If you have all the time in the world to attend office hours and hop around to various TA sessions, then this course might be doable. This is not the professor to take if you're also balancing a myriad of other extracurricular activities. I'm a working student balancing various positions, so making time to review and grasp the in-class material, in addition to the homework, and practice finals/midterms, to then craft good questions for clarification was often challenging. Also, as a transfer student I'd say it would have definitely helped to have taken a Stats class before this.

Disclaimer: I only attended the first 3 discussions, but TA wasn't great at helping me understand concepts and develop intuition.

Homework: In all honesty, I heavily relied on Chegg solutions to even begin to understand how to approach the homework problems. His in-class examples were too simple and didn't translate into understanding more challenging variations. In addition, he didn't do a great job of helping us develop our intuition. He would throw new problem types at us in the homework that were not once covered in class. To be fair, the TA's would go over the homework the following week, but not all TA's are made equally. It was only in my PLF session that I even began to grasp the real world applications of the things we were learning.

Midterm: The practice problems were definitely reflected in the actual midterm. That being said, in my experience the in-class lecture and homework didn't prepare you much for either the practice or actual midterm. You were actually learning new things when going over the material. So, unless you had the time review the practice problems in time to meet with Denis or your TA, you might have not been sure how to answer a good portion of them. There was also no solution manual, just an answer key.

Final: He rushed us through the last sections and glossed over the null-hypothesis topic. He didn't even solve actual problems in class and they definitely showed up in the final. But again, I cannot be sure how big of a role not attending my discussion played in my lack of understanding. Nevertheless, you were again learning new things as you were trying to solve the practice final. So, you had to find the time to go to office hours and TA sections to even begin to understand how to approach the problems. So many strategies and methods to solve for answers were just never taught in class.

So yeah. Unless you have a light course load, previous stats experience, and time to religiously attend TA section AND their office hours, in addition to Denis' OH, don't take this class. The methods in themselves are quite simple though, and it just takes simple memorization to problem solve. So if you can ask questions and identify the steps to solve a problem, you should be okay.

Denis was a great professor, though I didn't spend much time in class because I had another class at the same time. He's very friendly and always willing to answer questions. He assigns grades based off of rank within the class, so make sure you step up when it comes to exams. Scoring above the curve is a good way to get an A. He makes the exams pretty easy, especially in comparison to the reviews from previous quarters. The downside to this is that you definitely need to get an A (or something close to that) on exams in order to get an A in the class. Averaging a C on exams however, is probably enough to get a low B or high C.
My advice is to pay close attention to the homework and do all of the practice problems he gives you. Doing all of those are probably enough to get an A in the class.

Disclaimer- This was the first online quarter
Let me start off by saying I didn't like the class. This class was the hardest econ class ive taken ( and ive taken 1,2 and 11) The professors lectures were a drag to listen to and most of the time went like 10-15 mins over the designated lecture time. The lectures were recorded but they were boring to listen to, I almost never did them in one sitting. As for the syllabus, he provided 4 different grading scheme due to the different situations going on. HW was always 10%, Midterm was either 0/45/30/60% with the Final being 90/45/60/30% respectively. As for the actual content of the class, the professor's lectures weren't very clear. He stated more theorems, definitions and proofs than showed how to use them in an actual example which is in my eyes the most important part because he didn't ask any theorem/definition/proof questions on the exams. The midterm was pretty straight forward, the average was like 90-92% depending on what time you took it (he provided 8am and 8pm exams to accommodate time differences). The high average was undoubtably due to people collaborating, bc the professor did not write an easy midterm. The final averages were 85-89% (bc he again provided 2 different times for the exam). The final was 70 questions and was not easy at all. The way he calculated grades was also quite unusual because he calculated your grade compared to the people who took the midterm/final at the same time as you and not compared to the whole class. I didn't do well on the exams but still managed to get a C in the class. But it was definitely a difficult class.

He follows the department curve strictly:
25% A
35% B
25% C

You cannot use a graphing calculator on exams to compute calculations. Only a 'simple calculator' is allowed. It is slightly unfair as other ECON 41 Professors allow students to use one.

Homework questions are graded for accuracy, and are due weekly. All work must be shown.

THIS CLASS WAS WAY TOO HARD. When I started the quarter, I chose Chetverikov over Liao because of my friend's recommendation when he took him during Spring 2015. He said that Chetverikov was the better teacher of the two and that his was the easiest class to take for ECON 41. However, I think due to the easiness of his first quarter teaching as a professor (Spring 2015), he made a complete U-turn and the class turned out to be way harder than I expected when I took it during Winter 2016. I'll break down how grades were determined:

10% HW
30% Midterm
60% percent final (yes ridiculous, I know).

