His accent is unbearable and impossible to understand. His slides are just regurgitations of the complex formulas from the textbook. His tests have very little to do with the problem sets as his questions focus on manipulation of the formulas rather than using them to solve actual problems. Worst class I've taken at UCLA

Professor Pinto's 103 class is very manageable compared to other 103 professor (Rojas). He is funny in class and always care for us. The exams are okay, as long as you study his practice exam you will be prepared.

This class is actually quite good. Professor Pinto is genuinely a very nice, motivated, and funny lecturer. Econometrics is a very tedious subject, and Professor tried to make the class as vigor as possible. He also explains everything down to the basic so you can follow everything on his slides, which made review much easier and really helped you understand what is going on. Homeworks are all graded on completion, and there's a midterm and a final. You do have to study though, since there's a tons of materials covered and there's not much space for mistakes during tests if you wanna keep your GPA. However, I do think this course is generally a rewarding experience, and professor clearly did his job well. Would recommand this class to anyone hesitating to take 103 with this professor.

Class is piss easy, but the tests were somewhat difficult, especially the final.

Professor Pinto is GOAT. The overall course did not bring me anxiety at all over the quarter. It's totally manageable. Midterm is super easy. Final is hard, but professor is very generous with the curve. He also rounds up my score from 89.75% to 90% so I can get a A-. Pinto is such a caring professor!

Horrible professor, lectures provided absolutely no help. His explanations were terrible, the only way to keep up with the course content was to read the book on your own. He claimed he was going to make a "significantly simplified final" and assess grades on a "generous curve", but did neither of those. Will be actively avoiding taking any more classes with him.

Overall, this is a good class. I would recommend that you put in the hours early on. Learn the fundamentals and then the rest will come relatively easy. Professor Pinto does his best to make the content interesting, but it is a bit challenging to do so because it is inherently un-invigorating. If you look at slides and come to class with a sense of the material to be covered, you will do very well.

Overall a pretty solid class. Pinto was super generous and understanding concerning the problem sets.

Grade breakdown:
20% HW (Problem Sets)
30% Midterm
50% Final (or 80% if you do better on the final than the midterm)

Both the midterm and final were only MC (20 and 40 q's respectively), which is extremely fair. The professor does have a bit of an accent which can make understanding him a bit difficult at times but since things were recorded you can just rewatch lectures. During the exams, you had access to all his slides and notes, which were extremely helpful, but other than that it was closed book. When I took the class the grade distribution was crazy high, so don't expect any curving to happen, but he did promise not to curve down so whatever face value grade you get, you get.

The problem sets are all just coding in R, which is helpful but also not tested on the exams, at least the coding part. The exams focus more on interpreting the results and understanding which models to use on different types of data, etc. The material can be a bit much sometimes, but don't get lost in the weeds and do the practice problems and practice midterms/finals he gives out. Those give you a really good sense of the difficulty of the exams.

The TA sections can be helpful and useless at the same time. At least for my TA, he would explain the same concepts but in different ways, and sometimes it clicked for me and other times I feel he would just get more convoluted and confusing than the professor. I feel like the TA's definitely bring a different perspective to the same material so if you listen to lecture and feel completely lost, then maybe go to a TA. If you understand the material from the lecture, there's no need to go to the TA sections.

The professor was super nice and you can definitely tell the passion he has for the subject. He definitely knows his stuff!

Honestly though, don't take this class. If you truly value your money, you should choose Rojas instead. Choosing pinto is like choosing to take this class at home. Not worth the risk even when people say it's multiple choice. Literally, all I did was do his homework(which I had to self taught myself) and memorize the book for the final.

I found this class pretty difficult, the exams were somewhat okay but the problem sets were really hard. You had to complete the problem sets in R, but no one ever taught us how to use R, so we were all left on our own to figure it out. Not to mention the class wasn't even about R, the Professor said we just needed to be able to interpret results from R, but the exams were written with results from Stata.

However, the Professor does give you an option of dropping the midterm score if your final is higher, so there's two grading scales:
1. 20% Problem sets, 80% Final
2. 20% Problem sets, 30% Midterm, 50% Final

My TA was super helpful for example problems so definitely go to discussion sessions.

The lectures were incredibly boring, even with 2x speed and taking breaks every 10 minutes I wanted nothing more than to go back to bed.