This professor actually is the worst LOL. This is my first bruinwalk review and I’ve never felt more motivated to write a bad review. I took this class because unfortunately Chen’s lecture was filled up. Zhou was unbearable. Homework was difficult and his notes were not understandable. His midterm and final were nothing like the material he taught in class. Apparently a girl in my lecture was crying during the final. Please please avoid this guy. If you look at Chen’s grade distribution, it’s like 60% A’s. That is NOT the case with Zhou who only gives the top 20% a variation of an A. If you want to apply to grad school, avoid this gpa killer. You’ll get your GPA lowered and it won’t even be worth it because you won’t learn anything. Seriously, avoid this professor. I’ve never learned less in an upper division stats class and this guy should have never been allowed to start teaching this class again.

I was excited for 102c. But this professor made this class unbearable. His exam is not reflective of class materials. Despite hours and hours of studying, it doesn’t matter because the final exam was outside of the scope. He said a certain date for an ADDITIONAL take home final and then cut back time and it was due the next day. Wish I could’ve taken it with Chen.

102C is one of the harder classes that stats majors have to take but the topics are highly interesting, and different (in a good way) than the other classes. It's a more simulation-based rather than mathematical approach to statistics, and the best part is that if you don't know how to prove something theoretically, you can write code to figure out the approximate answers. That's pretty powerful and this class introduces some examples of that approach.

Zhou taught very well and his lectures were understandable. I remember the final exam had a take-home programming part that was quite hard. Homework and tests were doable but required you to really understand the material. Highly recommend taking this class with Zhou.

If you like not having any idea what you're doing and having no idea why you're doing it, then this class could potentially be a good fit for you. The class starts off with Zhou writing a bunch of proofs with no context or title, simply calling them "proof" and that's about it. I'm not really sure what it was we were supposed to be learning but I can assure you, I did not learn it. I recommend taking Chen.

I love this guy. Took this class with Prof Zhou in spring of my senior year and it makes my top five favorite classes and definitely top 5 favorite professors. Zhou is an excellent lecturer, knows the material inside and out, and challenges you without making exams and homework so hard that studying is rendered pointless. There was weekly homework (TA's help a lot so go to discussion), one 50 minute midterm, and a 2 hour final.

He is also SO ORGANIZED! Homework is due on the same day each week, lecture notes are always posted before lecture (so you can print them out and bring them to class to annotate,) and his handwriting is beautiful in a math professor kind of way.

Although lecture notes are posted, and attendance is optional, it was still very much worth it to attend class as the spatial nature of the material often took more explaining than was doable on paper.

tldr: Nice guy, funny, organized, isn't a try-hard, and wants people to learn. Challenging but doable. 10/10 take his class, go to lecture, go to discussion, put in the time, and you'll do great.

he posts his hand written notes online,
midterm 40%
final 50%
hw 10%

There are 5 homework's, 4 of which are graded

midterm covers stuff you learn first 5 weeks of class
which is about 10 pages of his hand written notes
midterm only had 3/4 questions and they are stuff you can do if u understand the examples from his notes and homework

final only covers stuff u learn from week 6-10, final is always on the last day of class. again about 4/5 questions

stop 20% of students get As
next 20-80% get Bs
and botton 20% get C's or lower...

Also you can take 4 pages of notes to each exam

I took 102B and 102C with him

I really enjoyed this class.
The material was very interesting and I found use of it immediately after finishing the course.
The workload is pretty light, a few assignments, midterm and exam were takehome.
Lecture notes were clear and instructive.

Most of all I appreciate that prof Zhou was really good at answering my questions, clear, concise and insightful.

This professor is the worst I had at UCLA. His exam is super hard. The mean and median for the whole class is super low, around 40 out of 100. However, he does not curve at all. The grade you get from midterm and final is the actual grade of your total grade. This means that all students from this class get below B-. I got C-, one my friend from this class got C- as well. Another student I know got C. Please! Do not take this class with Qing Zhou. He knows Monte Carlos. However, he does not know how to teach. Moreover, his exams are super super super hard.

Zhou is one of my favorite professors in the Stats department and I like the way he teaches math. Usually professors who teach math write messily on the board and doesn't pay attention to whether students understand the lecture. But Zhou was very clear throughout every class and always made sure to review the pre-req concepts. He doesn't shy away from giving proofs but you always learn a lot about the details of how the math works, which is not emphasized in many other Stats classes (ie. 101 series).

Coding isn't as important in 102B as it is in 102A or 102C, since this class is mostly about linear algebra and optimization. Homework problems (this year's TA gave away the solutions) and exams were focused on concepts rather than computation, but they weren't nearly as challenging as Christou's. I would recommend Zhou because he was a good lecturer and knew his stuff inside out.