Ngl, I was nervous about the previous reviews, but Professor BK is not nearly as bad as people make him out to be on here. In fact, he turned out to be one of my favorite professors at UCLA after 2.5 years here (CS&E).

Pro-tip: go to office hours! BK is actually very chill and approachable, and he is more than willing to help if you have trouble understanding. Just make sure you start doing this early in the quarter since the material is cumulative and tends to move quickly.

Not much else to say other than give him a shot and do your due diligence as a student. The material can be terse and difficult at times (especially for CS&E majors) but the core concepts are really what is important, and the material will be difficult no matter which professor you take it with. Use YouTube as a secondary source of information when text and slides don't cut it. You'll be fine!

As mentioned in previous review, this professor grading system is broken. He change the weights in project and homework 3 days before the final!! I was study so hard for the final and midterm. And get a good grade in midterm. But all in a sudden, the project become 35% of total grade, and final only weight 20%. Which make me so frustrating.

The project grading is based on ranking. It's unfair and very time consuming. Our group spend two week over 40 hours in this project, and meet all the requirements. If you finish the Requirement in the description, you will only get 50%, and the other part will based on ranking. That is totally unfair!!!!

Be careful of the final project. Please Please don't follow the project description. Otherwise, you will waste a lot of time. You don't need absolute-value and comparator for this project. You just need to think about a simple logic how to compare a 6-bit absolute value and a positive value (CS33).

He warned us about the project the entire quarter. Read the specs and it isn’t that bad of a project. He literally tells you the hints to know in the specs.

He changed the grading scheme to combat cheating. The lowest grade on the project was a 60%. The major majority were in the 80+ Range so this grading changed helped nearly everybody considering the midterm average was low, you weren’t going to do that well on the final.

His lectures are incredibly clear. The best lectures I’ve had in the EE department. Midterms are fair. The final was a take home due to the coronavirus and he gave us 24 hours.

It’s amazing to me people are complaining about this professor.

Professor Sina himself has said that this is one of the hardest EE classes at UCLA, and he's not lying. We get around 8 or so homework assignments, most of which are 3 or 4 problems with multiple subproblems (e.g. 1a, 1b, etc.) that are fairly time-consuming. There's a group project which, despite seeming very simple, is actually quite time-consuming and is apparently graded on a "rank" basis i.e. you don't just have to meet the project spec, but you also have to do well compared to your peers. The midterm, thankfully, is actually only moderately difficult — at least compared to the final, which is definitely harder. In summary — there's one hell of a workload in this class. Don't underestimate it.

As for Sina himself — he's a dick. There's no way around it. But that doesn't mean he's a bad person, if you get what I mean. He comes across as unforgiving, condescending, and sarcastic — but he does have a warmer side. Don't be upset if he puts you down or makes you feel stupid, 'cause that's just how he is. Just try to be patient, and always have a specific goal in mind when you interact with him. Empirically, he seems to be far nicer online than in-person, so try email/campuswire if you feel nervous about him.

Professor Sina is a real nice fella. I enjoyed talking with him and learning from him during office hours. He was accommodating towards the class and takes feedback seriously. Sina and our TA co-designed a much more manageable final project due to the complaints about the previous project. I hope they keep some form of the current project in the future because it leaves plenty of room for ingenuity without being overly taxing on students.

The slides for this class can be a lot to take in. You'll be happily following along in lecture and then realize you missed half the point once you get to homework. At this point, referring back to his slides can be a wash; you're generally better off reading the relevant section of the textbook and/or going to his office hours.

The class was a lot of work. The homeworks consisted of only a few questions each but you needed to understand the concepts well in order to do them quickly. Exam averages were painfully low but don't feel doomed--you'll probably be saved by the gracious curve. Despite that, I felt the exams were fair. The questions tended to be on par with homework assignments, in-class problems, and the easier problems from discussion (but that still leaves lots of material to screw up during a test.)

Oh yeah, and have fun wrestling with Cadence over VPN. It's the best thing ever.