I really don't like to give a bad review, but man my fellow engineers need to know about this nightmare of a class. Chaterjee is the worst professor i've ever experienced at UCLA. He is a nice guy, but that doesn't come close to making up for the cluster fuck of a class he "teaches."

Lectures- Useless. Good luck understanding what this guy is teaching, becuase I don't know anybody that did. I kept attending in hopes that maybe it would one day click. It did not. Let me give you a little anecdote so you might understand what we're working with here:

On our last class some guy in our class asked the professor to hand out the attendance sheet. Standard question, he hands this sheet out every single class for the 5% participation (which is nice bc none of my stem classes ever do this).

Chaterjee pauses for a moment, walks over to this guy, then starts commenting about him owning an iPad and how he also owns an iPad. The guy then asks for the attendance sheet once more.

Chaterjee (unprompted) starts explaining something on the board (that has nothing to do with the question).

The TA speaks up and tries to clarify what the guy is asking for.

Chaterjee says "Attendance sheet? I don't have anything like that." And then proceeds to explain how we should all not be worried about the attendance sheet- "The final is everything in this class." (45%)

Now that you know who you are dealing with, you need to hear about the final exam.

The final exam was supposed to be proctored by Chaterjee and the TA. Chaterjee shows up with about an hour left in the exam. Unprompted, looks at some dudes final exam and says he is doing the problem incorrectly. About 5 minutes passes and I hear some audio coming from the back of the room. I assume someone was trying to cheat and use their phone and they accidently opened tik tok or instagram or something. But no, the noise continues and is really quite loud, the entire room can def hear this.

I finally look back- Chaterjee is sitting in the back of the room with tik tok on full blast just scrolling his heart out. This went on for a quite some time until the TA intervenes.

We were also told that we would be able to see our final exams- We never got them. Which is just fantastic. because Chaterjee made a bunch of grading mistakes on the midterm exam, and I HEARD (keep in mind I heard this from other students so it might not be true) that a handful of students were just given zero credit on one problem of the midterm because Chaterjee didn't understand how gradescope worked.

I hope you can see by now that nobody should subject themselves to this delusional experience- just take someone else.

Our TA was pretty great though- discussions were the only way to get any kind of information, other than youtube, etc.

Professor Chatterjee is the worst professor I have taken at UCLA…. Let me go on a tangent as to why:

HIS SLIDES ARE GOD AWFUL! The slides are always cluttered with MANY derivations which don’t even make sense since they all over the place. This makes it difficult to interpret and to learn in an environment where the class is 2 HOURS LONG. Moreover, he is such a slow lecturer. What I mean by this is that it takes him almost the entire class to finish like 8-10 slides; he then asks his students to look at the remaining 20-50 slides (sometimes even more!) on our own time, so he can "cover" other stuff. However, like I said earlier, his slides are very difficult to understand, so it is pointless to even look at them, which resorted to me watching Jeff Hanson (GOD BLESS THIS GUY) to understand the covered concepts. Like the other person said, he is "technologically inept” since it took him a long time to even set up his horrendous slides. The class was NOT engaging at ALL, since he is unable to teach the concepts well. Most students just ignored him after realizing that they wouldn’t learn a single thing from him; those who did listen had no idea what he was talking about, since he would often mumble to himself if what he was doing was correct. Attendance is mandatory (worth 5% of your grade).... even though he himself is late to class every time. If he was graded for attendance he would automatically get an F on that aspect. During the final hour of the final exam, which our TA mainly proctored, Professor Chatterjee, entered the room, seemed to not know what was going on, sat in the back of the class, and started watching Tik Tok videos at max volume while we were still taking the EXAM! I just find it funny and ridiculous how this professor has not retired yet.

OVERALL, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE (I CAN'T EMPHASIZE THIS ENOUGH) take 101 with a different professor. If you have to, I suggest going to your TA's office hours and watching Jeff Hanson on youtube. They will carry you the entire class. Jeff Hanson has two playlists, one for Statics and one for Strengths of Materials (Called Mechanics of Materials on his playlist).

