This class has changed from Fall 2019. The Stats dept. and Mike seemed to realize how hard Fall 2019 was, and made it a more accessible course.

For starters, I had TA Edouardo (I don't think Jake TAs for Stats 20 anymore?). He was very clear and very helpful and made sure any and every question people had received a clear answer.

In addition, all the homeworks were based on satisfactory completion (not correctness) to alleviate some stress.

The lectures would be posted onto CCLE (asynch) and the live lecture time was used for office hours with Mike. Mike was always helpful and very friendly!

The exams were tough but they were fair and on par with what a intro to programming course should look like.

Overall I think the Stat dept. has heard the grievances posted on Bruinwalk. They have made this class more accessible. It is still difficult (as is any intro to programming course), but it is a reasonable amount of workload and doable. Mike and Edouardo have done a great job teaching this course and I am glad I took it!

I was here for the COVID online session. Take his class if you really want to learn stuff!

Before I took this class, I got scared by this class's rating. However, when I took this class, I was honestly surprised by how well he teaches. Though hw is hard, I could tell you that he's probably one of the best professors teaching stats 20. If not best, he is experienced. He has a bunch of lecture notes that you should refer to everytime you do homework. Then there is campuswire on which you can ask questions, either in public or through dm. If you really work through all the hw sets by yourself, you coding skills will improve tremendously.

Also, my TA was Edoardo. He's super passionate in teaching and super helpful on campuswire. If he's a choice, choose this guy!

Best luck to those who are taking stats 20 afterwards!

This class is hard. Manageable, but very hard. The lectures are clear, you can understand what the professor is saying, but when it comes to the homework, it's a completely different story. The workload is extremely heavy each week, about 300+ lines of code. Also, the homework is very hard. The lectures only introduce the basic functions you need, but the homework test you on the complicated logic behind these functions, so it is depressing spending 10+ hrs on the homework every week. However, this year they changed the hw grading to completion grade. If you can stick through, the grades are not bad. However, it's just this process of sticking through that's very depressing.

When my friend told me about the difficulty of the class I thought it would be comparable to CS31/CS32 (In which I did well in those classes) but I was wrong. I think this class is more difficult in terms of grading and workload. I'm not sure why they claim you need no previous programming experience to succeed in the course because even with taking cs courses in the past I spent a lot of time on the weekly homework assignments. Then your points get zapped with a secret rubric. My favorite is course's hatred of for loops, I can't tell you how many points for loops cost me even though no where in the homework say that for loops will cost me points. Another weird thing is that they disallow you to use any function that was not explicitly mentioned in the course. Exams are closed note, I think that's quite weird because there are so much syntactic sugar in R you need to memorize. It feels as if the exams are testing you on how well you memorized the intricacies of R, not your programming ability WITH R. The exams averages will be like in the 60s with homework averages also being around 60s. Despite this Mike gives a really generous curve at the very end. All in all, this class will beat you down with R until the gods grace you with the curve. NOT WORTH.

I can see why this class is considered a weeder for the stats dept, but if you just stick it through, you shouldn't receive a grade lower than a B. Each homework took me 12+ hours and basically sucked the soul out of me. The cherry to top it off is receiving a grade between 50-60 for something I worked so hard on. Turns out the TA Jake or whoever grades this sh*t takes points off for the tiniest things that can cause your code to not work. IT DOES NOT MAKE SENSE!! So you're saying that if my code works for 90% of possible cases, I should only receive 40% of the possible points? And even if you think you know your stuff, the exams do an amazing job at changing your mind. They test on the dumbest, most random cases that I would be surprised if anyone has ever stumbled upon. Both Mike and his pet dog Jake aren't that great at helping either, they never give straightforward answers to your questions and leave you with cryptic questions that leave you more confused than before. HOWEVER, half the class gets A's, so as long as you score at or above the average on both homework and exams the lowest grade you'll get is probably an A-.

TL;DR: this class is HARD AS F*CK but not a GPA killer. Still don't know if that A was worth my loss of mental sanity.

This is going to be a long review so I'll put my TLDR first: Decent class, but very hard.

