Professor
Michael Lindstrom
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2019 - Cannot stress this enough: READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW before you take this class. TLDR: DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. Pros: 1. Pic 10B will be easier for you 2. Helpful in office hours 3. TAs are helpful usually (Swati Sharma was good) Cons: 1. Almost everything 2. Curves according to his mood/preference. You have NO idea about your predicted grade till after the final. A 60% overall can get you an A- or a C+. Depends on him entirely. 3. (!!!) Grade bracket descriptions in his syllabus are COMPLETELY inaccurate (My percentages in HW and on the final were above the "usual" B+ grade bracket. He handed me a C with no explanation) 4. Weekly HWs are on steroids. Extremely challenging after week 3 and take 16h+ 5. Exams are on steroids AND crystal meth. Extremely unnecessarily challenging 6. He is an asshole about any ways to improve your grade 7. Class pace is insanely fast. Very difficult to cope for someone with no prior C++ experience. 8. Syllabus covers MULTIPLE topics from PIC 10B. Far too complex for an intro class. 9. VERY strict about any collaboration in HWs post week 3. Uses complex algorithms to analyze all HWs and identify similarities. If you copy even 50% he WILL KNOW. Gave a "Deferred Report" to 4 students and launched an plagiarism investigation through the Dean's Office 10. Does not give a fuck about you. I submitted a HW file named "query.cpp" and got a 0 on it because he wanted it named "Query.cpp" (YES the upper case Q) 11. If you have a macbook, coding on your laptop is a huge pain. Will need to go to the PIC lab to do all your HWs and it shuts by 6pm. 12. Does not give any practice midterms or finals, so you go into the exams with no clue about the style of questions (and then get fucked lmao) Please do yourself a favor, and do not take this class. There are hundreds of easier PIC 10a classes at UCLA. You might still end up with a A- or an A but I promise you, you will hate your life by the end of it.
Fall 2019 - Cannot stress this enough: READ THE ENTIRE REVIEW before you take this class. TLDR: DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. Pros: 1. Pic 10B will be easier for you 2. Helpful in office hours 3. TAs are helpful usually (Swati Sharma was good) Cons: 1. Almost everything 2. Curves according to his mood/preference. You have NO idea about your predicted grade till after the final. A 60% overall can get you an A- or a C+. Depends on him entirely. 3. (!!!) Grade bracket descriptions in his syllabus are COMPLETELY inaccurate (My percentages in HW and on the final were above the "usual" B+ grade bracket. He handed me a C with no explanation) 4. Weekly HWs are on steroids. Extremely challenging after week 3 and take 16h+ 5. Exams are on steroids AND crystal meth. Extremely unnecessarily challenging 6. He is an asshole about any ways to improve your grade 7. Class pace is insanely fast. Very difficult to cope for someone with no prior C++ experience. 8. Syllabus covers MULTIPLE topics from PIC 10B. Far too complex for an intro class. 9. VERY strict about any collaboration in HWs post week 3. Uses complex algorithms to analyze all HWs and identify similarities. If you copy even 50% he WILL KNOW. Gave a "Deferred Report" to 4 students and launched an plagiarism investigation through the Dean's Office 10. Does not give a fuck about you. I submitted a HW file named "query.cpp" and got a 0 on it because he wanted it named "Query.cpp" (YES the upper case Q) 11. If you have a macbook, coding on your laptop is a huge pain. Will need to go to the PIC lab to do all your HWs and it shuts by 6pm. 12. Does not give any practice midterms or finals, so you go into the exams with no clue about the style of questions (and then get fucked lmao) Please do yourself a favor, and do not take this class. There are hundreds of easier PIC 10a classes at UCLA. You might still end up with a A- or an A but I promise you, you will hate your life by the end of it.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - The grade distribution for Winter 2021 was thus: 5 A's 15 A-'s 2 B+'s 3 B's 1 C- If you take this course, pray.....and then make sure you triple check your homework against the homework codes. I pulled off an A with no previous coding knowledge (except pic 10a with a different, much easier professor) and getting 20s on homeworks really came in clutch. I think I learned a ton but this was the most anxiety inducing time of my life. Mike got our final grades out within a day of the last hw submission, though, so....thank you king...
Winter 2021 - The grade distribution for Winter 2021 was thus: 5 A's 15 A-'s 2 B+'s 3 B's 1 C- If you take this course, pray.....and then make sure you triple check your homework against the homework codes. I pulled off an A with no previous coding knowledge (except pic 10a with a different, much easier professor) and getting 20s on homeworks really came in clutch. I think I learned a ton but this was the most anxiety inducing time of my life. Mike got our final grades out within a day of the last hw submission, though, so....thank you king...
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2018 - This class will kick you in the teeth and make you swallow a pint of blood before burying you alive. Michael Lindstrom, who is, in all fairness, a good guy and a smart person, had us cover way too much stuff. If you are considering enrolling in PIC 40A taught by Michael Lindstrom: don't. If you do, I cannot save you. PIC classes are often taught by Miroshnikov. Take classes with him, he is way more realistic with the ammount of work he gives. This class was brutal. I may have been able to get a better grade if I took ONLY this class. We covered HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the essentials of web programming. But we also spent the other half of the class cramming in PHP and MySQL, as well as wasting time on jQuery. Just save yourself, I am warning you now.
Fall 2018 - This class will kick you in the teeth and make you swallow a pint of blood before burying you alive. Michael Lindstrom, who is, in all fairness, a good guy and a smart person, had us cover way too much stuff. If you are considering enrolling in PIC 40A taught by Michael Lindstrom: don't. If you do, I cannot save you. PIC classes are often taught by Miroshnikov. Take classes with him, he is way more realistic with the ammount of work he gives. This class was brutal. I may have been able to get a better grade if I took ONLY this class. We covered HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, the essentials of web programming. But we also spent the other half of the class cramming in PHP and MySQL, as well as wasting time on jQuery. Just save yourself, I am warning you now.
Most Helpful Review
Summer 2017 - If you want to get easy As, please do not choose Math142!!!! Mikel assumes that a score of 55% of the final exam to be excellent, so you will find how hard for you to outshine in this course. However, you will learn a lot from this course if you are not a Math major, because this course involves considerable knowledge of calculus, ODE, PDE and linear algebra, and you will thrive to master them. Besides, make sure that you know quite a lot about physics, because this course will base many of its models on physics world, which COULD be harsh if you have never taken a similar course before. All in all, Mikel is dedicated to this course though it seems that he is still lack in experience, and the TA Xu Chen is sooooooooooooo cute :)
Summer 2017 - If you want to get easy As, please do not choose Math142!!!! Mikel assumes that a score of 55% of the final exam to be excellent, so you will find how hard for you to outshine in this course. However, you will learn a lot from this course if you are not a Math major, because this course involves considerable knowledge of calculus, ODE, PDE and linear algebra, and you will thrive to master them. Besides, make sure that you know quite a lot about physics, because this course will base many of its models on physics world, which COULD be harsh if you have never taken a similar course before. All in all, Mikel is dedicated to this course though it seems that he is still lack in experience, and the TA Xu Chen is sooooooooooooo cute :)