Professor
Steve Margulis
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2023 - Margulis is a pretty nice guy. His lectures are organized and the slides are well-put-together, but the content itself can be very dry as the class covers iterative/numerical methods of mathematical processes. Overall, the class is very manageable and pretty easy as long as you don't procrastinate on PSETs, collaborate with peers, and do well on the midterm. Even though MATLAB is used a lot, there isn't any actual coding; it's mostly setting up parameters and calling pre-written functions and plotting. The final project is longer and more confusing (so pay attention to the wk 8, 9, 10 topics) but as long as you work on it steadily and meet with the professor/TAs, you should be good.
Spring 2023 - Margulis is a pretty nice guy. His lectures are organized and the slides are well-put-together, but the content itself can be very dry as the class covers iterative/numerical methods of mathematical processes. Overall, the class is very manageable and pretty easy as long as you don't procrastinate on PSETs, collaborate with peers, and do well on the midterm. Even though MATLAB is used a lot, there isn't any actual coding; it's mostly setting up parameters and calling pre-written functions and plotting. The final project is longer and more confusing (so pay attention to the wk 8, 9, 10 topics) but as long as you work on it steadily and meet with the professor/TAs, you should be good.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2025 - I could talk about this class for pages on end, so this is going to be a little long but bear with me. The Good: Midterm/Final-Both of the tests were very fair. You get tons of note sheets, the questions are very reminiscent of the practice tests and not difficult in nature, and they are graded fairly. Realistically, this is the cushion of your grade (worth 50%), which is weird to say about tests but here we are. Lectures-I would say Margulis was a very good lecturer. Some of the content towards the end of the course was presented at a subpar level compared to the earlier lectures, but in general I would say he is good at presenting the content and he did publish all slides with annotations which was nice. The Mediocre: Homework-The homework was okay but significantly harder than the tests weirdly enough. It really doesn't matter because they basically always gave 100% on homework assignments but the questions were a bit weird. Also the homework was only worth 4% of the grade which made the time it took to do the homework not proportionally to it's contribution to the course at all. They did release homework solutions however, which was definitely very helpful especially when creating test note sheets. Discussions-Very few people attended discussions but they were hit or miss. Sometimes they would be helpful such as when they taught us how to set up the class MATLAB directory. That being said, a lot of the time they were not too helpful, with one TA having a somewhat difficult accent and the other being EXTREMELY petty. The Bad: Projects-My God these sucked. There were FIVE projects, with each requiring you to create graphs/maps/figures and discussion them in detail. They were due every even week in the quarter, which made it so you basically always had a project due. There were so many issues with them, the biggest being that you had to create figures on MATLAB using the directory he provided which was very confusing to do, especially when you needed to make maps. He apparently gave coding templates every year before this one, but due to the existence of AI to help you code now, he stopped doing that, but that doesn't make sense because we wouldn't even need to use AI if you just gave the templates. It made it so whether you wanted to or not, you had to really on AI (which was tedious as hell with ChatGPT sometimes not understanding the provided directory at all). They also graded the projects insanely harshly and when you had questions would provide extremely poor answers. It felt like throwing Hail Mary's with every project. Oh and finally, you could barely ever start the projects before like 5 days before the due date due to them needing to cover the content the projects revolved around in class, which made it so giving us 2 weeks still wasn't enough time. These projects almost single handedly ruined the class with them weighing so much of your grade (25%). Quizzes-These were also awful but just took up very little time. They were during the first 15 minutes of each discussion section, and you could leave after, so they weren't time consuming, just frustrating as all hell. They were super hard and worded intentionally confusingly, so go figure, the average on them was fairly low, and they also took up 20% of your grade which was just so much for such intentionally difficult assessments. This was the first year they had quizzes in years, and they clearly had no idea how to scale the difficulty properly. Overall, this class had some enjoyable aspects while also having many severe issues. The content was genuinely interesting and I enjoyed the lectures and assessments, but constantly feeling anxious over those God-forsaken projects and quizzes was a feeling that plagued my whole quarter. I don't regret taking this class but I really advise preparing to WORK for your grade.
