Professor Xu is a really nice guy. He lectures out of his course reader and occasionally straight up gives you answers to questions on his exams in class (usually about the various sampling distributions of something or another), so be sure to attend his lectures. While sometimes he might not be the most clear in explaining some of the material (particularly the chapter 7 stuff about estimators), he will always be willing to help clarify things to you after class or in his office hours with a big smile. Also, he has a random sign in sheet he passes around sometimes and if you have attended every lecture when the sign up sheet was passed around, you get a flat 2% added to your final grade which is pretty huge.

His exams are rather straight forward and on the easier side, the only remotely tricky parts are the few multiple choice / true/false questions he has on every exam. Other than that, the exams are open everything short of a laptop, so you don't need to spend time committing formulas and test procedures exactly to memory. Despite being open book/notes, you really want to prepare for the exams since the midterms are only 1 hour long each and you'll actually have to know the material to finish it in time and have time to go back and double check you didn't fudge your calculations.

The homework was pretty straight forward, mostly because Miles, the TA, is super cool and pretty much walks you through the homework every discussion. He also replies pretty quickly to emails so thumbs up there too. The homework grader, however, seems to have a permanent stick lodged thoroughly up his rear, so don't expect to get full scores on homework very often (but don't worry, homework is only 10% of your grade).

The class is graded on a straight scale though (100-90% A range, 89-80% B range etc) so just study up for the exams and you'll be fine. Also don't be scared off by the first midterm since that seems to be the hardest of all his exams, or at least it was for the Spring 2012 quarter.

Thumbs up, would take a class from Professor Xu again. Also, for reference, arf = alpha.

As an instructor, I guess Xu knew what he was talking about and could teach if he could speak. But this guy could not complete a sentence without stumbling on at least a quarter of the words or having a coughing fit. It takes away from the lectures because every five seconds you hear " AAAHHHEEEMMMMM HHHHMMMMHHHHCCHCHCHCHCH " or something along those lines. Also, every word with more than 2 syllables is cut off, so we are taking a "statis" class, not statistics class, and learning about "hypos" testing, not hypothesis testing.

If you can get past that annoyance, the class is pretty easy. He takes attendance during lectures that counts for an easy 3% of the grade, and the midterms and final were some of the easiest tests I have ever taken at UCLA.

Xu was a pretty chill teacher and was especially easy for those who took AP Statistics in high school. It doesn't matter if you were very good at it, because just being familiar with it all makes this class seem like a quarter long review session. The only annoyance was that he would take attendance during lecture to try to encourage you to come.. And with it 3 times a week, that sort of is annoying at times. Regardless, I managed to go maybe 65% of the time out of laziness or wanting to booze it up and I still did very well. I did the homeworks after going to discussion (if Tiffany is your TA, she will show you how to do everything). Got a little above average on the midterm (avg: 38/50). Don't know how I did on the final, but it was good enough. Final grade: A.

Chill, chill, chill chill chill

I'm not a fan of Professor Xu's lecture style, but I still recommend him as a professor. His homework assignments aren't too bad; the only thing bad about the homework was the grader, who was extremely strict when grading each problem.

The midterm was a piece of cake, and the final was pretty easy as well, although I will never know how I did on the final because the class website did not have a gradebook anywhere; the only thing I knew about my final was that it helped me get an A+ in the class.

With a pretty big background in statistics, taking Xu would be a wise choice as about 2/3 of the material learned in that class I had already learned in AP stats. Most of the problems on the homework and exams were basically plug-and-chug.