Behzad Razavi
Department of Electrical Engineering
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3.3
Overall Rating
Based on 15 Users
Easiness 2.7 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 3.5 / 5 How clear the class is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Workload 3.0 / 5 How much workload the class is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Helpfulness 3.0 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Appropriately Priced Materials
  • Needs Textbook
  • Is Podcasted
  • Tolerates Tardiness
  • Tough Tests
GRADE DISTRIBUTIONS
17.8%
14.8%
11.9%
8.9%
5.9%
3.0%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

28.0%
23.3%
18.7%
14.0%
9.3%
4.7%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

25.0%
20.8%
16.7%
12.5%
8.3%
4.2%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

ENROLLMENT DISTRIBUTIONS
Clear marks

Sorry, no enrollment data is available.

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Reviews (10)

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Quarter: Fall 2021
Grade: A
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 7, 2021

I had heard a lot of negative things about this class (I put off taking it for as long as I could). After reading other reviews here once I'd finally enrolled, my nerves were definitely not abated due to comments about how the class was when Razavi taught it online. However, for in-person, I thought that his teaching was very clear and that his exams were fair. Discussion worksheets helped to solidify concepts and clarify cases that weren't elaborated upon in lecture. I actually ended up kinda liking the material, which really came as a shock to me. Razavi gives tips on how to succeed in the class on the syllabus - follow them, he's taught the class many times and knows what works (I followed them mostly except for one or two weeks of the quarter - guess what concepts I missed on the midterm). He'd drop a joke here and there, but it took a few seconds for everyone to realize he'd just said something funny. Anyway, if you're taking this class, it's probably because you have to, so you might as well take it with Razavi.

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Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: N/A
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 6, 2020

(Copying and pasting my Course Evaluation)

Professor,
The way you presented class material and assignments makes me believe that your goal was to spend the least amount of time possible teaching this course. I am incredibly upset with the way this course was run.

The assignments given in this course were not related to the lecture. The tests, even less so. It seemed like your goal was to put the minimum effort into evaluating our performance in this class. You even stated that you did not want to use Gradescope, which would have given students' a chance to demonstrate their knowledge, because it would be "too much work" for you. If your assignments were a 100 m sprint, the tests were a marathon - we were in no way, shape, or form prepared for them.

You did give students the ability to take tests in one of two time slots. However, the format of the tests did not allow me to demonstrate how much I had learned. Outside of your tests, I am able to explain the concepts to my friends and help them. But your tests did not measure my understanding of the concepts. Your tests measured "gotcha" cases that did not appear in the lectures or homework. (The tests were 40-50 min and contained 4 all or nothing questions which you answered on CCLE. With only 4 tests for the entire quarter, making a small mistake was worth a large portion of your final grade.)

To top it off, I have no idea how I'm doing in the class. Even though they have decent reviews from before the pandemic, Behzad has no idea how to teach an online course.

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Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 19, 2020

Lectures are a good pace and very easy to follow. People complained that the professor didn't lecture live on zoom, but I didn't mind it. He would play pre-recorded lectures, and then stop every so often to take questions from the chat. The lectures themselves were extremely well made, and it made it really easy to understand and learn the material. There are 7 homeworks that are due about once a week, and they not too hard, but kind of time consuming. The homework material definitely helped reinforced whatever was learned during class, and it is good portion of the grade (20%).

Exams for the COVID quarter were all done through CCLE, and through numerical answers only. This also means that there is basically no partial credit given. There were 5 exams, with one getting cancelled completely, and your lowest of the remaining 4 getting dropped. The exams themselves were REALLY easy if you understand the fundamentals of the material (for example, for one of the exams, 4 of the 5 questions has an answer of 0), but the all-or-nothing credit and short time (40-50 minutes) can definitely add to pressure. I personally didn't mind the ccle format of exams, but a lot of people protested it, and the professor eventually added ways to get partial credit (just more questions on ccle, with each question being a smaller part). The final was done the same way, and was also pretty easy.

Overall, the class is great, lecture material is presented really well. Homework is not too bad. Exams are a little stressful due to time/format but otherwise pretty easy. I recommend everyone take Razavi for this course. Just make sure to watch lectures and do hw!

