were not helpful. This class is a huge time commitment and is quite stressful so make sure the rest of your classes are not too stressful.

I never write bruinwalk reviews but I had to for this class because it was my favorite Econ class I have taken at ucla. The material was actually useful for post grad and Rojas is an absolute gem. The projects and homeworks are hard and take a while to complete but he lets you work in groups and grades extremely leniently. Additionally, he will answer any question you have about anything. There are two exams: a midterm and a final but they are worth a relatively low percentage grade compared to other Econ classes because the projects are worth a large chunk (and are basically a completion grade). The exams are hard I won't lie but he also grades extremely leniently on them. It's basically the best of both worlds because you actually get to challenge yourself with the material of the class without it hurting your class grade that much. Anyways class is fantastic and Rojas is fantastic. Take 144 if you actually want to learn something useful

Rojas is by far my least favorite economics professor. I think he is actually a sadist and/or a lizard. His lectures are the most monotone experience you possibly imagine. I shit you not I fell asleep every lecture I attended (at 1pm nonetheless) so I stopped attending class. He is incredibly punitive and does little to help his students. He does not record lecture. He gave us one practice midterm that was absolutely nothing like the actual; this seemed intentional. The coding projects took forever even in groups of four. Be warned, this class is solely about R not about economics. The homework is all R and the tests are all related to R in some way as well. Rojas is clearly quite intelligent but this leads to him just assuming we know a bunch of stuff we were never taught. Take 104 with Boswell if you can.

Professor Rojas is definitely very talented and a great instructor for such a hard-core course. He efficiently uses every single minute of the lecture to teach as many concepts as possible, and since the amount of materials is so dense, it would be hard to catch up if you missed a class. However, Professor Rojas teaches very clearly, so you can definitely follow along as long as you concentrate in class. HW and projects require a lot of effort (usually files with 30-50 pages generated from R markdown), but all of them are extremely useful and hands-on practices that help you explore how to fit models to real-world data. Tests could be a bit hard since it requires you to fully understand all concepts taught in class (with no cheat sheet so you have to memorize), but it is heavily analysis-based instead of coding-based, so personally it works better for me. Overall, I would say it is definitely a challenging course that requires you to have a strong technical background (be very familiar with using R and have at least some knowledge of math/statistics), but definitely one of the most useful classes I've taken at UCLA that I think I could apply the knowledge to my future career.

This course should not be a requirement for Biz Econ majors. It is far to complication and completely unnecessary for any business professions. I'm going into accounting. I don't need to know how to code and do data science. Rojas was really good. He is very nice. We weren't prepared at all by our 103 professor, so it was a bit of a learning curve. He basically has to teach 41, 103, and 104, because we are all bad at data science and weren't prepared. Rojas is a really good professor, especially given our failures. His exams are very reasonable.

professor rojas does his best to teach ECON 1; however, this class is hard asf for no reason!!! the important thing to note: your grade is solely based on two midterms + a final * though, the distribution you can choose :-) your TAs try to be as helpful as they can~ it's giving AP econ exam LOL

Super easy class. The professor is super good. Tests are easy as long as you do practice problems.

This class was one of the most interesting and useful classes that I have taken at UCLA. Granted, it does have a fairly heavy workload with a significant amount of work in R. However, I took this class at the same time as Econ 104 and thought I was prepared enough for the R work. Just be prepared to spend some long hours working on projects.

As a person who aspires to work in finance, I highly recommend this class. The topics covered are very applicable to real-life quantitative analysis in the field and Rojas has some very interesting lectures and anecdotes he shares in class.

To do well in this class just make sure you passed Econ 103 and found R not too challenging (although I think anyone should be able to learn R quickly), are ready to spend a solid amount of hours on projects, and study the past midterms/finals thoroughly for the tests!

If you’re taking Econ 1, definitely take it with another professor. I came out of every lecture confused, but if I went over the lecture slides on my own it was much easier. He makes everything way more confusing than it has to be and his class is fully based on two midterms and a final, which you need to be able to be good at answering weird questions, not just understanding the material. The class average for the midterms and the final ranged from a C- to a C+.
Thankfully, he curved it a bit at the end because a lot of people didn’t do too well. I feel like I understood most, if not all of the material that was taught in the class, but the professor made the class way more complicated than it had to be.