Professor
Wei Wang
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2016 - "Data Mining" sounds like a great class—until you realize that it means sitting through 1.5 hours of research papers converted into incomprehensible PowerPoint slides. Professor Wang is the epitome of a professor who does not know how to teach, because she clearly never received training in it. Examples are not worked out, complex diagrams, definitions, and tables are breezed by before they can even be fully examined, and every slide has a million items on it. Her style is to drop an unintelligible stream of academic jargon and acronyms before saying, "Okay? Great, let's move on." People have no idea where to even begin asking questions. The tests are all multiple-choice, which sounds easy for the pattern-matching powers of most modern college students. Except, they usually require working out long algorithms. Now trying repeating 10-minute computations for 20 questions in a row with only 100 minutes for the midterm. The average and median came out to 13/20. You do the math, because she clearly didn't. This is a common predicament in the math lowerdivs: a non-helpful professor and bad presentation of material. In that case, you could turn to the textbook (or better yet, KhanAcademy). In a CS upperdiv like this, you can only hopelessly Google for slightly more comprehensible slides from other universities. The professor also doesn't follow the textbook (which is similarly jargon and math-heavy). Your only saving grace is the TAs, and not even all of them were helpful enough. To top it all off, you have a group project to struggle through for the last half of the quarter. Overall, CS 145 is a stinking example of all that is wrong with the theory-heavy CS curriculum at UCLA. Avoid it at all costs and go do something useful with your time. The world has many real problems to solve.
Fall 2016 - "Data Mining" sounds like a great class—until you realize that it means sitting through 1.5 hours of research papers converted into incomprehensible PowerPoint slides. Professor Wang is the epitome of a professor who does not know how to teach, because she clearly never received training in it. Examples are not worked out, complex diagrams, definitions, and tables are breezed by before they can even be fully examined, and every slide has a million items on it. Her style is to drop an unintelligible stream of academic jargon and acronyms before saying, "Okay? Great, let's move on." People have no idea where to even begin asking questions. The tests are all multiple-choice, which sounds easy for the pattern-matching powers of most modern college students. Except, they usually require working out long algorithms. Now trying repeating 10-minute computations for 20 questions in a row with only 100 minutes for the midterm. The average and median came out to 13/20. You do the math, because she clearly didn't. This is a common predicament in the math lowerdivs: a non-helpful professor and bad presentation of material. In that case, you could turn to the textbook (or better yet, KhanAcademy). In a CS upperdiv like this, you can only hopelessly Google for slightly more comprehensible slides from other universities. The professor also doesn't follow the textbook (which is similarly jargon and math-heavy). Your only saving grace is the TAs, and not even all of them were helpful enough. To top it all off, you have a group project to struggle through for the last half of the quarter. Overall, CS 145 is a stinking example of all that is wrong with the theory-heavy CS curriculum at UCLA. Avoid it at all costs and go do something useful with your time. The world has many real problems to solve.
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