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
Oct. 16, 2020

Love this man, weekly homework thats pretty doable, midterm very similar to practice test he gave out (avg high 60s). Big dad energy, very nice, discussion was useless.

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Quarter: Fall 2021
Grade: A-
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 22, 2021

Razavi is pretty nice. He knows he's teaching the "non-EE" electronics class and acts/teaches accordingly. Whether that's a good thing entirely depends on you. But most of the material he covers should be pretty straightforward after your physics course on electromagnetism.

My chief complaint about Razavi was that he lectured on three whiteboards at the front of a giant auditorium. He argued that students should get seats near the front of class if they had trouble seeing the boards, but these seats were already too competitive. If you had a class immediately before this one, you had no chance to get a good seat. Aside from that, I think Razavi was great.

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Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Jan. 4, 2021

This was taken during COVID online lectures. Professor Razavi was a so-so professor. He was clear in his teaching, but often would not teach very important things that we then had homework on. He was detailed in what he taught, but did not teach all the details we needed. His quizzes offered absolutely 0 partial credit. His final was at least somewhat more forgiving with more parts that acted as partial credit, but quizzes in class were basically 5 questions and only your answer mattered.

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Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Jan. 3, 2021

I think there were some mixed reviews after Professor Razavi's most recent teaching of this course and I wanted to chime in with my opinion on my past quarter. In my personal experience, there were a lot of highs and lows of this course. For me, the highs and positives of Professor Razavi's teaching outweighed the lows, but this may not be the case for everyone.
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.
I would like to first mention that one of the biggest things I noticed while taking this course is that Professor Razavi did an amazing job with his recorded lectures. EE100 is a notoriously difficult course and attending every single one of the lectures live was a very important part of doing well for me. The professor was very clear with his explanations of ideas, he would lay out a problem and take it step by step which made the content much easier to swallow. When working through a problem, I always appreciated that after doing a a basic first analysis of a circuit he would take a moment to pause and allow us to digest what we are seeing and start to make guesses and assumptions ourselves. A lot of professors have not been able to move over to an online setting and keep a good pace that students can follow, Razavi had it right on the dot. Weird touch, but I found his voice while lecturing to be very easy and nice to listen to and I never found myself either annoyed or bored by two hour lectures.
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With all this, it must be mentioned that his online lectures are recorded and replayed during lecture. He occasionally stops the recording at important parts to answer questions and extend on anything if needed. By reading the reviews, it seems some people do not like this and see it as a lack of effort. I had no problem with this format. It takes the same effort, if not more, for a professor to prerecord lectures and I felt it led to better lecture quality and provided better answers to questions.
.
.
Homework in this course was pretty fair and I think it did a good job of helping us understand the content and learn the process of analyzing different circuit.
.
.
Now comes the ugly parts of the class. Exams and communication. The administering of exams was one of the weirdest things I have seen so far during online classes and I'm really confused as to why things were done the way they were. Exams were done on CCLE and credit was only given for the exact numerical solution(with a tolerance of like .1% or something like that). This made is VERY easy to make a mistake in directions of current and voltage signs as well as losing all credit if you make a calculation error while doing a problem. I had my share of experiences forgetting a negative sign or using the wrong units (mA vs A) and had some incorrect answers. I think it was quite a bad move and really unfair that these grades were often tainted by things that really did not display a lack of understanding. I think this really screwed with gauging how good some students were with the material.
.
.
Despite the exam format and idea being pretty flawed, this was somewhat made up by the fact that the exams really weren't all that hard. If you really had a good understanding for how these circuits worked by paying attention in class and doing some critical thinking, you would be able to spot the many shortcuts in the problems that made analysis significantly easier. This often meant that exams would have multiple answers that were simply '0' because a component of a circuit could not take a jump in current or would equate to a short circuit. This as well as the exams being pretty fair on time meant that answers were somewhat easy to get and could be checked multiple times before the time limit was reached.
.
.
The second ugly portion of this class was the communication. There really isn't much to say here except that it only consisted of indirect communication with the professor through the TAs(who really weren't very helpful and were very much minimalists when it came to responses) and a Piazza that mostly consisted of students complaining about exam timings, formats, or credit. It kinda sucked.
.
.
TLDR: This is a really long review. To make it short, the lectures turned out to be one of my most understandable of any online quarter, the exams were quite ugly in format and a bad decision but if you knew the basic principles of the material and made sure you used your time wisely they really weren't all that dangerous, and the communication in this class was probably the worst part, but if you are a student like me that doesn't make much contact with the professors and TAs and works through a course mostly on your own and with other students, it isn't much of a problem. Overall a 4/5 course for me but could easily be 5/5 without some problems that could've really easily been fixed.

