Lectures are pretty dry and sleep-inducing. I would still recommend going to lecture and writing down some things he says, but in order to do well in the class, you'll have to self-study a decent amount from the textbook. There are 2 quizzes in addition to a MT and final, and only the final exam is cumulative. Self-studying is definitely needed if you want to do well on the exams. The content is moderately interesting.

If possible and there are other professors offering the class, avoid Jaime and go with them!
Marian was definitely not the worst but not great either. He basically “just got the job done”.
Lectures were often dry and delivered extremely monotonously with slides often lacking text and context to understand the figures and diagrams they had.
The grading scheme was as follows: 10% hw (weekly), 30% quizzes (week 3 and week 8), 25% midterm (week 6) and 35% final.
The quizzes were essentially like midterms with the first one being unreasonably long. The midterm repeatedly tested concepts thought just a couple of days before the exam which seemed unfair. The exams often tested things that weren’t explicitly covered in lecture, but this improved over the quarter.
The homework was very fair with solutions timely posted.
The TAs were extremely helpful and provided some but not enough practice for the exams.
Overall, the class needs more structure since it covers an extremely wide range of topics and Marian needs to improve on his delivery of lectures and his slides.

I thought this class would be a lot of learning how to set up simulations for different problems on your own. This is only true for some assignments, and almost all of those are kind of pointless problems anyway that don't really give you any deeper meaning of material simulations. The rest are just going to a website with a preset simulator, messing around with the parameters, and writing a report of what you see. The report is really just there to pad the length of an otherwise minimal assignment.

The prof also couldn't figure out bruinlearn until the last couple weeks of the course, so there was essentially no feedback on any assignments, which sucked considering the average scores were lower than you would expect. The lectures mostly consist of a few tips about the homework followed by an endless monologue of theory that only slightly connects with the assignments. This whole class felt like 2 separate parts that never really came together at all.

Overall, only weekly homework and a final group project, but the homeworks are a bit more work than they seem to be at first glance. Dry lectures but they are actually a bit interesting depending on which day you come in for. Most people seem to take this class as an easy side requirement, which I guess it's not the worst choice for.

Very knowledgable professor, always gives concrete and real life examples of the material he teaches in class. The class was from 8-10a so lots of lazy students never showed up to class, only about half of attendance, yet the professor understood that and never used attendance against anyone. The homework was exceptionally difficult and a bit disconnected from what is given in class, but the TA Moupi was very helpful and accommodating. The midterm and final were okay though, and his grading is fair. Overall, I learnt quite a bit but was always behind on homework to really enjoy the class.

Its actually hard to write this review because of how frustrating this class was. Here are a list of weaknesses that Professor Marian needs to fix. He made the class extremely frustrating for me and many classmates and the experience was embarrassing for the undergraduate education in the material science department.

- Worst lecture slides. Did not relate lecture slides to homework AT ALL! Always did a top level review of subjects in class and did not explain quantitative equations. NO EXAMPLE PROBLEMS in an application based class...

- Very clearly did not care about students. Never established office hours. Had an attitude like he had something more important to do. Did not fix obvious mistakes in lecture slides.

-Homework was a joke.

-Midterm was a joke. Midterm point distribution was out of whack. Small mistakes meant half the problem was wrong.

- I could go on and on, but to sum up - Marian obviously cared little about his class, his lectures only ever skim the surface and do not connect with his homework or tests, and overall he just made me disinterested in the subject matter.

The previous review is accurate, and honestly an understatement regarding some parts.