Professor
Xiaofan Cui
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2025 - I took Prof Cui for ECE 141 last quarter, and I think he overall did a better job in ECE 110 than that class (probably because this is his second time teaching ECE 110), but his ratings on BruinWalk are still a bit overhyped in my opinion. The biggest improvement of his ECE 110 over ECE 141 is that he would now post pre-lecture notes before every lecture so that we can better follow along with the lecture, instead of trying to catch up to his speed and take notes all the time. His lecture was a bit dry, primarily because he focused a lot on derivations and the theory behind equations, which could be quite boring. However, if you followed along his notes, it would be pretty easy to understand the concepts and solve the HW problems. One of the reasons why Prof Cui has such high reviews, in my opinion, is that he cares about the students’ success and wants everyone to do well in the class. This can be seen from his super relaxed grading scale (87.5% for an A). Furthermore, after everyone did poorly on the midterm (which I will expand on next), he offered an extra credit project and changed the test weights in our favor, which was nice. Overall, Prof Cui is definitely not a bad choice for ECE 110, and I think he will keep improving because he listens to students' feedback. My biggest complaint about this class is the TAs. In my opinion, they were the worst TAs I had ever had in my life, and I could not even find one good thing about them. Oftentimes, I would wonder why they were even getting paid to do the job. At the beginning of the quarter, I went to one of the TAs’ office hours to ask about a HW question. The TA was literally like an AI chatbot with limited responses. When I asked him about something, he would either say “sorry, I cannot answer that”, or just repeat the same “hint” over and over again, even though nobody understood what the “hint” meant. When I tried to go to the discussions for the first time, I was surprised to find out that they had just permanently cancelled our discussion session out of the blue. I honestly didn’t even know that they had the ability to do that, but I guess they did. Also, they posted an announcement on Piazza that basically forbade students from “discussing HW solutions/answers”. It was not like people were passing the HW solution around; they were mostly just trying to confirm that they got the same answer as someone else. And let’s face this, whether or not people are allowed to discuss their answers online, they are still gonna discuss in person, as long as the HW is graded for correctness. Speaking of HW, the HW assignments they gave us were an utter joke. I had never in my life seen a crooked scanned PDF of a textbook as HW assignments. It is like when they scanned the textbook, they did not even bother to hold the pages straight and take a proper picture. The midterm we had was an exact copy and paste from a previous quarter, which I assume was the TAs’ idea. It was very obvious that some people had seen the solution prior to the exam, which was unfair to everyone else. But to be fair, the midterm was not too hard if you paid attention in class and did all the HW problems on your own. The reason for the low average, in my opinion, was the TA’s way of awarding partial credit for numerical mistakes. The thing about circuits is that after you set up the equations, the rest is just all algebra, and it’s super easy to make algebraic mistakes. Many people lost a lot of points because they plugged in the numbers wrong. The final was next level compared to the midterm, and it was nothing like the practice final or any of the HW problems we had. The first question on the final was a set of true false questions, which included a lot of confusing and strange concepts. For example, do you know whether the unit of voltage in the Laplace domain is Weber or not? Well, you better do because that was one of the true and false questions. The other four questions were also challenging in their own ways, each much harder than anything we had seen in that class. What surprised me during the final was how little the TAs knew about the concepts of the class and the exam they “supposedly” designed. When we asked one of the TAs some clarification questions, he had to look up the internet to answer our questions. Even then, the answers he gave us would often still be wrong and misleading, which made the questions even more confusing. This is why I suspect they probably didn’t come up with this exam either. Well, if you have to take this class, I think you should just pray you get good TAs. Even if your TAs are as bad as ours, you would probably still end up with a good understanding of the material and good grades because of the relaxed grading scheme, which is not a bad tradeoff. And definitely try to get access to prior years’ exams to get familiar with the difficulty and the style of the questions.
