this class is HORRIBLE with Jane Shevstov. Jane is the WORST teacher ever. She is impossible to understand and should not be allowed to teach ever again. It is absolutely impossible to pay attention in her lectures so you learn absolutely nothing. The grading is extremely unforgiving and the grading scheme for this course makes it really hard to receive a good grade. midterm and final is 75% of your grade and the other 25% is homework that is not graded on completion!! DO NOT take this class! Also, Jane is one of the writers of the textbook and it is horribly written and hard to understand which does not help at all. The only thing helping me in this class is notes that are re-scribed by the TAs. Also the homework is really tedious and repetitive and takes foreverrrr. PLEASE do not take this class with Jane (I have heard good things about other professors but DO NOT TAKE IT W JANE).

Excellent professor! Very thorough explanations. I really can't say anything bad about her except that her lectures can be pretty slow sometimes. For midterms and finals, just study the practice exams and you'll be well prepared.

do not take this class. very difficult material and professor is hard to understand.

As nice as Prof. Shevtsov is, it’s very very difficult to understand her and the overall course is mismanaged because the labs do not really correlate with the material sufficiently enough. Homework is due weekly as well as labs, the former grades for completion but the latter being extremely difficult/tedious. Tests are fair enough (Go to weekly problem solving sessions!!!).

This class was not fun. Usually when a professor is bad at teaching, they compensate themselves by giving out less work, being more accommodating, or providing ample resources outside of class. Not Shevtsov. Aside from the class being extremely disorganized and confusing, she also assigns a lot of homework, and this year she even created a new Lab Practical which is 10% of our grade.
The TAs were the only people holding this class together and given the recent strike, this class is disastrous. Prof.Shetsov does not seem to understand the gravity of the strike and insisted that students go to Labs regardless. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the labs are canceled, but Prof.Shevtsov is determined to carry on business as usual. We have to complete our Labs by ourselves (granted, there is 1 zoom makeup lab section so far, but many cannot make it to that time), which is near impossible unless you have previous coding experience.
Overall, this class made me regret taking the LS30 series and lose faith in my mathematical abilities. I have never missed calculus this much. Think twice if Shevtsov is your professor, you geniunely would be better off with Math3A - even if the content is said to be "harder".

Dr.Shevtsov was a pretty good professor but Winter 2022 was an unusual quarter since the first half was online and the second half was in person. Her online lectures were definitely better but her in-person ones were not as good because of the lack of slides she had before and some tech/audio issues that were out of her control. One thing about the class is the homework. She assigned so many problems in the textbook and many of these problems were so weirdly worded or just difficult to answer. Other professors like Jukka assign fewer problems from the textbook. Her tests were somewhat fair, definitely a bit more difficult than the practice tests given by other professors. These tests make you think a lot. However, her coding practical (basically a coding test) was very easy since it was just simple concepts you already learned before. The TAs were really helpful and nice! The coding part was time-consuming but I found it to be a lot of fun (due to my prior coding background).

TLDR: Dr.Shevtsov is not a bad professor to take it with! Bit tougher tests and more homework, but all of that is manageable if you stay on top of the class (class concepts are pretty easy if you've taken AP Calc).

