His midterm focuses on trivial details. Not an easy one, but still doable since he curved a lot and gave practice. Final is pretty easy. However, I do not think he is as friendly and willing to help students as others said...especially during his OHs

Aside from his highly confusing exam questions, the homework problems are REALLY hard. You are basically required to build extra complicated codes based on his lectures navigating basic R and some library stuff. I believe taking STATS 20 is not enough to prepare this class. Be sure to come up with decent programming skills to survive in this class.

Pros : His lectures are so organized that you can easily study via the videos on CCLE and the lecture notes. He gives lots of extra credits toward the end of quarter.

He pretty much gives you a free 20% just for completing lecture quizzes and participating on campuswire. There are 6 homeworks which are moderately difficult, but the instructions are clear so it is easy to see if you were right. Midterm is difficult but he added some points for everyone's midterm. Final much easier than midterm

To my own experience, I don't think this class is as hard as other people claimed it to be. Dr. Chen gave us his old exams as practice exams, and I have taken both midterm and final, so I can be sure that the difficulty in my class and the previous class is at the same level. Although Dr. Chen said that this is a coding class, Stat102A is no way compared to CS31 in which I used to spend at least 5-10 hrs or even more for each project, it may be an easier version of PIC10A. He does test some conceptual details, but he reminds students that he will do so before the test. As long as you watch his youtube lectures and take notes, and STUDY, you will be totally fine. The only thing is that I think he didn't spend enough time on numerical methods/ Randomization/Bootstrap tests (probably because it is summer). If you have taken Numerical Methods MATH151A, you will have no problem understanding the material, but if you have not, spend some more time on the internet. Otherwise, I don't really have anything to complain about Dr. Chen. Nice summer class!!!

People love this guy for some reason and I really cannot for the life of me figure out why. He's not the worst professor in the world (or even in the UCLA stats department lol) but imo, the glazing in these reviews is excessive.

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Starting with the good: he's a decent lecturer and it's really nice that he records lectures (especially for the 8am section), but it's also a bit funny that he'll do that and then make these snarky comments about how nobody shows up to class in person lol.
There's also a ton of extra credit on homework assignments, Campuswire participation, he even gave everybody an extra 5% on the midterm just because he felt like the average wasn't high enough. He also tells you exactly what's going to be on the final. That being said, the class is not hard and really does not require all this hand-holding whatsoever, but I'm not going to complain. He also holds office hours very frequently, but see above.

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The bad: Oh boy. On the first day of class, he'll casually say something like "I'm not very good at replying to emails, so don't email me" and just leave it at that for the entirety of the quarter. And I'm supposed to just accept that a college professor who is supposed to be a professional in his field just doesn't check his fckg emails? You'll email him about something and he doesn't respond, so a few days later you go to his single office hour per day, wait for the other 10 people there to get their questions answered, and finally talk to the man himself just for him to address you with this honestly bizarre air of condescension like you've made the most heinous remarks about the dplyr package just for having the audacity to ask for some sort of accommodation.
Homework rubrics are not clear. Very rarely do they range beyond "correct" and "wrong," and for clarification, you of course have to go to the aforementioned office hours. If you're not free, with Miles' refusal to check his emails, you're pretty much SOL. Campuswire is full of people giving useless non-answers so they can farm upvotes for the mandatory participation points. I don't know if the TA even exists outside of discussion. Submit a regrade request on Gradescope and say a Quran verse, I guess.

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Rant over. To be fair to the guy, he does hold office hours an insane four times a week.

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All in all, my Miles Chen Stats 102a experience was probably more of a personal problem - I don't think he liked me and clearly, I'm not the biggest fan of him either. You're unlikely to have as much of an issue as I did - Chen is a perfectly adequate lecturer for this class, and I do recommend taking him, but mainly because I think the alternatives are likely to be even worse. He isn't bad from a high-level standpoint, he just gets all of the little things (communication, being accommodating, professionalism, etc.) completely and absolutely wrong.

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TLDR: Take his class, but keep your expectations in check.

Miles's lectures are great and the hw actually helps u. much love

Professor is very understanding. Homeworks are really hard.

This class was not easy, but it is very doable if you put in the work. Not to mention, Miles Chen is probably the best Statistics professor I have ever come across. His lectures are well organized and clear and his exams are very fair (plus, he has a cute dog which you may see if you go to live lecture). The homework projects took me some time, so I'd start early and not overload on other difficult classes. Overall I learned a lot in this class and I would gladly take any other class taught by Miles Chen.

Note: This review is for Winter 2021, a quarter conducted remotely for this class.

I thoroughly enjoyed Professor Chen's STATS 102A class. The first half was an in-depth review of STATS 20 (with a little extra around classes and regex (i.e., regular expressions), with the latter half shifting toward use in computational statistics. Professor Chen was extremely clear about how to approach some situations and how to use code in such instances, helping provide a nice picture of how to run simulations with R.

I've heard many people describe some of the homework assignments as difficult, but I found them to be manageable (in fact, I sort of wished there was a little more extension to some assignments). For the exams, the online version of this course had two-hour exams (midterm and final) that were open book; it was more about application and less about memorization, which I found more practical and representative of a real-life situation. Overall, his grading scheme is rather generous, and you should not worry too much about your grade in the course

TL;DR: A solid STATS 20 background can be extremely helpful, but nonetheless the class is not bad if you actively listen/pay attention in lecture. Grades are generally not too stressful.

I really enjoyed taking this class with Miles. I had a bad experience with Stats 20 that left me feeling really nervous for 102A. While the homework assignments were challenging, they really helped me understand the concepts we learned in lecture and also made me feel more confident in my R capabilities. The content of the class is super interesting. Miles is very approachable and helpful in OH, and overall super encouraging and wants his students to succeed. I also really liked how we used Campuswire for this class, as everyone is super helpful and quick to answer questions. All of the exams are very fair and the grade breakdown is fair as well. I highly recommend taking this class with Miles!