Darabi is a very kind professor and made the best out of our Friday 8 am lectures, but the class was still difficult to follow despite going to every lecture. I did not feel confident with most of the material until a few days before the midterm and final, and walked out of both tests feeling like I had done poorly. So, I do think the grading was pretty lenient. There are not many resources provided in terms of practice tests/past exams so while the tests were fair, studying for them was difficult. Overall I definitely learned a lot though. Some advice: make sure to set aside plenty of time for the homeworks, they started getting pretty difficult after the first one. Also make sure you understand the examples Darabi goes over in class and look in the textbook for more examples. Working with others on homework and studying makes it a lot more manageable.

Darabi is an awesome professor, but I had this class for 4 hours at 8am which made it so much harder to focus. He's a great, concise lecturer, and his tests are very straightforward. Also, big props to the TA Stheya who was awesome and gave out a lot of homework and discussion help. The hardest part of this class is the homework: there are 4 of them in the quarter, ranging from 5 to 8 problems each. Do not start them last minute, homeworks take several hours but are super useful for understanding the material. He also curved the class at the end, which was awesome. Overall, pretty cool and interesting class, Darabi definitely makes the material interesting and provides great application examples.

Professor Darabi was brought in to teach this class fairly last minute, leading to a very unfortunate lecture time (8-12 on Fridays) and final time (two days after the last lecture). That being said, he and the TA did a fantastic job teaching this class and accomodating the ~100 students. The grading scheme was very fair (34% homework, 32% midterm, 32% final, 1% course evaluation survey, 1% attendance) and the exams themselves were extremely reasonable. Furthermore, the class was recorded and though the recordings were of poor visual quality, the TA made the effort to take stand-alone photographs of the whiteboard so students could compare side-by-side while watching the recording.
Overall, the material was taught well, the TA (Stheya Julakanti) did a stellar job (one TA for 100 students is crazy), and though I struggled to understand topics initially, I was able to do fairly well in class by attending office hours when I needed help and by looking through the material the TA released every week.

The only thing that would have made my experience better was a more convenient lecture time as I found it difficult to pay attention after the 2.5 hour mark. However, Professor Darabi did the best he could with the situation. Massive shoutout to both him and the TA, would take again.