I took this class in the winter and it was by far the most unpleasant teaching experience I have had thus far. The class material is rather confusing on its own and in conjunction to her teaching style, it was even worse. I took this class when there was a mandatory lockdown and for the first four weeks, our classes were held on zoom. These four weeks were misery. The professor would have 7 slides on average each session with one or two pictures on them and no words or written work. We would, for literally 1 hour and 15 minutes stare stare a schematic of chaos while she talked the whole time. When we went back in person, it was much better since they would use the whiteboard to go through concepts, however it was sometimes hard to hear her, so sit in the front. The labs in this class were also very confusing and a large step from what you saw in 30A. So be prepared to work with your groups or TAs or literally anyone else in the class because the coding in this class is just thrown at you for and hour and 50 minutes and never spoken of again. The professor also assigns a large amount of work. We had more homework problems than the other 30B classes with different professors. We also, going into finals week, had around 46 questions of HW (with multiple parts for each) and a capstone project, both of which took forever to complete. And that was in addition to the studying and work you had for your other classes. The homework in this class also involves coding problems which was something that other classes rarely had on their homework. I would not say she is the worse lecturer, but she is very close. She rarely would expound on some concepts and would just assume you would read the textbook. Part of the problem is, I think, is that she was one of the leading authors of the textbook. This means that everything that she could possibly say or want to say is IN the textbook. So, she probably felt she did not ever really need to explain concepts. However, perusing textbooks to learn math is very difficult for many in addition to being ineffective. The first midterm was okay, there is an individual and group portion, the latter being more difficult obviously. She also gave previous midterms to help you practice, however they did not really resemble the actual midterm. The final was outright egregious, there was also a mistake on the test. When multiple people asked on Campuswire if there was a mistake, the TA literally told us, with great confidence, that there was no mistake, despite the fact that there in fact was (they later confirmed this). The final was very hard and did not reflect the type of learning we had done in the previous weeks. If you asked me five weeks into the quarter, ten weeks into the quarter, or even after the quarter ended what I learned in the class, I would give you the same answer: nothing. However, this class is probably easier than the other math series so if you are an LS major, then just bite the bullet, your GPA will thank you.

General Idea: If you like coding, you might like this class. If you don't like coding, for the love of god and all things holy don't take this class. Every homework assignment is at least 60% coding and every lab is all code. If you liked the LS30 series then perhaps you'll like this class.

As far as course content goes, the content is relatively easy since you use the textbook to learn a lot. However, Prof Shevtsov's lectures really aren't all that useful, and they only help if you get the chance to actually speak during class to explain your reasoning. You'll be hard-pressed to find a slide given during a lecture that has any more than about 10 words on it. Practically, if you go to a lecture then you might get clarification on something you read in the textbook. Otherwise, good luck justifying leaving your bed since the lectures are recorded anyways.

Now for the homework. The homework itself is rather easy if you like code. It's about 7 questions of data analysis using code you write or just explaining what code you could write. The problem, though? It's been 7 weeks before I got my first homework assignment graded, and some of my classmates haven't even gotten one graded yet. The homework is typically rather disorganized, like how week 7's homework said to look at week 8's homework answers for clarification. Some parts of the homework rely on a one-word difference between what Prof Shevtsov said, the textbook said, and the TAs said. As of finalizing this review it's summer and my 5th homework of 9 was just graded.

Oh boy and here's the best part: the grading scheme. In reality, there are 2 of them running at the same time: [[25% Homework, 25% midterm, 50% final]] OR [[25% Homework, 75% Final]]]
Whichever one you score better with is the grading scheme you use for your course grade. Now just think of it like this: if you don't do well on the first midterm (because you got no feedback on homework or labs in time so you didn't know if you were doing ANYTHING right) then you have the option to drop it and rely on the final to dictate the other 75% of your grade.

My overall view of this class? It's pretty poor in every way you can think. Lectures aren't all that useful, homework isn't just disorganized but it's rarely graded, and my professor disagreed with the textbook and the TAs on critical parts of data analysis. Though, I am a sucker for math/science/biology so I think that my appreciation for the subject really helped me out in sticking with the class.

While it might be hard to tell, I really do tend to see the best in people and assume the best reasons for why something happened. This class has so much wrong that my incessant optimism just isn't enough to cut through the literal slag covering this class's every crevice. (That optimism shows with the "Overall 4" despite the other scores being less than that :D )

If you can tolerate useless lectures, ungraded homework, no comments on such homework, and a grading scheme that monopolizes on your suffering, then this is the class for you! <3

edit: It's now the first week of summer and I still stand by everything I said lol. The Final really wasn't that bad, just that it tested on a couple of fringe topics that we only covered for literally one minute during class. I'm still waiting on my Final exam grade, but I'm fairly confident that I'll get an A (I only missed 1.5 points on the midterm for reference). If you can study on your own time and can teach yourself stats (like I did), then perhaps you'll do well in this class.

Overall: If you liked the coding in the LS30 series, take this class (if the professor is good). If you didn't like the coding, don't take this class.

Grading:
Homework - 25%
Midterm - 25%
Final - 50%
You also have the option to take out the midterm so that the final is worth 75%.
There's also easy extra credit in filling out the evaluation forms and a small meme-making assignment. A-F scale is standard.