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Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 25, 2020

I want to preface this with the fact that I took this course 100% online due to COVID-19.

Professor Razavi had a very difficult time adapting to online learning. He explained concepts well and used real-world examples to break down how the topics we covered are relevant, but his presentation was what prevented me from being confident in my understanding of this material.
Instead of just posting pre-recorded lectures to CCLE where students could watch them at their own pace, he would "watch" them during lecture hours and pause periodically to answer any questions that students had. Though a good idea in theory, the video quality was constantly terrible to the point where I could not read what was on the screen. Additionally, the approach to testing in this class was nothing short of lazy and did not allow for students to demonstrate a full understanding of the course material. Tests were conducted through CCLE and required us to input numbers correct to two decimal places.

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Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: B+
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 24, 2020

The structure the professor used for this quarter was just awful. I don't know if he'll change at all because of all the negative feedback, but it was pretty miserable for me. I thought the professor was extremely unresponsive (he doesn't give out his own email, just a group email that the TA's answer, and only the TAs respond through piazza. Even group emails about class information were sent out through the TAs). It felt like he was purposefully unreachable so that we couldn't ask him questions outside of lecture, and even in lecture he dodged a lot of our questions about the course structure (grading, curving, test format). While I understand these are annoying questions, they were important to us and I would've appreciated a little more clarity. As far as the tests themselves, I thought they could've been pretty easy. Unfortunately, I am not good with quick, high pressure tests, so this format literally made me sick to my stomach. They were very simple and straightforward, but you had to quickly do calculations and remember small details and trick problems under high pressure. It didn't help that every test was this way, so if this isn't a good style for you, too bad. It was like fully studying for a midterm every two weeks, so I had a mini panic attack each time. If that sounds like something that will make you miserable, I highly recommend taking a different professor. HW and lectures were fairly easy and straightforward. I actually thought Professor Razavi was a very good lecturer and definitely knew what he was talking about. I thought playing pre-recorded videos (from a few years ago) was a little lazy. Combined with dodging our questions, using ccle quizzes for rapid grading despite our objections, ignoring all commentary from the class, and the anxiety many students were facing, it really felt like Professor Razavi wasn't committed to us. Overall, this class turned out okay and it was a pretty light workload, but I found it was completely miserable and high-stress for my work style.

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Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: B+
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Dec. 19, 2020

I don't know how Prof Razavi teaches in person classes, its fully possible that he is a good professor for in person professors, but he was a pretty poor professor for the remote fall 2020 quarter.

"Lecture" consists of the professor streaming a pre-recorded lecture of the video on zoom and occasionally asking if there are questions. The video quality of these lectures by themselves is already pretty poor but watching them through zoom makes them pixilated to the point where you cannot watch them anymore. These pre-recorded lectures were thankfully on youtube as well, so half way through the quarter I stopped trying to figure out what was written during live lecture and just watch the same content there instead. Prof Razavi should really either lecture live or go full flipped classroom and just use lecture time for questions instead of doing a pointless stream of a video that no one can see.

These pre-recorded lectures were decent, nothing particularly special, the camera quality wasn't amazing but what he wrote was at least readable.

The main saving grace of this class is that it was easy, at least based on my experience. I believe this class taught less content than it should have since supposedly course evals mentioned a few topics like BJTs that were not covered in my experience with the class. Beside that its a basic circuits class, the most difficult topic covered are RLC second order diffeqs and even that is just barely touched. On the other hand, this also means I didn't really learn anything in this class, it was basically all review of ECE3.

