Do not take this class under any circumstances. Every aspect of this class is unfair. The workload is condensed so that most of the work is in the last two weeks of the class and finals week, resulting in all of your time being allocated towards this class. The assignments for those last two weeks and the final have extremely unfair grading practices that result in receiving a failing grade if your submission is not perfect. Be prepared to appeal your grade. My original grade for this class was a C and the only reason my grade is now a B- is due to appealing my grade with Dean Wesel.
Overall Professor Srivastava is the ideal demonstration of an incompetent Professor as he refuses to recognize the deficiencies in his course and address them when they are presented to him on a silver platter. As a result he should not be permitted to teach this course again. Perhaps that will happen if ZERO people enroll the next time he is assigned to teach this course.

Amazing class. Professor Srivastava made lectures highly interesting and provided us with a very solid foundation of digital logic. There is a lot of content, and while the course does start out slow, it picks up pace quickly in the second half after the transition to state machines and datapaths. The labs are tough yet very rewarding, and Professor Srivastava's lectures and advice will help approach them. Overall, Professor Srivastava and this class have piqued my interest in digital logic.

Overall, Professor Srivastava is a great lecturer who truly cares our learning.

He is very unhelpful. Basically left to your own devices for assignments. The first few weeks of the class are very easy with little to no work. But, in the last 3 weeks he assigns 3x more work than he did in the first 7 weeks. Why you may ask? I don't know. Don't take this class.

Do not take this class, it really isn't worth it. I feel like Mani himself would even tell you don't take his class because it doesn't seem like he enjoys teaching undergraduates. A student went and complained to the dean because Mani refused to release dates for when any of his material/assignments were released, so Mani sent out an urgent piazza post basically saying, "Since one of you decided to go behind my back to the dean...", all because he didn't want to give us any form of dates.

The student who left the review saying students are being whiny, but then goes on to make their own complaints for the class, don't listen to that review because this class with Mani is far and away the biggest time dump that is only comparable to CS32. The difference between this class and CS32 however, is that it truly seems like Mani does not want you to learn from him and puts you in positions where you will have an incredible amount of stress that is avoidable and pointless.

The design assignments took WAY more than 10 hours to complete. For each DA sub-problem you would have many different sub-circuits that you would have to build, and to top it all off Mani put a twist on 2/5 of the sub-projects on DA #1 and the only question on DA #2 where you basically competed with all other students to get the lowest number of components used, otherwise you would get 30% of the points for the question. So, you basically had two sub-projects in one.
The quizzes and the final exam were all ridiculous time crunches with no partial credit whatsoever which is crazy because most of the questions either were comprised of lists or piggy-backed off of other questions. If you take this class, you will realize how crazy it is not getting partial credit for the type of material this class encompasses.

As you have read on his other bad reviews all of the material for the class gets released within the last 7-10 weeks and all it does is take away from your time with other classes because his material is so time consuming, and especially since you essentially have to learn everything on your own. Week 10 we had a P-Set due comprised of about 15-20 questions, a quiz, and a design assignment. Although the assignments weren't super difficult, they were by no means easy assignments that you could complete in a relatively fast time frame.

Mani is incredibly active on piazza but is such a smart ass and borderline degrading for every one of his responses. He consistently says things such as "Why would you even care about that?", "I'll leave you to figure that out on your own.", "You would understand the question if you participated in lecture", which I don't understand because it's almost always in response to someone simply asking for clarity.
The worst part of his piazza shenanigans is that he uses the urgent post bypass so willingly that during the quarter it's not uncommon to get a solid 3-5 pinned messages all at anywhere from midnight-3am. I had to turn the notifications off because it literally felt like you couldn't get away from Mani even when you were in bed sleeping. His messages were always some form of: "I am correct and you guys are cheating", "Actually, I made a mistake in an assignment", "Fixed a mistake in assignment", "Mistake is still there", "fixed mistake", "mistake is still there", "it's because you guys are entering something incorrectly", "never mind I fixed the mistake" all within a span of 2 hours at 1am.

Mani did have family issues going on before the quarter started and I truly want to feel for the guy, but the issue is that his problems were problems that you can read on every single one of his past reviews, which means he just has a terrible system in place and judging by how he responds to students I don't think he wants to change it anytime soon. If you are in a position where you have to take this class, DO NOT take it with other STEM classes you will regret it.

The professor had to teach in pretty difficult circumstances so I think a lot of the criticism given is unwarranted and honestly whiny.

For context, Professor Mani has been dealing with a pretty serious family issue throughout Spring 2024. He's been forced to teach remote as he cannot be in UCLA in person due to the circumstances. I imagine this is probably part of the reason for some of the complaints about the professor's strange schedules.

