Professor
Jiaqi Ma
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2022 - Professor Ma was not the most exciting professor. The lectures were 2 hours long and I often found myself drifting off to sleep during class. He posts the slides but pretty much reads off of them completely. The homework worksheets are not too bad and usually you can just use the examples in the textbooks for help. Exams were take-home (remote and timed) and were not too hard. Discussion sections were extremely helpful, and sometimes reading the book in lieu of attending lecture works just as well.
Spring 2022 - Professor Ma was not the most exciting professor. The lectures were 2 hours long and I often found myself drifting off to sleep during class. He posts the slides but pretty much reads off of them completely. The homework worksheets are not too bad and usually you can just use the examples in the textbooks for help. Exams were take-home (remote and timed) and were not too hard. Discussion sections were extremely helpful, and sometimes reading the book in lieu of attending lecture works just as well.
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - I enjoyed this class a lot, and I think it will be a good addition to the transportation engineering curriculum at UCLA. Overall I would recommend this class to anyone interested in transportation engineering, and to planners interested in taking civil courses I would recommend this course over 181 (though I'm not sure how much 180/181 will change with Prof Ma teaching). This was the first time Prof Ma has taught this class at UCLA, although I believe he taught it elsewhere before. Also teaching some sections was Dr Yueshuai He. Some sections of the class were pretty theoretical and some people complained about this, but mostly it was comprehensible. The textbook however is highly theoretical and basically has the mathematical basis for trip modelling. Sections of the class: discrete choice, how this is calibrated to make models, and a further in-depth look at the framework of models. There were three homeworks (covering those aforementioned sections), one final group project*, and a multi-day final (maybe not multiday once we're out of the rona). The group project is probably the worst part of this, as it's reading the documentation for an existing real-world travel demand model and basically summarizing it (for grad students only: a critical paper too). Maybe this was just because my group's paper was *extraordinarily* badly written, but this wasn't too instructive. Larger-scale modelling (i.e. on computers) wasn't really present in homeworks and we just dealt with toy models since that would take so much calculation time, but there is a lecture devoted to just showing what can be done, and they provide resources for learning on your own.
Winter 2021 - I enjoyed this class a lot, and I think it will be a good addition to the transportation engineering curriculum at UCLA. Overall I would recommend this class to anyone interested in transportation engineering, and to planners interested in taking civil courses I would recommend this course over 181 (though I'm not sure how much 180/181 will change with Prof Ma teaching). This was the first time Prof Ma has taught this class at UCLA, although I believe he taught it elsewhere before. Also teaching some sections was Dr Yueshuai He. Some sections of the class were pretty theoretical and some people complained about this, but mostly it was comprehensible. The textbook however is highly theoretical and basically has the mathematical basis for trip modelling. Sections of the class: discrete choice, how this is calibrated to make models, and a further in-depth look at the framework of models. There were three homeworks (covering those aforementioned sections), one final group project*, and a multi-day final (maybe not multiday once we're out of the rona). The group project is probably the worst part of this, as it's reading the documentation for an existing real-world travel demand model and basically summarizing it (for grad students only: a critical paper too). Maybe this was just because my group's paper was *extraordinarily* badly written, but this wasn't too instructive. Larger-scale modelling (i.e. on computers) wasn't really present in homeworks and we just dealt with toy models since that would take so much calculation time, but there is a lecture devoted to just showing what can be done, and they provide resources for learning on your own.
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