TLDR: This professor is a dinosaur and will not teach you anything about Statics and Strengths of Materials for 10 weeks. I wish those who take him the best of luck.

Amiya Chatterjee is the single worst professor I've had in all of my engineering classes at UCLA.

He's too old. I told my upperclassmen friends I had him and they were surprised to hear he's still alive. He's a fossil. Technologically inept. Can't use bruin learn to save his life. Walks at a snails pace. And is just otherwise simple. The syllabus was outdated 3 times over - as in, he posted the course with 3 syllabi all from previous sessions that were all inaccurate or incomplete. If I didn't email him to fix it, he wouldn't have.

Not once has he ever arrived to class on time. Our class started at 10, and he consistently walked in the door at 10:10 and started lecturing at 10:20. The amount of time wasting, nonsense, and incompetence that happened in those 10 minutes was astounding. Not once did he ever apologize for his tardiness. He would fiddle with the computer, determine it didn't work properly, show up to class with the wrong technology, call the tech support to complain about the amount of USB ports on his computer, ask his TA to fix his iPad. It was a literal circus.

Lectures are the biggest waste of time ever conceived. He has a bit of an accent, but he's unintelligible because he's god-awful, not because of his English. The slides are so bad. Think of the worst slides you can imagine. It's worse than that. Obviously he doesn't actually lecture, derive, write on the giant chalkboards, or do anything besides present his slideshow. He dumps massive diagrams on the screen with full derivations printed in text. And then, in itty bitty red handwriting, he annotates the full derivation while he talks about it. How are we reasonably expected to process what he's saying while also copying down the formula landfill that's projected on screen (keep in mind, the lights are on in the front of the room so there's a glare on the board). The slideshow contains scanned images from y2k, rather than screenshots of reasonable graphics. Our TA is literally teaching him how to use an iPad right now. Yes I'm writing this during lecture because that's the most productive use of my time.

The funny thing is, in week 8 he came out of a department meeting on some shit about reforming his teaching style and actually writing things down. But did his lecture quality improve? No. It's always the full derivation posted. It's never any useful information. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. The slides are still full of complete derivations. And we have the pleasure of watching him annotate them, live in class.

Did I mention he takes attendance during lecture? And again, he's never been on time himself. But of course every lecture is mandatory and never recorded.

Here's another doozy - he's confrontational. In the beginning, we would naively ask Chatterjee questions during class, as the good students that we were. Here's the breakdown. When you ask him a question, he cuts you off (because he's probably deaf) and then takes a step forward in the aisle and asks you to repeat yourself. When you finally get the question out, he'll either criticize you, ask you defend yourself on the board, or just answer an unrelated question. His communication skills are not just lacking, they left to pick up milk and never came back.

So what are your options to learn besides lecture? Well it's not the textbook. This clown uses the first edition of the textbook. Is this edition available for sale, on Inclusive Access, or even pirateable? No of course not. So if you can scavenge a copy of the current 5th edition, it won't help anyways since it diverges at week 6 or so. God forbid he assign a current textbook that covers both statics and strength of materials. Right now he's explaining a differential equation solving method when this class's only prerequisite is Math 31AB and Physics 1A. It's a shitshow out here.

The TA is the saving grace, and is often the saving grace in any class he teaches. Vaibhav runs the entire class, write the quizzes and midterms, explains things clearly and concisely, and is the only reason anybody walks out of this class with any understanding whatsoever. I'm getting an A because of him and him alone.

Our class is less than 50% enrollment. Most students know better than to take this class with Chatterjee. For my TA, the homework, midterm (and hopefully final) were all super easy. But the only constant in this class is Chatterjee's uselessness. For everybody's sake, I hope administration guides him to his long-awaited retirement. Otherwise, pray for a good TA.

He uses the first edition textbook, which is basically off the internet and bookstores. Then, the slides is a culmination of everything he has for the past decades. It is just unorganized. The ta Naarendharan Meenakshi Sundaram carried the class. I learned mostly during discussion. Prof. Chatterjee is nice and the only professor that has offered his phone number to students so that they can reach him, but it's hard to understand his explanations. Additionally, he is a harsh grader. He also did not curve the final, which is 50% of the final grade despite the average was very low. So yeah, take this class with someone else if you can.