Fall 2025 - I could talk about this class for pages on end, so this is going to be a little long but bear with me. The Good: Midterm/Final-Both of the tests were very fair. You get tons of note sheets, the questions are very reminiscent of the practice tests and not difficult in nature, and they are graded fairly. Realistically, this is the cushion of your grade (worth 50%), which is weird to say about tests but here we are. Lectures-I would say Margulis was a very good lecturer. Some of the content towards the end of the course was presented at a subpar level compared to the earlier lectures, but in general I would say he is good at presenting the content and he did publish all slides with annotations which was nice. The Mediocre: Homework-The homework was okay but significantly harder than the tests weirdly enough. It really doesn't matter because they basically always gave 100% on homework assignments but the questions were a bit weird. Also the homework was only worth 4% of the grade which made the time it took to do the homework not proportionally to it's contribution to the course at all. They did release homework solutions however, which was definitely very helpful especially when creating test note sheets. Discussions-Very few people attended discussions but they were hit or miss. Sometimes they would be helpful such as when they taught us how to set up the class MATLAB directory. That being said, a lot of the time they were not too helpful, with one TA having a somewhat difficult accent and the other being EXTREMELY petty. The Bad: Projects-My God these sucked. There were FIVE projects, with each requiring you to create graphs/maps/figures and discussion them in detail. They were due every even week in the quarter, which made it so you basically always had a project due. There were so many issues with them, the biggest being that you had to create figures on MATLAB using the directory he provided which was very confusing to do, especially when you needed to make maps. He apparently gave coding templates every year before this one, but due to the existence of AI to help you code now, he stopped doing that, but that doesn't make sense because we wouldn't even need to use AI if you just gave the templates. It made it so whether you wanted to or not, you had to really on AI (which was tedious as hell with ChatGPT sometimes not understanding the provided directory at all). They also graded the projects insanely harshly and when you had questions would provide extremely poor answers. It felt like throwing Hail Mary's with every project. Oh and finally, you could barely ever start the projects before like 5 days before the due date due to them needing to cover the content the projects revolved around in class, which made it so giving us 2 weeks still wasn't enough time. These projects almost single handedly ruined the class with them weighing so much of your grade (25%). Quizzes-These were also awful but just took up very little time. They were during the first 15 minutes of each discussion section, and you could leave after, so they weren't time consuming, just frustrating as all hell. They were super hard and worded intentionally confusingly, so go figure, the average on them was fairly low, and they also took up 20% of your grade which was just so much for such intentionally difficult assessments. This was the first year they had quizzes in years, and they clearly had no idea how to scale the difficulty properly. Overall, this class had some enjoyable aspects while also having many severe issues. The content was genuinely interesting and I enjoyed the lectures and assessments, but constantly feeling anxious over those God-forsaken projects and quizzes was a feeling that plagued my whole quarter. I don't regret taking this class but I really advise preparing to WORK for your grade.
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Most Helpful Review
Really good professor. He is incredibly fair and will NOT ask you random questions on exams. Margulis is very organized and he gives very thorough notes so you will always know exactly what to study. How well you do is simply a matter of how much time you're willing to put into studying. The homework can get lengthy at times, but if you can do it on your own, you're pretty much set. Every homework has some matlab in it (and homework is worth a LOT), so either know it well, or find a classmate that does. Margulis is a great guy, and is very patient and soft-spoken. Take advantage of his office hours because he's probably one of the nicest professors we have at UCLA. I took CEE 150 with him as well, and all of the comments above also apply. I recommend you take 150 if you're interested at all in water resources because you learn a lot of interesting things that you may not get from your general required classes.
Really good professor. He is incredibly fair and will NOT ask you random questions on exams. Margulis is very organized and he gives very thorough notes so you will always know exactly what to study. How well you do is simply a matter of how much time you're willing to put into studying. The homework can get lengthy at times, but if you can do it on your own, you're pretty much set. Every homework has some matlab in it (and homework is worth a LOT), so either know it well, or find a classmate that does. Margulis is a great guy, and is very patient and soft-spoken. Take advantage of his office hours because he's probably one of the nicest professors we have at UCLA. I took CEE 150 with him as well, and all of the comments above also apply. I recommend you take 150 if you're interested at all in water resources because you learn a lot of interesting things that you may not get from your general required classes.
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