The top review here mentions Rosario wanting to be like Eggert. Well, he is not Eggert. He's not a particularly good lecturer and I feel his opinions on what is important to know in a course are fairly antithetical to Eggert's. But that is possibly the result of teaching a databases course. Anyways, the course itself is not hard if you put in effort and engage with the material (which, to be fair, I did not), and I thought the exams were reasonable for the most part. His final grades were also very generous (I scored median on both the midterm and the final).

Rosario is a great lecturer, with incredibly detailed slides that he posts on Bruinlearn. He works at Google, and has a lot of good anecdotes from his professional career.

Some of the homeworks were easy, and some are more difficult, but they are all very straightforward.

There is an insane amount of content in this class. From the first to the last lecture Rosario will be lecturing for the entire class period, and he talks fast. Exams are completely open book, but extremely difficult. The curve is less generous than Eggert, but it's still there. I scored in the lower quartile on both the midterm and the final but still managed to scrape by with a B.

This course was pretty intense but overall I enjoyed it. Don't listen to the old reviews, they're not true anymore. Rosario is an amazing professor! He's the best CS professor I've had so far at UCLA. You can tell that he's truly passionate about his work and loves teaching students and helping them succeed. He's very helpful during office hours and works hard answering all our questions on Piazza. I've never had a professor respond so quickly to my Piazza posts.

Rosario is an amazing lecturer. Although there is a TON of content in this class and it can sometimes be dense, Rosario makes sure it's never boring. He cracks a lot of jokes and teaches in a very engaging way. I liked how lecture recordings were posted on YouTube after each lecture. Since there was so much content and Rosario goes through it at a rather quick pace (definitely doesn't speak sleep-inducingly slowly like Smallberg lol), I preferred to use the recordings rather than attend in-person so that I could take notes at my own pace. The slides were also pretty good. This class also has a textbook, but if you understand the lecture well, you don't have to read it since Rosario doesn't put things on his exams that were covered solely in the textbook and not in lecture.

There were 8 homeworks and four of them were graded on completion. The other ones were graded pretty leniently. Out of all the CS classes I've taken so far, this one definitely had the lightest assignment load. Even the most difficult and stressful one, homework/project 5, wasn't as bad as an average CS 32 assignment, and although it was challenging, it was still doable and it made me a better programmer. I also liked how we had 6 late days to use throughout the quarter.

Besides going through the lectures, the biggest time suck for this course for me was by far preparing for the exams. The other reviews are right in that the exams are insanely difficult, particularly the final. If you decide to take this class, you should definitely be prepared to set aside a lot of time to study for the exams; you will definitely not be able to get by with cramming. I did pretty bad on the midterm and the class average was 67, but fortunately Rosario values improvement, so you can improve your grade significantly by doing well on the final. I knew I'd have to do really well on the final to save my grade so I created an in-depth two-week study guide involving reviewing my notes, making flashcards, redoing hw, and doing practice problems from discussion section for each week of content. However, despite following my study plan to the T, I was still feeling terrified to take the final due to the many past reviews with horror stories about how hard it was. My fears certainly weren't unfounded, as the final exam was super difficult. No amount of studying could have prepared me for it. Despite being the final I had studied the most for at UCLA, I only got a C. The class average was 62.

However, here's the catch about the exams: they are curved very generously. Rosario curved my C on the final to an A, which let me end with an A in the class! I was so afraid my hard work would go to waste but thanks to the curve it did not. Many of my friends also said that the curve helped them a lot. Rosario even stated during the last lecture that he knows that we put a lot of effort into this class and that he tries to acknowledge that through his grading scheme.

So seriously, don't let the difficult exams or past reviews deter you from taking this class! You'll learn so much important info that will help you greatly in your CS career taught by a quadruple-Bruin seasoned industry professional who is clearly very passionate about student success. Although you may go through difficulties, they will make you a better student and programmer. This is not a class you want to miss out on and you should take it even if it's not required for your major. I promise, give it a try if you get the chance, you won't regret it ❤️

Edit: In case that wasn't enough convincing for you, I just received an internship offer all thanks to this class!!! After getting my grade back, I sent a follow-up email for a data science position saying I had just finished the course and explaining what I'd learned. That caught the company's interest, as despite ghosting me earlier and ignoring my previous follow-ups, they finally agreed to do a follow-up interview and gave me the offer! Seriously, you need to take this class, it will open doors for you!

Rosario is one of the most entertaining and laidback professors I’ve had in the CS department. Lectures will never bore you, as he cracks jokes or tells stories to break up heavy topics. Assignments were fun to do, and were somewhat comparable to the difficulty of the midterm. The final was tough; we were given new languages and some new scenarios and were meant to use intuition to solve those problems. However, the final was graded pretty generously.