I took this class online SU23 and I think we single handedly made Prof Chatterjee never want to teach an online class again. The lectures were incredibly dry and unhelpful, though the exams felt fair if you completed all the homework assignments. The slides were very messy. He would include example problems that were already solved on the slide, so he didn't really teach us how to solve them since he just loosely read the solution that was already there. Attendance was 5% of the final grade in this class, but it was unclear how he was keeping track of that tbh, it led to a lot of people logging on and letting the lecture run just for the sake of being there for attendance. He got fed up with the lack of participation, so he started to call names in the last few lectures. On the other hand, if you asked a question and didn't immediately accept his answer, he would get tired of explaining it after a few back and forths.

Don't get me wrong, Prof Chatterjee is a very nice person, he does try his best to cater to all of his students. The online format just makes his teaching style miserable on both ends. If you can, find a different professor to take this class with. I've heard good things about this class under someone else's instruction.

Professor Chatterjee is one of the worst professors I've ever had at UCLA. His lectures are extraordinarily useless. I would only ever attend lectures for attendance, and most people stopped showing up after the first couple of weeks as they were always a waste of time.

He is too old to be teaching anymore and he could never hear or comprehend his students when they asked questions. He often spent 20 minutes of the lecture struggling with simple tasks on the projector. His voice was too soft and lectures were very slowly paced making it impossible to pay attention. One time in the middle of a lecture he stopped talking about the topic and started going on a little spiel about how he knows he can't teach well but that he knows the material well.

The class was also very disorganized with messy/cluttered slides, and homework problems often were missing needed figures. The professor also often explained topics differently from the way the TA explained them which caused conflict in how we should solve problems. I only really learned anything from doing the homework.

Tests were also very hard and the grading distribution sucks with 10% homework 5% participation and 85% tests/quizzes. The average on the final for reference was 42%.

This guy needs to retire and let someone else who can actually teach the class teach it. Avoid this professor at all costs.

He's the nicest guy, although his lecture's aren't the greatest. Jeff Hanson carried me through this class, and Prof. Chatterjee's grading was also very lenient. I don't understand the bad reviews, this class, although it wasn't the greatest, was doable and interesting.