Instead of midterms/finals, the professor gave small CCLE quizzes every 2 weeks. These were pretty easy imo, some complained that these didn't allow room for partial credit because we only submitted numerical answers, but these were easy enough that IMO it didn't matter all that much.

The homeworks were also pretty alright, nothing too bad.

Overall I don't think Prof Razavi has adapted well to remote learning in any sense, leading to by far the most problems in this class.

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2021
Grade: A
Dec. 7, 2021

I had heard a lot of negative things about this class (I put off taking it for as long as I could). After reading other reviews here once I'd finally enrolled, my nerves were definitely not abated due to comments about how the class was when Razavi taught it online. However, for in-person, I thought that his teaching was very clear and that his exams were fair. Discussion worksheets helped to solidify concepts and clarify cases that weren't elaborated upon in lecture. I actually ended up kinda liking the material, which really came as a shock to me. Razavi gives tips on how to succeed in the class on the syllabus - follow them, he's taught the class many times and knows what works (I followed them mostly except for one or two weeks of the quarter - guess what concepts I missed on the midterm). He'd drop a joke here and there, but it took a few seconds for everyone to realize he'd just said something funny. Anyway, if you're taking this class, it's probably because you have to, so you might as well take it with Razavi.

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: N/A
Dec. 6, 2020

(Copying and pasting my Course Evaluation)

Professor,
The way you presented class material and assignments makes me believe that your goal was to spend the least amount of time possible teaching this course. I am incredibly upset with the way this course was run.

The assignments given in this course were not related to the lecture. The tests, even less so. It seemed like your goal was to put the minimum effort into evaluating our performance in this class. You even stated that you did not want to use Gradescope, which would have given students' a chance to demonstrate their knowledge, because it would be "too much work" for you. If your assignments were a 100 m sprint, the tests were a marathon - we were in no way, shape, or form prepared for them.

You did give students the ability to take tests in one of two time slots. However, the format of the tests did not allow me to demonstrate how much I had learned. Outside of your tests, I am able to explain the concepts to my friends and help them. But your tests did not measure my understanding of the concepts. Your tests measured "gotcha" cases that did not appear in the lectures or homework. (The tests were 40-50 min and contained 4 all or nothing questions which you answered on CCLE. With only 4 tests for the entire quarter, making a small mistake was worth a large portion of your final grade.)

To top it off, I have no idea how I'm doing in the class. Even though they have decent reviews from before the pandemic, Behzad has no idea how to teach an online course.

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+
Dec. 19, 2020

Lectures are a good pace and very easy to follow. People complained that the professor didn't lecture live on zoom, but I didn't mind it. He would play pre-recorded lectures, and then stop every so often to take questions from the chat. The lectures themselves were extremely well made, and it made it really easy to understand and learn the material. There are 7 homeworks that are due about once a week, and they not too hard, but kind of time consuming. The homework material definitely helped reinforced whatever was learned during class, and it is good portion of the grade (20%).

Exams for the COVID quarter were all done through CCLE, and through numerical answers only. This also means that there is basically no partial credit given. There were 5 exams, with one getting cancelled completely, and your lowest of the remaining 4 getting dropped. The exams themselves were REALLY easy if you understand the fundamentals of the material (for example, for one of the exams, 4 of the 5 questions has an answer of 0), but the all-or-nothing credit and short time (40-50 minutes) can definitely add to pressure. I personally didn't mind the ccle format of exams, but a lot of people protested it, and the professor eventually added ways to get partial credit (just more questions on ccle, with each question being a smaller part). The final was done the same way, and was also pretty easy.

Overall, the class is great, lecture material is presented really well. Homework is not too bad. Exams are a little stressful due to time/format but otherwise pretty easy. I recommend everyone take Razavi for this course. Just make sure to watch lectures and do hw!

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
Oct. 16, 2020

Love this man, weekly homework thats pretty doable, midterm very similar to practice test he gave out (avg high 60s). Big dad energy, very nice, discussion was useless.

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2021
Grade: A-
Dec. 22, 2021

Razavi is pretty nice. He knows he's teaching the "non-EE" electronics class and acts/teaches accordingly. Whether that's a good thing entirely depends on you. But most of the material he covers should be pretty straightforward after your physics course on electromagnetism.