Grading is extremely generous. This quarter, it was 40% HW, 25% MT, and 35% Final. HW was graded on a straight scale, while exams were curved. Rosario was very clear with what he considered to be an A-, B-, C on the midterm.

Overall, the practical content of the course and the perspective of learning from a hip, industry veteran made this class a fun time. Don’t miss out on this hidden gem of a class.

The reviews from 2019 and later quarters all ring true to some extent. Professor Rosario is a good lecturer who tries his best to help students, but his exams are hard as balls: the types of questions he asks are similar to Eggert's, but graded with little to no partial credit given. Had Cho not been on sabbatical, I don't think I would have taken his class, his exams are just too much...

There are some harsh reviews for Professor Rosario here on Bruinwalk. This is more than a little bit surprising to me, as I had an excellent experience taking 143 with him over the summer. Professor Rosario was an engaging lecturer, answered questions well, and was very helpful during office hours. There are several mentions of bullying/micro-aggressions among the other reviews, and given that they are from the same quarter during which I took the class, I must have missed them. All I can testify is that he was friendly and helpful during lectures and office hours and never gave any indications of being rude or dismissive with me that I could pick up on. I felt that the workload was on the easier end for the computer science department, although Eggert has skewed my perspective on normality, and the final was based off of the class (not an accomplishment, but then again we deal with some silly stuff here) and didn't jump out as being particularly unreasonable. It wasn't necessarily the best class I've ever taken but it didn't stand out as a negative experience. I'm only adding my review so that people know that the narrative that Rosario is an asshole is not a universal experience and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt.

hard pass to this guy - one of the worst classes ive ever taken at ucla. he does not care about you learning; he just wants you to feel bad over things you probably missed in each lecture. He runs through about 100 + slides each lecture so good luck getting down every detail. he's snarky on piazza, and just a terrible professor in general. would never take again.

> 8 am
> Slide heavy
> Doesn't give clarifications on Piazza
> Makes a lot of bad jokes
> No clear direction on what we should know for the exam
> Bajillion questions on the final
> 0/10 Professor
> do NOT take 143 with this professor

Rosario is one of the worst excuses for a professor I’ve ever seen, not to mention he’s a borderline crazy (see previous posts on the topological sort incident in class). He gave extremely unreasonable tests that tested irrelevant or uncovered topics in the grand scheme of the class. He let you have a cheat sheet for the exam (one for the midterm and still only one for the final which makes no sense), and usually in CS classes where a cheat sheet is allowed, one can be confident that the material tested on the exam won’t be straight up regurgitations of your cheat sheet, and it will mostly test understanding. Well not with this guy. He decided to have the most random trivial things on his slides be major test questions and if you didn’t have EVERYTHING on your cheat sheet then tough luck (and he made you hand write it, you couldn’t type it...).

Now what’s even worse about him is his handling of assignments. All of his homeworks were super bogus questions that he took from someone else online or straight out of the textbook, and he couldn’t even answer some of them and always just graded on completion. That’s okay, but it seemed really disorganized having a deluge of piazza posts every week about irrational/unsolvable questions on the homeworks to which he would say not to worry about correctness, so everyone probably just put down gibberish. And the projects... Jesus Christ. Usually in CS classes, it is understandable to grade students project submissions using a script, but this man could not write a script for his life and so when (a lot) of projects wouldn’t run on his test script he would just give you a 0. This was weird because my friends and I thoroughly tested and met all spec requirements, and there weren’t any specific “test script adherence” points to follow. And to top it all off, he even provided sanity checks/submission checkers to “make sure your submission doesn’t get drastic points taken off”, and on several occasions he tried to give my partner and I 0s or Fs because his script sucked... and we passed the sanity check! Like what even is a sanity check for? Also, not to mention he basically tried to fail like half the entire class on a project (that was straight up just complicated string parsing, I don’t know why he felt this was a necessary PROJECT for a DB class but whatever) because apparently they had to manually grade our submissions for not working with his bogus script. He initially said no regrades, but when the entire class requested regrades, he had to oblige everyone’s grades went from Fs to 100s...

He’s just a janky and disorganized professor, but what really makes him bad is his guise of fairness, acting like he wants everyone to learn rather than be focused on a grade, but then he fails you on projects because he can’t write a script. I haven’t even gotten my grade back, but I really don’t care cuz I’m just glad to be done with his BS. PEACE OUT RRR ✌🏽

He blazes through ~120 slides a lecture at 8AM when everyone's tired & unfocused. Studying is hard because the material is seriously so boring, and he doesn't give out a list of topics for the midterm or the final. Save urself a headache and avoid this guy.