First off, I've read through the reviews from Fall 2019, and this is a COMPLETELY different class. It's also not the end of the world if you have Jake as your TA.

Workload: Very heavy. I cannot stress this enough. We had 7 homeworks in the quarter, and each one of them takes 4-8 hours if they're done well. The last problem is always a very difficult "challenge problem" and usually they are nearly impossible to answer unless you stumble on the solution through sheer luck or have a stroke of coding brilliance. Luckily, they're weighted a little less heavily than the rest of the homework, so you can do average (or above average) and still miss the challenge questions.

Lectures/Professor: Mike's lectures are VERY similar to his notes, and he only expands on things a little bit verbally, so you can really substitute one for the other, depending on your learning style. Outside of lecture, Mike is very nice and approachable, but he does tend to be vague in his answers. Mike is VERY accommodating to situations if you're struggling. I feel like he gets a bad rap, but he wants you to do well, and if you take an interest in the class and go to his OH/ask questions he'll remember your name and try help if you're struggling.

Pace/Structure: Overall the class is decently well-structured in the first half (apparently this is a change from fall 2019) but the one thing that frustrates me is that loops are covered so early and then we're penalized for using them. Mike/Jake frequently say that you should use loops as little as possible, but I found myself frequently struggling to avoid them because they're the easiest way to solve a lot of the problems. Around week 6/7 and the second midterm, the pace of the class goes crazy. While the quantity of material (1 chapter/week) doesn't change, the difficulty of the material skyrockets. The chapters and lectures get much, much denser and the homework problems get a lot more complex. I also wish the last few chapters had been covered more in depth because they felt very rushed.

Grading: There is a massive curve in this class. If you're about average on the homeworks and midterms, you're almost guaranteed a B+ or better. The way you receive grades is super wack, because you'll never get an answer key for the homework, just feedback on what you did wrong or right. You can take that to office hours and ask questions, but it's a pain in the ass to try and ask about all the missed points, especially when you sometimes can't even tell what you did wrong. The midterms are even more wack because you get nothing but a score and the class distribution. The other big problem, which I'm hoping doesn't happen again, is that grades were delayed by about a month or so. We got scores for the 5th week homework during finals week, and were missing three homework grades when we took the final, which definitely impaired people's ability to choose whether to take the class P/NP.

[I'm going to add to this review after the quarter is actually over, but I wanted to get it up to start off with]

The best thing about this class is that you come out of it with a very well-developed knowledge of R. If you have the time to devote to this class you'll learn so much, but it'll be a pain in the ass while you're doing it.

ALRIGHT FOLKS there's a bunch of TEA in these bruinwalk reviews about Stats 20 with Tsiang so I've gathered what a bunch of people have said and I'm giving my take on it.

Is the workload of the class too much?
Sorta. Stats 20 was definitely the class that I had the largest workload for for this quarter, but I'm not sure if I'd say the workload was too much. There's about a homework assignment every week, and each homework assignment took be a total of about 6ish hours each. That said, I do have some coding experience, so idk if I'm the best judge of this.

Did the stats department turn this class into a weeder course?
No. The grading for this class in terms of percentages is very low and the grading is very harsh. They'll take off points on homework for not taking into account situations they never tell you to take account for, and the midterms will cover things that there is no way you would have learned except maybe by pure coincidence while "playing around in R". All of that is pretty dumb, in my opinion. However, your final letter grades for the class will all be based on how well you do relative to everyone else in the class. So even though I'd say I did very bad in terms of how many points I got on each homework and midterm, I still got an A for my final grade. It's not really right to call this class a weeder because based on what Mike said about the grading, still about 75% of the people will get B's or better. So, while I'd say they hand grading pretty poorly for this class, your actual final grade probably won't be that bad as long as you are keeping up with/doing slightly better than everyone else.

Are the instructors super unhelpful on campuswire?
Yup. Mike uses campuswire to communicate with students, but for pretty much every question, they'll give you some super vague answer that isn't helpful. And, if you try to ask the question again, they'll just link you back to their original, vague answer instead of trying to clarify.