My chief complaint about Razavi was that he lectured on three whiteboards at the front of a giant auditorium. He argued that students should get seats near the front of class if they had trouble seeing the boards, but these seats were already too competitive. If you had a class immediately before this one, you had no chance to get a good seat. Aside from that, I think Razavi was great.

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
Jan. 4, 2021

This was taken during COVID online lectures. Professor Razavi was a so-so professor. He was clear in his teaching, but often would not teach very important things that we then had homework on. He was detailed in what he taught, but did not teach all the details we needed. His quizzes offered absolutely 0 partial credit. His final was at least somewhat more forgiving with more parts that acted as partial credit, but quizzes in class were basically 5 questions and only your answer mattered.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+
Jan. 3, 2021

I think there were some mixed reviews after Professor Razavi's most recent teaching of this course and I wanted to chime in with my opinion on my past quarter. In my personal experience, there were a lot of highs and lows of this course. For me, the highs and positives of Professor Razavi's teaching outweighed the lows, but this may not be the case for everyone.
.
.
I would like to first mention that one of the biggest things I noticed while taking this course is that Professor Razavi did an amazing job with his recorded lectures. EE100 is a notoriously difficult course and attending every single one of the lectures live was a very important part of doing well for me. The professor was very clear with his explanations of ideas, he would lay out a problem and take it step by step which made the content much easier to swallow. When working through a problem, I always appreciated that after doing a a basic first analysis of a circuit he would take a moment to pause and allow us to digest what we are seeing and start to make guesses and assumptions ourselves. A lot of professors have not been able to move over to an online setting and keep a good pace that students can follow, Razavi had it right on the dot. Weird touch, but I found his voice while lecturing to be very easy and nice to listen to and I never found myself either annoyed or bored by two hour lectures.
.
.
With all this, it must be mentioned that his online lectures are recorded and replayed during lecture. He occasionally stops the recording at important parts to answer questions and extend on anything if needed. By reading the reviews, it seems some people do not like this and see it as a lack of effort. I had no problem with this format. It takes the same effort, if not more, for a professor to prerecord lectures and I felt it led to better lecture quality and provided better answers to questions.
.
.
Homework in this course was pretty fair and I think it did a good job of helping us understand the content and learn the process of analyzing different circuit.
.
.
Now comes the ugly parts of the class. Exams and communication. The administering of exams was one of the weirdest things I have seen so far during online classes and I'm really confused as to why things were done the way they were. Exams were done on CCLE and credit was only given for the exact numerical solution(with a tolerance of like .1% or something like that). This made is VERY easy to make a mistake in directions of current and voltage signs as well as losing all credit if you make a calculation error while doing a problem. I had my share of experiences forgetting a negative sign or using the wrong units (mA vs A) and had some incorrect answers. I think it was quite a bad move and really unfair that these grades were often tainted by things that really did not display a lack of understanding. I think this really screwed with gauging how good some students were with the material.
.
.
Despite the exam format and idea being pretty flawed, this was somewhat made up by the fact that the exams really weren't all that hard. If you really had a good understanding for how these circuits worked by paying attention in class and doing some critical thinking, you would be able to spot the many shortcuts in the problems that made analysis significantly easier. This often meant that exams would have multiple answers that were simply '0' because a component of a circuit could not take a jump in current or would equate to a short circuit. This as well as the exams being pretty fair on time meant that answers were somewhat easy to get and could be checked multiple times before the time limit was reached.
.
.
The second ugly portion of this class was the communication. There really isn't much to say here except that it only consisted of indirect communication with the professor through the TAs(who really weren't very helpful and were very much minimalists when it came to responses) and a Piazza that mostly consisted of students complaining about exam timings, formats, or credit. It kinda sucked.
.
.
TLDR: This is a really long review. To make it short, the lectures turned out to be one of my most understandable of any online quarter, the exams were quite ugly in format and a bad decision but if you knew the basic principles of the material and made sure you used your time wisely they really weren't all that dangerous, and the communication in this class was probably the worst part, but if you are a student like me that doesn't make much contact with the professors and TAs and works through a course mostly on your own and with other students, it isn't much of a problem. Overall a 4/5 course for me but could easily be 5/5 without some problems that could've really easily been fixed.