I saw plenty of horrible reviews of Chatterjee from past COVID quarters (when he taught 82) and was almost dissuaded from taking this class this quarter, but then I decided to give it a chance. While it’s true that his lecturing isn’t great and his slides are jam-packed with information to the point that they’re almost unreadable, I have to give him credit for being the most helpful and available professor I’ve ever had at UCLA. He even gave us his phone number and told us to call him at any time we had a question about the course material, in which he would almost immediately set up a Zoom meeting for some one-on-one discussion. He never hesitates in explaining a concept in multiple different ways to make sure that you fully understand the mechanics (pardon the pun) behind the materials. I wish I started going to office hours a lot sooner in the quarter, since my understanding of the course content prior to and after the midterm was like night and day thanks to his explanations.
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That’s unfortunately where the positives end. Here is a general breakdown of the grading scheme and my opinion on each component:
Homework: 10%
Quizzes: 10% each
Midterm: 20%
Final: 50%
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Lectures: Like I said earlier, they were pretty hard to follow. While they were definitely thorough, they were extremely disorganised. There was just way too much information jam-packed on a single slide which made it difficult to pay attention during lecture and difficult to use as a study tool. Honestly the most helpful part of his lectures was when he opened up a separate slide and derived equations and solutions to problems by hand, but he rarely did this. For the most part, he was just reading from the slides, which honestly was not particularly engaging, especially since the lecture was an hour and 50 minutes straight with no break.. He did stop often to ask if we had any questions, further lending credence to the fact that he was a very helpful professor. I was tempted to stop going to lectures and just watch online YouTube videos (look up Jeff Hanson - he’s a lifesaver), but a lot of the information in the lectures does come up on exams.
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Homework: Questions were straight from the textbook. They spanned a good range of difficulty, with some extremely easy questions to others that may take a few hours of thought. He provided the numerical solutions to problems but didn't tell us how to solve them, which was great because it gave us an easy check to ensure our solution was correct. If you really get stuck, you can find the solution guide to the entire book on Library Genesis, but I don’t recommend looking at this until you’ve tried the problem yourself in multiple different ways. The homework also was not assigned weekly. PDF files just appeared on CCLE out of nowhere and we had a week to complete it.
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Discussion: We had a weekly optional discussion. The TA would go over a worksheet (which just consisted of additional exercises from the book). Like the other users said, it was nice to see someone talk and work through the problems live, since that part of learning was absent from lecture.
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Quizzes: Both quizzes were only two questions, and we were given an hour to complete them. The first quiz was extremely easy, but there was a twist in one of the problems. Chatterjee has a grading policy where if you mess up something fundamental about the problem (like misinterpreting the question or drawing the wrong free body diagram) you would get a 0. I messed up the FBD on literally the easiest exam problem in the entire class and I was contemplating taking the course P/NP week 3. But he really only says this to scare you and to emphasize that this is in fact a statics course and these are the most important aspects of the material. The second quiz, however, was extremely difficult. The entire exam had no numbers on it, and we had to write out answers in terms of a million variables. I never knew what grade I got on it, but I assume it wasn’t good.
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Midterm: About the same difficulty as the first quiz, just four questions instead of two.
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Final: Chatterjee definitely talked up the importance of the final exam, and I think this was the reason why I ended up doing well in the class. The final made up 50% of our grade, or 100% if we did better on it than everything before it. There were six questions in total, all from material in the latter part of the class. Half of the test questions were on beam deflections, which we covered the last two weeks of class but we never had homework for it. The rest of it was on torsion of circular shafts, stresses and strains, and friction. I think if I had some additional practice on beam deflection I probably would have been more comfortable going into it. Thankfully, the other half of the test was fairly straightforward. I honestly felt that the way the final exam was structured was a bit unfair - given that it was such a large percentage of our final grade, I think it would have made sense to cover material from both the statics section and mechanics of materials section equally. He did give us a practice final from 2016 to help us study, which was very nice of him. The practice exam was a lot more difficult than the actual exam too.
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Overall: Chatterjee isn’t the greatest lecturer and I don’t like how his class was structured. The tests ranged from straightforward to extremely difficult. However he was extremely available and always made time to help us on a one-on-one basis. In the unlikely event that this class is taught in an online format by him some time in the future, I wouldn’t recommend it. But seeing his reviews from pre-COVID quarters makes me think that he is much better in in-person, so do with that as you will.

To be honest, I think he just struggled a bit with the online format. His slides were often cluttered, hard to understand, and it would take you a second or two to actually figure out what he's trying to express. But after you get it, he actually isn't all that bad of a professor. I think I learned the first chapters very well from him, but I will say that you will very likely need to use outside resources like youtube to really understand the concepts.

The last couple chapters, which dealt with circular shafts and beam bending, were what made me take this class P/NP. I was doing alright until then but for some reason, these concepts did not stick in my mind and from what I've heard from other students, this was an exceptionally challenging section as well. I found youtube videos to be much more helpful than the class during this time.

His tests were very hit and miss. Sometimes they were very conceptual and difficult problems that did not look like our homework at all, which was pure straightforward calculation. Sometimes the test problems were almost exactly like homework problems.

In the end though, I can tell he genuinely does care about teaching, and I think the online format messed with him as it did with all of us. I'd say if you do have to take him, don't get too scared but just watch yourself near the end.

Lectures: quite challenging in the online environment. His slides can get really full and difficult to decipher, and he's not the best at online lecturing.

Discussions: really nice to be able to hear the concepts explained by another person, and he has good exercise problems too

Homework: good practice for the lecture concepts, but does not seem to reflect the type of questions he gives on the exams

Exams: tends to include some conceptual questions and a lot of letters (very little numbers). They can be quite difficult.

Overall: he's a really nice professor but he doesn't always teach you everything you need to know. There are YouTube channels which you should definitely watch on top of his lectures, and expect to have to study beyond looking at the resources that he gives.