EE 1115A is one of the 8 choose 6 core classes. And typically people take the easier ones and are left with deciding between 115a, CS33, and ee133a. Between those three 115 is the easier one. Darabi is a decent lecturer and because 115 is more formula based than 110 and 10 it makes it easier to not only follow but also understand. The homework’s are really long and take forever. But doing them is the only study material you’ll have since there are no practice exams. The midterm was super tough as was the final. Overall would take again with darabi. The ta’s were fantastic.

Darabi's lecture style really did not work for me. I regularly found myself immensely confused, and even when he was teaching material I already knew, I found him explaining it in ways that added confusion instead of insight. After a particular lecture a friend said that the lecture had helped them understand a topic they'd been struggling with; they'd been upside down with Professor Moloudi's lectures, which I found immensely clarifying and helpful. So, different styles. A stylistic thing Darabi does that was really rough for me is that he will say "now let's talk about such-and-such" and then talk about something else for a bit, then "alright, that wasn't such-and-such, now let's talk about such-and-such" so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what we were even talking about in the first place. I handled his lectures best when I stopped trying to think to understand them, just wrote down everything and then later cross referenced in the textbook where stuff didn't make sense. At the end of each transistor amplifier section he does a summary of stages and formulas which was extremely helpful.

The textbooks Darabi assigns are really good and made the material much more accessible and interesting to me, and I wish the chapters/sections had been indicated beforehand (the class covers only about a quarter of each of the textbooks) because I learned the material much better from the text. Homework was nicely comprehensive. No cheat sheet allowed on exams so there are formulas to memorize; a few that you have to memorize regardless, and then a bunch you can either memorize or derive on the fly. It's worth memorizing them for test purposes (it's also worth learning to derive on the fly quickly, but tests aren't real life). Darabi was very clear on what we needed to memorize, and exam questions were similar to homework.

Overall I felt that the class was designed pretty well, with good scope and good homework, it just needed a lecturer that worked better for me and a chapter/section guide to match up to the lecture schedule.

Honestly, I don't think I really learned anything from this class that I didn't find in a pdf online, condensing weeks of lecture into a single powerpoint pres / pdf from online. Just my two cents IMO, pace of the material taught could be faster with the last week of class being a review / hard applications and examples.

I usually believe that lecturers are better than professors because lecturers are generally more articulate than professors (in the sense that they give the students a good look at what is going on). However, I don't think Prof. Darabi is the best.

I sincerely believe that he is trying to teach us something but the way he goes about it makes it sound really boring. At the end of the course, I went onto YouTube and discovered that what I learned (or supposed to learn) was actually really cool stuff. Darabi didn't convey that "coolness" to me.

Lectures were pretty dry. He goes over a lot of stuff but because of his monotone voice, it's easy to fall asleep. Lectures were Bruincasted so that helped (and so, class was pretty deserted). He mostly wrote a lot of equations and graphs on the board. Probably reading the textbook beforehand would help but not entirely sure but I think his lectures were a bit disconnected from the textbook. I would prefer if his syllabus provided clear dates as to what chapters are covered during which lectures. The textbook was pretty good though. Clear examples, engaging writing, one of the better textbooks in the EE department (and a helluva lot better than the EE10 and 110 ancient textbook).

Tests were simple in format. 4 questions (?) on midterm and 5, I believe, on final. Mostly calculations. He covered some gate construction using BJT and CMOS in class and that appeared on both final and midterm so if you didn't pay attention or looked back on the Bruincast, you would be screwed (and those topics aren't covered in the text either). He said the tests would be like the homework but when opening the exam (midterm or final), they felt not very similar (though the final was similar to hw). To give you a feel, the average on the midterm was 55% (I got 7% below). Not sure what the final was like as he didn't post any info on it.

Homework was pretty okay. If you get stuck on a problem, you can find it online. However, the homework problems are neatly tied to the textbook so consulting it can really help as well.

Would I recommend Darabi? No, if the other professor has better reviews. Is he all that bad? No. Is he meh? Yeah.

Great professor! Darabi is one of the most intelligent professors I have had at UCLA. He does all of his derivations from memory with a very small number of mistakes.

He is also very helpful during office hours.

Some say he is a slow lecturer, but I think he taught at the right pace. He covered a lot of material and made sure that we had an intuitive understanding of basic analog circuits by the end of the course.

I highly recommend taking 115A with Darabi. Also, his tests are very fair, I'm not sure how he assigns grades at the end as I'm still waiting for my grade, but I expect a normal EE grading curve which is fine with me