This class is so much more of a headache than it is worth. Somehow I would go to lectures and be more confused about various topics than just going into a topic with zero info. Like a typical Wu class, grade breakdown was 7% quizzes based on completion, 45% Homeworks (6 total, one of which was during finals week), and 48% Final. We received zero feedback after the 2nd homework before taking the final. Basically, you have no idea what you do or don't know or where you stand in the class. The final exam was also quite difficult and half of it was nothing like the previous quiz or homework questions.
I watched all of Prof Chen's 102c lectures on youtube before the final (HIGHLY RECOMMEND) and finally understood the course. It's clear to me the difference in teaching between the two professors, so I would try to take this course under another professor (if possible).

Bro just fired him

I had the misfortune of taking this class with Professor Wu. His lectures are incoherent and don't make much sense at all. Reading the textbook is much more valuable than the lectures. He is mildly helpful during OH, though he was 20-30 minutes late multiple times. He is a nice guy overall and I believe he wants the best for his students, but his teaching style is better suited for graduate courses.

Professor Wu is very nice, but his lectures are extremely unengaging and unclear. He recaps the previous lecture for at least 10-15 minutes every class, and then when he teaches new content, he half reads off the slides and half does some math without really explaining the big picture of when/how to use the methods being introduced.

The class is pretty challenging compared to the complexity of the content just because they are not presented very well. We did not receive ANY feedback for homework after homework 2, and none of the solutions were posted because "the exam is based heavily on the homework." Is that not the whole point of studying the homework? There is zero transparency in this class and Professor Wu's teaching model is to just lecture and assign work. There is no consideration for students' progress and whether or not the previous lessons were actually effective. The way he teaches was more suitable to an online course, since his lectures are so unclear I would've had to rewatch them multiple times just to understand the objective of the lecture.

I would have liked to look to the slides for help with homework, but the slides are equally unhelpful since they only contain the most basic algorithms and examples, but rarely information about how to apply them in different contexts. I also found the notation pretty confusing and I personally had to spend a lot of extra time watching Professor Chen's STATS 102C lectures (posted on Youtube) to understand the lecture and the intuition behind many of the sampling and integration methods. While I didn't mind the theoretical nature of the class (I found the proof based homework problems to be the easiest), I found it very difficult to understand any of the math when there was little explanation for its connection to what we were learning.

Since homework tended to be more complicated than lectures, I felt like I had to self-learn a lot using the textbook. In general, I don't recommend taking this class with Professor Wu if you have the choice, but if you find yourself with no other option, prepare yourself to dedicate a decent amount of time to just understanding the material and rereading the textbook.

Taking 102A and 102B with Wu was the worst decision I made in my three years at UCLA.

I took 102b with Wu 2022 spring but class is not listed so I'll say something here.

Don't take his class.

I got wrong on part of a small hw question. It got me 10% off the total hw. Prof doesn't use gradescope, so you have absolutely no idea how you got your points off. I went to ask TA for the correct solution, TA said go ask prof. I went to the prof. Prof said go ask TA.

Quizzes are also fcked up. Extremely unclear question prompt with millions of possible interpretations. Thought it's completion grade, it doesn't help to throw random garbage prompt just to waste students' time

I took this class the summer of 2024 and it was a complete dumptster fire. Initially, about 40 people showed up to his lectures, but after quickly realizing that we were not learning anything, it dropped to about 6. Guani has a very dry, monotonous, and hard to follow along with teaching style. Additionally, his lectures focus heavily on theory which would not be an issue if that is what the homework and tests were about. HOWEVER, that is not the case as you will soon see.

The homeworks are very programming based, much of which you don't actually learn in class. There is much self learning to be done in this class as there hardly any resources provided to help you. Then we proceed to the worst part of the class. The tests. I believe the median of our midterm was a D, which means atleast half the people in our class failed it. Additionally, the highest score in our final was a 58 out of a 100, and the median was like a 35. So literally every single person in the class failed the final.

Both the midterm and final were on Lockdown browser and required an extremely strong knowledge of programming which was never taught in the course. You are only allowed one sheet of scratch paper front and back which can only contain formulas, not examples, so you can't just fill it up with code. Obviously with this much fuckery and poorly planned test taking where we did not have anywhere near enough time to take the tests, it ended with bad grades.

He is also going completely off the rails by not following the traditional grading distribution and just giving everyone shit grades, including my friends who scored in the top 20 - 25 % of the class.

Please avoid this sorry excuse of a professor at all costs. You won't learn anything and your GPA will get fucked.

The class was online for the summer quarter. I never interacted with the professor, but he seems like a nice guy who wants the best for his students. He recaps previous material and asks several times during the lecture if everyone understands his delivery of the material. Unfortunately, I found him quite unclear and thought he made seemingly simple topics more complicated. Though he follows a slide deck, I found his lectures to be unstructured and hard to follow. I would listen to a lecture and leave more confused on the topic, not knowing what the main objective of the lecture was. After a couple of weeks, I stopped watching the lectures and just read the book that he used to make his slides.

For both exams (esp the midterm), it was hard to study, because we did not have access to answers for the quizzes, nor was there any study guide outlining what to expect on the exam.

As far as grading goes, HW was graded very generously, with average scores of 95+ on each hw. Quizzes are based on completion, so for the quizzes graded at the time of this post, I have received fair grades. Our midterm exam had a pretty bad mean (62%), which is typical for this professor. Not sure what the final exam scores will be, but I am expecting around the same, if not a little better.

TDLR: Nice guy, seems like he's chill but thought that he was not a good lecturer at all. Poor exam averages, but fair grading on homework and quizzes. Would try to avoid him and take another professor, but not the end of the world if he's the only option.

102C is one of my favorite classes here at UCLA. I feel like the Bruinwalk review does not do Guani justice. It is true that his lecture clarity are not as good as many of the lecture focused professors (shoutout to Mike, Miles and Linda! Loved those classes), but Guani is definitely way above a 1.9 rated professor in my opinion. His classes are curved with a fair scale (30%As, 30%Bs, if I remembered right) and it's a "if everyone did good, everyone get good grades" type of curve. He is helpful during office hours and gives homework extensions. He can be funny during lectures and tries to make them engaging for students.

I can tell that he definitely cares about his students and definitely wants everyone to do well, however I must also agree that he can be difficult to understand during lectures. (Man is just not that good at explaining theoretical concepts, but being the research professor as he is, all the lectures are theory heavy.)

Guani deserves a rating around 3.2~3.6 in my opinion. His homework is coding based, difficult but doable, exams are theory-focused like lectures. He usually gives a good amount of review and hints before the exams so that you can prepare well. If you attended all his lectures and go to office hours for anything you don't understand, you will get a good grade.

If grades is not all you care about, I also think that his lectures are worthy attending just for the theoretical concepts alone. 102C goes over some of the foundation of grad-level statistics, so I think its good for it to be theory heavy. You get to practice the theories with coding in homework, so don't worry about application either.

Anyways, don't be scared if you didn't get in Mile's 102C. I know Guani gets a lot of hate in the Stats department but I genuinely thinks that he is a good person and want you to do well. Best of luck and I hope you 102C end up being fun for you!

I am honestly shocked about the current rating that this course has. Professor Wu is my favorite professor at UCLA and goes out of his way to be accommodating to his students. This course was challenging and you will need to work hard, but it is by no means impossible. Professor Wu has a more theoretical teaching style, but if you have questions and you go to office hours he will take the time to help you understand. He really is a great guy. Good luck!