"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.

Confusing lecturing. PowerPoint slides were like over 100 pages and she just read all of the slides without explaining them. I was so confused and frustrated throughout the class.

Exams were VERYB hard. We were asked to do a lot of math work and computation in only 100 minutes. However, the correct answer for a question was "this question couldn't be answered". I spent hella time computing and running algorithm. Then you told me the correct answer was not doing anything? Totally a joke. Giving students a difficult won't make you a good professor. And giving unclear lectures discourages students from learning. Don't take any classes taught by professor Wang, your life has so much more important things to do.

Oh my god. I am here to send my bless to all of the students taking this class including myself. This course is probably the worst class that I have taken in my entire life. By looking at the course material, it sounds interesting and useful. But this professor ruined everything. I can barely understood what she was talking in the lecture. PowerPoint slides missed so many details so students got lost. But the test was tedious, very hard and pointless.

Also, i want to call out TA in this class. Very irresponsible. We tried to ask him questions but he never explained or made up something trying to get over this office hour. Also, it takes forever to get your assignment grade from the TA. It took several weeks to get ur grade since u submitted. The whole quarter is only ten weeks!!!!

Life can be so amazing and meaningful. Dont waste time on this course. Its just not worth it. I meant it.

She literally just read the slides in class. Also, she came class unprepared - did not explain the important concepts and most of students were confused. I literally need to Google everything up. Professors were supposed to ease things up but she made everything so confusing, dull, challenging.

Midterm and final exams are extremely difficult. I was so frsutrated and definitely did not recommend taking her class.

Idk why there aren't any reviews here. Maybe no one's feeling strongly about the class either positively or negatively.

Anyways good luck taking this class. The material is interesting but the teaching is not helpful and the tests are long and extensive.

Maybe from previous reviews, you might think this class is a tough one. But at least for online version, the professor explains concepts clearly and designed tests that are closely related to the course materials. Some of the concepts are hard to understand for sure, but as long as you do some practices, you will master them without too many struggles. Tests are fair and representative of the course materials. TAs can be really helpful for extra exercises and reviews of core concepts. At least from my experience, this course is not ambiguous as many other courses. Algorithms and methodologies are clear and straightforward. The only thing difficult is to understand the algorithm and familiarize yourself with those steps. Also, the extra group project to predict COVID trend is really interesting and applies what you have learnt.