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
Dec. 25, 2020

I want to preface this with the fact that I took this course 100% online due to COVID-19.

Professor Razavi had a very difficult time adapting to online learning. He explained concepts well and used real-world examples to break down how the topics we covered are relevant, but his presentation was what prevented me from being confident in my understanding of this material.
Instead of just posting pre-recorded lectures to CCLE where students could watch them at their own pace, he would "watch" them during lecture hours and pause periodically to answer any questions that students had. Though a good idea in theory, the video quality was constantly terrible to the point where I could not read what was on the screen. Additionally, the approach to testing in this class was nothing short of lazy and did not allow for students to demonstrate a full understanding of the course material. Tests were conducted through CCLE and required us to input numbers correct to two decimal places.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: B+
Dec. 24, 2020

The structure the professor used for this quarter was just awful. I don't know if he'll change at all because of all the negative feedback, but it was pretty miserable for me. I thought the professor was extremely unresponsive (he doesn't give out his own email, just a group email that the TA's answer, and only the TAs respond through piazza. Even group emails about class information were sent out through the TAs). It felt like he was purposefully unreachable so that we couldn't ask him questions outside of lecture, and even in lecture he dodged a lot of our questions about the course structure (grading, curving, test format). While I understand these are annoying questions, they were important to us and I would've appreciated a little more clarity. As far as the tests themselves, I thought they could've been pretty easy. Unfortunately, I am not good with quick, high pressure tests, so this format literally made me sick to my stomach. They were very simple and straightforward, but you had to quickly do calculations and remember small details and trick problems under high pressure. It didn't help that every test was this way, so if this isn't a good style for you, too bad. It was like fully studying for a midterm every two weeks, so I had a mini panic attack each time. If that sounds like something that will make you miserable, I highly recommend taking a different professor. HW and lectures were fairly easy and straightforward. I actually thought Professor Razavi was a very good lecturer and definitely knew what he was talking about. I thought playing pre-recorded videos (from a few years ago) was a little lazy. Combined with dodging our questions, using ccle quizzes for rapid grading despite our objections, ignoring all commentary from the class, and the anxiety many students were facing, it really felt like Professor Razavi wasn't committed to us. Overall, this class turned out okay and it was a pretty light workload, but I found it was completely miserable and high-stress for my work style.

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COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: B+
Dec. 19, 2020

I don't know how Prof Razavi teaches in person classes, its fully possible that he is a good professor for in person professors, but he was a pretty poor professor for the remote fall 2020 quarter.

"Lecture" consists of the professor streaming a pre-recorded lecture of the video on zoom and occasionally asking if there are questions. The video quality of these lectures by themselves is already pretty poor but watching them through zoom makes them pixilated to the point where you cannot watch them anymore. These pre-recorded lectures were thankfully on youtube as well, so half way through the quarter I stopped trying to figure out what was written during live lecture and just watch the same content there instead. Prof Razavi should really either lecture live or go full flipped classroom and just use lecture time for questions instead of doing a pointless stream of a video that no one can see.

These pre-recorded lectures were decent, nothing particularly special, the camera quality wasn't amazing but what he wrote was at least readable.

The main saving grace of this class is that it was easy, at least based on my experience. I believe this class taught less content than it should have since supposedly course evals mentioned a few topics like BJTs that were not covered in my experience with the class. Beside that its a basic circuits class, the most difficult topic covered are RLC second order diffeqs and even that is just barely touched. On the other hand, this also means I didn't really learn anything in this class, it was basically all review of ECE3.

Instead of midterms/finals, the professor gave small CCLE quizzes every 2 weeks. These were pretty easy imo, some complained that these didn't allow room for partial credit because we only submitted numerical answers, but these were easy enough that IMO it didn't matter all that much.

The homeworks were also pretty alright, nothing too bad.

Overall I don't think Prof Razavi has adapted well to remote learning in any sense, leading to by far the most problems in this class.

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3.3
Overall Rating
Based on 15 Users
Easiness 2.7 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 3.5 / 5 How clear the class is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Workload 3.0 / 5 How much workload the class is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Helpfulness 3.0 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

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