<p>Could anyone please give some feedback on both professors? A lot of people are giving good feedback on Pister according to NinjaCourses. But there aren't really a lot of reviews on Sahai. Can anyone that has taken his class or heard about him give me some feedback? Thanks!</p>
<p>Take both. CS70 Professors all suck except for Wagner, Sinclair, and to a <em>tiny</em> lesser extent, Sahai (I sat in his EE126 lectures a few times, dude is OK but is very serious about probability. So expect heavier work than usual in the last half of CS70). The rest suck. As for Pister, it’s his first time teaching EE42, so good review for his upper-div EE classes wouldn’t help much, but I would go with the reviews and take him. </p>
<p>I personally think Spr2013 is a fantastic semester when you have Garcia, Shewchuk, Sahai, Pister, Papad, Paxson, etc., the best teachers you can get for most of the CS classes here at Berkeley, in the same semester…</p>
<p>I took EE126 with Sahai this semester. HE IS AMAZING (and he loves probability since it plays a big role in his research). He will push you hard as apparently our homework assignments in EE126 went beyond in both time and difficulty than of those with other professors teaching it, but the extra insights he gave us which went beyond the scope of the course/textbook was invaluable to my education imo.</p>
<p>I’ve heard he does similar things like this when teaching other courses like EE 120 and perhaps with EE121.</p>
<p>I don’t know about lower divs but he’ll probably do it for CS70 at least for the probability part.</p>
<p>But yeah Sinclair was definitely an amazing CS 70 professor all around. I loved his lecture notes…</p>
<p>^ Lucky you to have all the good professors. CS70 this semester is terrible… </p>
<p>How much difference is EE126 compared to CS70? Did you guys start from the beginning, or just jump straight into Theoretical Probability assuming knowledge from CS70? I sat on the lecture about Markov Chains, and that blew my mind…</p>
<p>Thanks for the reply you guys! </p>
<p>How much time should I be committing to each class per week? How bad are the weekly problem sets? Also, are their tests fair? What should I do to prepare for them?</p>
<p>It sounds like I’ll actually be having good professors this coming semester. Grunbaum was horrible…</p>
<p>OK, Problem Set in CS70 is entirely up to you. I think they switched from handing in paper copies of your homework to submitting a pdf via glookup, maybe this summer and this semester or so (Dunno if they ever did that before). That can be quite a problem. If you choose to type it in Latex and make the readers’ lives easier, chances are you won’t get docked too many points. If you choose to scan it and somehow end up uploading a 10Mb file, you know the odds are against you.</p>
<p>Anw, the homework itself ranges from 3-15 hours. If you are smart and know what you are doing, getting it done and coming up with the solution takes as little as 3 hours. If you are struggling through the class, and constantly have to go to OH for hints, it may take you longer. Writing them down legibly and scanning them is another 2 hours, but if you choose to type it then export to PDF, that may take around 3-5 hours depends on how fast you type and how familiar you are with Latex.</p>
<p>I would say be ready to spend around 20 hours a week on CS70, especially when Sahai is teaching. It’s a great class, you will learn a lot for sure, but you absolutely don’t want to fall behind since they have so much material to cover in one semester. </p>
<p>As for EE42, we’ll see. I’m taking it too, lol. But I’ve heard that without EE43, most people spend around 10 hours a week on it, which is not bad at all compared to CS70 and the 61 series.</p>
<p>Edit: forgot you also asked about the test. This semester, they give out a very, very easy midterm 1. The average was about 82%. Then midterm 2 **** just got real and everyone panicked when the average jumped down to 56%. After doing the final last Friday, most people I know and myself included still felt like “*** was that?” because there were a couple of questions which we had no idea how to do, and they each worth 25-35 points out of about 150, I guess? I’ve looked at Sinclair’s test before and they look tough but challenging, also the difficulty almost remains constant throughout the semester. I hope Sahai will do the same next semester, but anyway, “hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” You will never know what kind of test your beloved Cal professor will throw at you to set the curve, lol. To prepare for the test, consider doing ALL of the past exams, especially those of Sahai to get the pattern (I think he only taught this class once before, in Fall 2006 with Papad). The course reader (the book, not the one who grade your hw :p) won’t help, nor will the homework.</p>
<p>The first week or two will feel like the second half of CS70. Thus your first two homeworks will feel fairly trivial with maybe the exception of one problem per homework. Homework three (Week 3) may still be finishing up what you learned in CS70 but the difficulty/length of the homework sets starts to finally get to the levels expected by the Sahai (although I wouldn’t say it does until about Homework 4-5, and your have 10 homeworks). </p>
<p>Also, even when he goes over stuff you’ve learned, like the Weak Law of Large Numbers, he does a lecture on a sister interpretation of it called the Asymptotic Equipartition Principle (AEP), and for normal (Gaussian) random variables, he goes into the concept of Jointly Gaussian R.V’s and giving the linear algebra intuition behind it. So I feel like you won’t feel bored with the exception of maybe the first two weeks.</p>
<p>Finally, he doesn’t curve grades so grading is extremely fair and definitely in the favor of the students.</p>
<p>Just the answers I was looking for. Thanks you guys!</p>
<p>So Sahai doesn’t curve? I’ve heard CS70 can be pretty brutal…how does that help the students?</p>
<p>I think Diivio means he doesn’t curve EE126. I’m 90% sure he will curve for CS70. Or set some sort of grade buckets like 61A/B did.</p>
<p>^Yeah he doesn’t curve EE126, but he probably will curve lower division courses like most professors.</p>