When my friend took the class in Spring 2015, both the midterm and final average were in the high 80's/low 90's. That was the AVERAGE. During my quarter, everything changed. Our midterm average was a 77 percent, and our final average was set at an even lower 70 percent. The thing about this class is that the material isn't even that hard, it's the fact that the midterm contained literally 1/3 impossible card/dice problems and that the final exam questions were nearly impossible. By impossible, I mean that almost every single question had an additional twist on it that required you to have gone above and beyond the learning required for that chapter, and to also tap into your critical thinking skills in order to solve the question correctly. A lot of the problems I had never seen before and were nothing even close to the lecture examples or the hw problems he has you do. By the end of the final I was braindead, exhausted, and probably shaky on around 30 or so problems out of the 70 that composed the exam. Oh, and did I mention that all of it was multiple choice? I had to randomly bubble in the last 5 or so because I ran out of time. This test was easily a 3.5 hour exam and you definitely have to rush/work fast to finish in the given 3 hours.

Part of this difficulty can probably be attributed to the fact that he breezed through the last few chapters of the class due to us missing two Monday classes during the quarter because of holidays. This ended up screwing us over, because the last few chapters were the most conceptually difficult and we were literally forced to learn them for ourselves with just a week left before the final exam. The only redeeming quality about this class is that it is based on a pretty generous curve where top 25% of kids get A's, and the next 35% get B's. That being said, this class was too much of a headache and stressed me out way more than any other class I've taken here at UCLA.

To paint you a clearer picture, I attended all office hours (both TA and Professors), I went to TWO discussions a week (in attempts to understand the stuff), and I stopped going out or having a social life and literally focused on ECON 41 every day for at least an hour after I got my midterm score back, which was beginning of week 7 up until the end of the quarter. Prior to this quarter, I had NEVER gone to office hours for a class. I had a 3.85 GPA, ended up with solid A's in my other two classes, and put my 110% into this class to STILL only end up with a B as my final grade. Suffice to say, if I knew what a shitshow this class would be before coming into it, I would have dropped it on the very first day.

Out of all of the pre-requisites for the Economics major, this is definitely the hardest class. If you do not have a strong background in Statistics and are not prepared, the later content in the class will be difficult to process quickly and stack up against you. While I did struggle in this class, I do not fault the professor as I feel like he conveyed the content well enough. Chetverikov has very engaging lectures despite the tough content. A lot lays on final, so prepare accordingly and do not blow it off for the last couple weeks. Hard class, great professor.

This class with Chetverikov was absolutely brutal. The midterm was average in terms of difficulty but the final impossible. Not to mention, he fools you by giving you a practice exam that is completely different than his actual test. So ridiculous. Don't even waste your time trying to decipher half of the questions. I had to go to 4 different office hours to figure a majority of them out and it still wasn't all of them. But the real final exam was completely different. Like the previous review said, you had to go way above and beyond what was learned through lecture and homework in order to solve some of the questions. I believe the final's average was a 46/70. As I looked around after the test, many people were shaking and in complete disbelief.

His lectures were very dry and all he did was copy directly from his lecture notes verbartim. I found the TA's ten times more helpful than the professor. But I would say I was learning a majority of the material through my chegg account, and I sat in all but one lecture. The lectures were not helpful, so don't bother wasting your time going. If you can hold off taking the class for a quarter to take it with another professor, do it.

Please avoid this professor if you can. I don't normally review professors on bruinwalk but Denis is all kinds of bad. He makes no effort to help his students. After the midterm he said if you didn't do well, just try harder. No concession from his end that he'll meet with students who didn't do well or anything. All he did was read off his lecture guides and confuse us with terrible terminology.the final was impossible (he put a concept that he didn't even teach and put 5 questions on it). The TAs were the only good thing about this class and honestly they should have been teaching. Only by going to them every week did I manage to get a good grade and even then it was a struggle til the end. It's sad that after spending so much money on UCLA this is the caliber of professor we get.

he is the best professor for econ 41. he was extremely helpful in office hours, and was always clear with what he expected from us to know. he assigned 5-10 homework problems a week and they were extremely doable, and not graded for correctness but for completeness which was nice because some were tricky. his midterm was easy, his final required much more work, but just do a million practice tests (get from the test bank or AAP) and you'll be fine. you need to know different ways to do these problems rather than relying on what he does in class. his final is much different than anything he has done in class, it is a lot harder but it was definitely expected to be harder. I wish I could take him for econ 103. he was very good compared to other econ 41 professors.

Denis.... sigh.
This guy spent way too much time explaining proofs during class that we didn't even get tested on. He spent so much time that we ran of time to go over a MAJOR topic (e.g: null hypothesis)... He had to rush us.... and this topic was like 1/4th of our final exam questions.
I went to 2 TAs' sections. They were both frustrated with Denis's over-complicated notations and how Denis emphasized all the wrong stuff

The practice midterm he gave us didn't resemble the midterm (eg: practice midterm barely had card or dice questions when the actual midterm was filled with them).
The practice Final is provided without solutions... Yes. It's pretty much so that you see how screwed you are.

Awful.
Denis you get a 1/5