Homework - Weekly assignments entirely on CoCalc. Graded on accuracy (though my grader seemed fairly lenient). Much of it (but not all) is coding in Python, usually using the things learned in Lab. First weeks were not too bad but gets longer/more complicated over time. Expect to spend a good chunk of the time with this class on the hw. There was at least one homework where everyone was exceptionally confused about a question, so the Professor Shevtsov allowed us to get points with just an attempt. Homework seems to be recycled from previous quarters, which is fine, but sometimes refer to old things that aren't there anymore which can add to confusion.

Also, these take an extremely long time to grade for some reason. I am writing this review at the end of finals week, and I only got my grades for HW up to Week 5. At least they give you the solutions to all the homework by the end of the quarter to prepare for final.

Labs - Similar to LS30 labs, meant to teach you how to code the conceptual things from lecture (emphasis on simulating sample studies). They're not graded, but they're really needed to understand the homework, so I would recommend doing them. How "good" the lab sections are highly depends on your TA, since they all have different styles of teaching and doing code. Overall, the TA's are mixed bag, but at least one of them probably fits your preferences. If you can't understand Professor Shevtsov, you WILL be relying on the TA's for understanding course content too.

Exams: The midterm is in-person, handwritten, about 2 hrs (though won't necessarily take you that long). Average was a 75%, median 80%. The final is split half and half: a coding section (24 hrs open-everything on Cocalc) and an in-person section (3 hrs, about 1.5x length of midterm). Grades pending on the final. On the written sections for both exxams, I think they decently covered what we learned in class and weren't excessively complicated or anything. Some questions were written quite vaguely though, which seems to be a general trait of Professor Shevtsov's writing, and really has to make you think about what the intent about the question is. She gives you past midterms/finals that are pretty similar to the current exams at least. On the coding part of the final, the difficulty was similar to homework (easy-moderate) though again, a single vaguely written question can turn the difficulty meter way up.

Professor: I think Professor Shevtsov genuinely tries to teach, but I think for a lot of people she's not great. Part of it is her disability, which makes her speak slowly and a bit hard to understand (like an accent). It also really negatively affects learning in lectures, since its sometimes hard to pay attention or connect things that were said. Personality-wise, she's usually understanding if you talk to her personally.

Lectures: Some lectures contain a lot of information while others have barely anything happen. Usually slides have diagrams, Clicker questions, etc. The slides are a bit disorganized but it usually has essential information. She does like to spend a lot of time on clickers though,, and I think she wastes too much time on that when we could just be going over content. (e.g. we once spent 30 min on a single clicker question). The main good thing about lectures is that there is also a TA writing notes on the lecture that acutally explains things decently in bullet-point form and simple diagrams (and is also displayed live while in lecture), and these are uploaded after every lecture, so I would highly recommend looking at these notes when reviewing.

Textbook: Lectures are hit or miss, and I usually used the textbook when reviewing. I personally think the textbook is decent in explaining, but a massive problem is that the textbook is unfinished, so content for a good chunk of the later weeks (which is also the harder section) is just not in the textbook.

Other Notes: Again, just summarizing from above, I think a big problem in this class is that homework and exam questions can be quite vague or confusingly-written. Also, I think that a certain kind of mindset is needed in this class. Personally, everything really clicked for me in this class (remember: null-hypothesis testing and confidence intervals have the same basic steps, just applied to different situations), which is why I think I was able to do the homework and exams fairly easily. But I know that for a lot of others, things really just don't make sense and never click anytime in the course. Frustration from the professor, logistics, etc. also really decreased enjoyment. Also, I actually enjoyed the coding, which is half the class, and I truly think the Python skills are valuable, especially if you pursue further programming skills.

However, if you disliked the LS30 series even a little bit, you probably won't enjoy this class.

If there was a 0 rating, I would give her that. Prof. Stevsov is playing with students lives and taking advantage of her sickness. she should not be allowed to teach students. She is not even trying so the students will pass her class. Lectures are horrible and no one can understand. Notes on slides are terribly made. No one can understand what she wants to teach.
I would recommend not to take this class.