C.K. Yang is one of the most interesting professors I have ever had. He is often quite funny if you are paying attention, and is genuinely a good guy when you talk to him. Also one of the most articulate people I have ever met. There is just also a veil of mystery around this guy, I can't quite explain it.

Let me start this out by saying I am NOT an CE, or any other computer major. The first three weeks were pretty alright for me, and the content was pretty interesting. After that everything just felt like stuff I did not need to know, or just too involved for it to be useful to my career/life. I have never put in so much work for a class only to get absolutely cooked by exams. Maybe it's just the nature of the content, but I felt like I either really really understood how something worked, or it made absolutely no sense to me and I couldn't even start a problem. This reflected in quizzes (3 problems, all on different concepts). Admittedly, I probably could have put like 25% more effort in the class and done considerably better, I was already neglecting other classes to study for this one, so this was not entirely possible. It just did not feel like I was getting good return on investment for the content. I think CK did a pretty good job, it's clear there is a little bit of room for improvement, (mainly just presentation style) but he seems extremely willing to change if someone tells him that there is something to be improved in the class.

Honestly if he just did examples more scattered in the presentation, it would be a lot more easy to stay engaged/fully understand problem. Discussions did not have prepared material, it was up for students to ask questions to TA. This design works on paper, but in practice anyone rarely asked questions when it was clear there was a knowledge gap on a concept. I think this is kind of the whole theme with the class, and I think it's just the nature of the content/sheer amount of content that doesn't aid in making it any easier.

If you're a CE or CSE major and have already taken ECE3, this class is pretty easy. The first half of this class covers the ECE3 material with a little more detail (RLC circuits, AC circuits, op-amps, etc.) and throws in some new stuff as well (diodes, MOSFETs, etc.). I didn't attend most of the lectures since I've already taken ECE3 (plus the class ended late in the evening) and still did okay with just reading the textbook. We had six homework assignments, three quizzes (lowest dropped), and a final. The quizzes were a little harder than the homework but not by much. Handwritten lecture notes were posted on BruinLearn, but they were messy and difficult to understand.

Overall, Yang is pretty middle-of-the-road as professors go. I've had better, and I've had worse.

I have many friends who complained about the absurdity of one of the other professors who used to teach this class so I was very nervous at the beginning of the course. However, Prof. Yang makes this class so much more manageable through his fair quizzes and his effort to explain concepts in great detail. He is willing to keep the pace of his lectures slow to show us how to do all kinds of example questions, which are very similar to the homework and quiz questions. He is super approachable, open to suggestions, and very good at explaining things. However, this class is not an "easy" class where everyone gets an A. You have to make sure that you understand the lectures and homework problems. If you did those you will be fine because his assessments are very fair. Before I wrote this review, Prof. Yang has a 3.0 rating from 1 person, which I think is too low. I filled out this review because I think Prof. Yang deserves a better rating for this class. Definitely recommend taking ECE 100 with him. Hopefully he will get to teach this class more often in the future.

The tests in this course were definitely on the difficult end. There were three quizzes (worth 42% total, lowest grade dropped) and a final exam (33%). The homework (24%) was graded based on completion, which was very nice, but it often did not mirror the exact topics learned in class so I had to self-learn by reading textbooks and watching YouTube videos. Filling out the anonymous course evaluation at the end of the quarter is helpful (1%). Overall, the professor is nice, but the class is not structured well enough and is such a challenging one to get through as a Mechanical Engineering major.