really nice and smart prof but he didn't even give us a practice final... and didn't inform us we weren't going to be given a practice final until someone emailed their TA and told the rest of the class. midterm was completely unlike the homework. notes are full of information that isn't going to be tested. the project (a 30% of your grade) is graded on completion (thank god) because our TAs (god bless them) tried their best to help us and pretty much gave up and told us to use chatgpt to check our code

this class killed my 4.0 gpa. lectures are not recorded. 2 group projects with R but you will struggle unless you are already okay with R

Dont take Rojas unless you absolutely have to. He bascially just reads off the lecture notes during the lectures, which is extremely confusing. He only gave one practice test for midterms and finals, which are pretty much irrelevalant from what actually appeared on the test. Both midterms and finals were quite hard:( However, the group project was graded pretty leniently which was the only good thing about this class.

He changed the structure of this class, there are now 2 projects worth 20% each, a midterm worth 20% and a final worth 40%. He does not give much practice material so just make sure to ask the TAs to give you more practice problems, some give out additional old practice problems.

I really liked Professor Rojas. Although I had taken statistics and probability before, I never truly grasped the concepts until this class. I think he did an excellent job of explaining the material clearly. We had two group projects, which were time-consuming, but they helped deepen our understanding of the content (each project accounted for 20% of the final grade). The midterm (20%) and final (40%) exams were challenging and built on what was taught in class. To succeed, you really need to understand the material as there is also no cheat sheet. On the positive side, the projects were graded leniently, and he only curved grades upwards.

Overall, I thought he was very nice and a good lecturer. I would take another class with him.

Rojas is a great lecturer, learned alot in this class. Projects made up 40% of our grade and everyone basically got a 100% on them. The only problem this class had was that the exams had a few random questions he barely ever touched on and his practice exams were nothing like the actual exams. Most exam questions were very easy however.

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

Class is not hard nor easy, but he taught all material without any order. It was very difficult to review the materials without any orderness.

Any positive reputation this professor had in the past is completely gone. He has completely checked out as a teacher this year and doesn't care about anyone. You will never get an email response. You will waste 40 hours a week on homework working on unrelated questions. He said we will be tested on R studio and coding, but not a single piece of code was needed for any of the tests. We started with the ability to take tests using R studio, but by the second midterm we were not allowed R studio, limited notes, testing via respondus, and a webcam proctor in addition to testing. While previous reviews say there is a curve, there really isn't. I bombed the first test because I studied to be tested on code. I got B and above on midterm and final. Raw score 79% because of the first exam, C+ as final grade. So basically no curve, couldn't even bump me to a B-. Students were so frustrated with him the entire class wrote a formal letter of complaints to the head of the econ department. One student went as far as chewing him out during one of the class sessions. The material isn't that hard but he made it a very toxic learning environment.

Having taken Econ 1 with Rojas (and having had a pretty good experience), I was shocked by how unorganized and poorly planned this course was. This class began with a ridiculous homework assignment in R that took days and ended with Respondus crashing over and over again on the final. In between, Rojas basically seemed to give up on trying to teach - it really felt like the pandemic had taken a lot out of him. He also decided to teach off of an R Markdown document, which sort of made sense because he was trying to teach us R, but was a lot more difficult to follow than a traditional powerpoint. If you can, I would recommend that you wait a couple of quarters before taking 103 so that the Econ department can figure out how to run this class.