Spring 2025 - I took Prof Cui for ECE 141 last quarter, and I think he overall did a better job in ECE 110 than that class (probably because this is his second time teaching ECE 110), but his ratings on BruinWalk are still a bit overhyped in my opinion. The biggest improvement of his ECE 110 over ECE 141 is that he would now post pre-lecture notes before every lecture so that we can better follow along with the lecture, instead of trying to catch up to his speed and take notes all the time. His lecture was a bit dry, primarily because he focused a lot on derivations and the theory behind equations, which could be quite boring. However, if you followed along his notes, it would be pretty easy to understand the concepts and solve the HW problems. One of the reasons why Prof Cui has such high reviews, in my opinion, is that he cares about the students’ success and wants everyone to do well in the class. This can be seen from his super relaxed grading scale (87.5% for an A). Furthermore, after everyone did poorly on the midterm (which I will expand on next), he offered an extra credit project and changed the test weights in our favor, which was nice. Overall, Prof Cui is definitely not a bad choice for ECE 110, and I think he will keep improving because he listens to students' feedback. My biggest complaint about this class is the TAs. In my opinion, they were the worst TAs I had ever had in my life, and I could not even find one good thing about them. Oftentimes, I would wonder why they were even getting paid to do the job. At the beginning of the quarter, I went to one of the TAs’ office hours to ask about a HW question. The TA was literally like an AI chatbot with limited responses. When I asked him about something, he would either say “sorry, I cannot answer that”, or just repeat the same “hint” over and over again, even though nobody understood what the “hint” meant. When I tried to go to the discussions for the first time, I was surprised to find out that they had just permanently cancelled our discussion session out of the blue. I honestly didn’t even know that they had the ability to do that, but I guess they did. Also, they posted an announcement on Piazza that basically forbade students from “discussing HW solutions/answers”. It was not like people were passing the HW solution around; they were mostly just trying to confirm that they got the same answer as someone else. And let’s face this, whether or not people are allowed to discuss their answers online, they are still gonna discuss in person, as long as the HW is graded for correctness. Speaking of HW, the HW assignments they gave us were an utter joke. I had never in my life seen a crooked scanned PDF of a textbook as HW assignments. It is like when they scanned the textbook, they did not even bother to hold the pages straight and take a proper picture. The midterm we had was an exact copy and paste from a previous quarter, which I assume was the TAs’ idea. It was very obvious that some people had seen the solution prior to the exam, which was unfair to everyone else. But to be fair, the midterm was not too hard if you paid attention in class and did all the HW problems on your own. The reason for the low average, in my opinion, was the TA’s way of awarding partial credit for numerical mistakes. The thing about circuits is that after you set up the equations, the rest is just all algebra, and it’s super easy to make algebraic mistakes. Many people lost a lot of points because they plugged in the numbers wrong. The final was next level compared to the midterm, and it was nothing like the practice final or any of the HW problems we had. The first question on the final was a set of true false questions, which included a lot of confusing and strange concepts. For example, do you know whether the unit of voltage in the Laplace domain is Weber or not? Well, you better do because that was one of the true and false questions. The other four questions were also challenging in their own ways, each much harder than anything we had seen in that class. What surprised me during the final was how little the TAs knew about the concepts of the class and the exam they “supposedly” designed. When we asked one of the TAs some clarification questions, he had to look up the internet to answer our questions. Even then, the answers he gave us would often still be wrong and misleading, which made the questions even more confusing. This is why I suspect they probably didn’t come up with this exam either. Well, if you have to take this class, I think you should just pray you get good TAs. Even if your TAs are as bad as ours, you would probably still end up with a good understanding of the material and good grades because of the relaxed grading scheme, which is not a bad tradeoff. And definitely try to get access to prior years’ exams to get familiar with the difficulty and the style of the questions.
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2024 - This class consists of 4 labs. You have two weeks to do each one. The labs consist of a lab module and a demo where you can either submit a video of yourself answering a couple questions about the lab, or if you complete the labs during lab hours, you can ask the TAs to 'check you off' where they will ask you a few questions about the lab themselves. The TAs Ramtin and Nhat are the best. They were very helpful and very understanding when it came to lab extensions. Labs were pretty easy and if you showed up to the lab hours you could get them done without ever needing to do any work at home.
Spring 2024 - This class consists of 4 labs. You have two weeks to do each one. The labs consist of a lab module and a demo where you can either submit a video of yourself answering a couple questions about the lab, or if you complete the labs during lab hours, you can ask the TAs to 'check you off' where they will ask you a few questions about the lab themselves. The TAs Ramtin and Nhat are the best. They were very helpful and very understanding when it came to lab extensions. Labs were pretty easy and if you showed up to the lab hours you could get them done without ever needing to do any work at home.
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