Is Mike a horrible teacher and person?
No! I can see how people can find his constant positivity annoying with how much work the class is, but I'd say Mike is a good teacher and person! His lectures and presentations are pretty good, he's pretty friendly, and despite everything, you'll probably be pretty good at R coding by the end of the course. He gives off dad humor vibes, and even though no one ever laughs at his jokes in class, I actually found them quite funny!

Does the TA Jake Kramer always talk super condescendingly, delight in making problems too hard for students to do and taking off points from them, basically use discussion sections to show off stuff that he knows how to do but you can't, is literally trying 24/7 trying to catch people for cheating, and probably steals lunch money from students?
x <- TRUE

(honestly, if there's multiple lectures offered for your quarter for Stats 20, try to find which one has Jake as TA, and then take the other one)

About 40+ people were sent to the Dean's office for suspected academic dishonesty.

If your code looks even slightly similar to something that is found online, you will be instantly sent to the dean's office. You'll have to wait for over 3 months to get your appointment. And finally, when you do have your meeting with the dean, you will have no choice but to plead guilty (even if you did not plagiarize) because if you don't, you will have to wait for another 3 months to remove the DR from your transcript

OK I dropped this class on week 7 almost before last minute I am able to drop a non impacted class. Although it causes an Incomplete on my transcript, i don't care because my mental health is much more important than this shitty class. And please, if any of you are going to take this class in the future, ask Micheal not to put the sentences "I care about your mental health" or "grades don't define you" in his emails. I just wanna vomit every time I see them. Anyhow, I don't want to comment on Michael because I think he is fine except those hypocritical sentences he likes to say. You can't expect everybody to teach programming like Carey Nachenberg. But here's the thing, the TA Jake Kramer is the MOST AWFUL TA I have ever met, and presumably, the WORST PERSON ever. I really don't like to judge a person when writing evaluations but every clue leads me to the conclusion that he is not only a bad TA but a bad person. It seems that he really enjoys failing students and destroys others confidence. And there is a guy who wrote a little bit more after the exam time ended, Jake refused to take his exam and even tried to stop any other TA to take his exam. Also, they gave extremely hard or tricky questions on exams and homework while not providing answers to them, BTW, you are NOT ALLOWED TO BRING CHEATSHEETS FOR A PROGRAMMING EXAM, meaning you have to memorize every bit of detail of numerous built-in functions in R. and REMEMBER, they will ask you the most tricky part of the functions and they expect you to be perfect, just like the help() function that knows every bits of detail in R. Jake likes to say "Oh I solved this questions with only 6 lines of code" or "my fastest algorithm takes around 2 seconds to run". Fine, I know you are good at R so just (*swear word) TELL US WHAT IS THE ANWER CUZ WE ARE NOT HERE TO LISTEN TO YOU BRAGGING. And guys, if you have taken any CS classes, you know that your instructor will make instructions on your homework very clear, but definitely not in this class. If you ask whether certain output is valid or whether we need to consider edge cases on campuswire, their answers can simply be translated into "do whatever you think is right". And the result of following this answer is that they will take lots of points off on your homework. And moreover, the style checker. This is the first programming class I have ever take that deduces you points for every tiny mistake in your style of code. Although they give you style checker, I have to spend half an hour every time checking styles before submitting the homework. This is just a waste of time and will only ruins your interest to write code when you have to always keep Jake's pedantic rules in mind.
I really wanna end this comment with some good things about this class, but I just can't come up with any. Ok, I have one, I would like to thank Jake forcing me to have the first withdrawal in my transcript, and letting me know how bad a TA can be, and also, to experience the extreme happiness after I clicked "Yes, drop" button on class planner on the last minute.

The workload in this class is overwhelming and Mike and the TA Jake have the typical air of "this isn't difficult, why are you struggling to understand this?" when the majority of people taking the class have never used R before. I never felt like the lecture notes adequately prepared me for the weekly homework assignments, and definitely not for the exams. The final project was assigned in the middle of week 9 when it was supposed to be assigned week 7, and was originally due the day after our final. So naturally, I spent a lot of my time leading up to the final working on the project. Right before our final started, he said he would be fine with people submitting the project on Sunday. I would have rather had more time to study for the final and then work on the project during the weekend if he had mentioned this change earlier.