I personally found the piazza responses hilarious - honestly, the professor is not being personal or "hostile" just because he decided to use a couple more adjectives in answering a question he's probably seen 1000 times already in a course that hes taught for many years. I appreciated the humor he tried to add to an otherwise dry subject matter. I think the fact that the class did so poorly as a whole of the quizzes is reflective of how well we truly learned the material - which was rather poorly for the most part, and that is not the professor's fault. Besides everything gets curved in the end. Just because your ego got hurt by the raw 19/62 for quiz 1 doesn't mean that will be your actual score, even if it is reflective of your actual level of grasp of the content.

One thing I genuinely did not like was the wacky grade calculation system. I think he made it in part to discourage people from trying to calculate/predict their grade? Whatever reason it is, it's complex enough that I've given up on trying to calculate it myself.

Alright rant over. Now for the actual review:

The class was tough. The homework were challenging. The exams were online and were very difficult. All of the averages on exams were consistently below 50%. Despite what some other reviews say however, this class was not a time consuming one.

A lot of the times being thrown around are grossly exaggerated. For example, none of the design assignments took more than 10 hours each, which considering we only have 2 in the entire quarter honestly wasn't a ton of time. If you could not commit 20 hours to working on basically the project for a class I don't see how in any universe you'd end up doing well.

The content of this class had a fair amount of overlap with CS33, so if you took that recently the knowledge is pretty transferable. You'd still need to study for the stuff about kmap and delays, but I think those aren't very difficult topics either. I handicapped myself by never going to lecture and only learning from textbook and slides, but most people who did go to lecture seemed to have a good understanding of the material when I spoke to them.

I really liked the design assignments and wished there were more of them, However, the professor decided to give a final this year instead of a take home design assignment.

If there was one thing I think I would change about this class is I would've preferred a design assignment over a final. I think it would've been a more meaningful challenge and I would've probably had a deeper appreciation of some of the design patterns and algorithms discussed in class.

Overall this class is not for the faint of heart. You should know what you signed up for when you take this class.

Oh Mani B Srivastava where do I begin. This professor is so incredibly rude, aggressive, and disrespectful on Piazza -- the god awful platform he uses to "help" and "answer" questions. He also uses Piazza to send crucial course info after midnight which will likely be him fixing his own mistakes on a problem set. Ironically, despite the numerous errors in quizzes, psets, and da assignments, the nonexistance of partial credit makes the quizzes so incredibly brutal. His callousness and hatred towards undergrads extends to his twice a week two hour long lectures where he'll ridicule and demean anyone who attempts and fails to answer his questions. I even remember him off handedly mentioning how "UCLA 'used to be' a prestigous university". The worst part is that he'll probably never stop teaching this course so all I can do is warn others. DONT TAKE HIS CLASS. HEED THE WARNINGS OF OTHERS!

This class is highly important and had interesting material. The professor's lectures were okay, and got the material across. However, none of these things can excuse this professors absolute cruelty to students. This professor is absurdly active on Piazza, and will respond to questions and post late at night or at any time of day. However, his responses are just outright aggressive to almost any question asked of him. One student asked for clarification on instructions for a problem and was told to "not go down the path of unusual interpretations of plain English". Once, a student answered a question during lecture incorrectly and was told that the right answer was "obvious". Alone, these responses suck, but over and over again throughout the class, they simply build a disgusting environment to learn in. This professor gives the impression he hates teaching undergraduates and expects them to operate at a graduate level capacity on a topic they are taking an introductory course in. I have never met a teacher who felt so actively aggressive towards students seeking help in my entire learning career. Please avoid this professor if you don't want to feel unreasonably angry late at night because of a question you posted on Piazza.

This professor was terrible. In my three years at UCLA, I can say by far this class has been the worst. The professor is degrading over Piazza and somehow failed to understand all of the questions I asked and would reply with either "I don't understand your question" or "its obv clear in the question description, so I'm not gonna answer that." I understand that professors have a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes, but if you have the time to refuse to answer my questions, why answer in the first place? Secondly, all of the assignments are pushed to the very end of the quarter and make it hard to practice the material throughout the quarter. We had a PSET, a Design assignment, and a Midterm all due in week 10!!!! The professor could work on spreading out the assignments throughout the quarter. Third, the way tests are designed, they are very unforgiving. If you miss one part of a question in the beginning of a 8 part question or mistake a 0 for a O, then you lose the whole question because you did not exactly give the correct answer.

In other words, you should avoid this class and prioritize taking the CS version as it is so much easier in terms of content, doesn't have 2 sets of 20-30 hour long Design assignments, and has better rated professors.

Wait for a different professor to take this class. I understood the material very well, and I did above average on both of the midterms and the final design project, but I still ended with a B because of the design assignments. The first seven weeks of the class were very light, but the professor assigned a quarter's worth of work in the last three weeks, including multiple design assignments (which none of the other professors for this class do). His instructions were so unclear that the median on the last design assignment was a zero, and this counted for a substantial amount of our grade. Even the TA's didn't understand the professors instructions on these assignments.

The professor thinks he is reasonable, but he is the least understanding professor I've ever had, and it is very clear he doesn't care about his students in the slightest. He took a subject that I was very interested in and made it boring. The only good thing about this class was that I liked the material.