If you are taking this course with Professor Bouchard, this is what you should expect:
Professor:
- does not motivate yet strongly discourage learning in class. Through the course of this semester, he has been adamant in his way of teaching, rejecting any challenges raised by the students and got irritated easily, responding “If you do not believe in X concept, you should not do science”.
- does not answer student’s questions after class; give only overly general responses or merely “you should know this”.
- scares students in class, constantly claiming that he is not afraid to fail seniors.
- fails to retreat students’ equally; have preference over some selected group of students; always treat these students with patience while ignoring or occasionally castigating other less preferred students. A concrete example is that, whenever I get answers to questions he raises wrong in class, Prof. Bouchard consistently used discouraging words like “Wrong” and “No” and did not let me continue answering the question, whereas he treats other student with much more patience, using words like “try harder” or “thinker deeper” while waiting for their answers. Such disparity in treatment directly impacted my passion for this class and discouraged me from participating in class discussion or engage in intellectual thinking.

TA:
- highly unfamiliar with the course material, could not help with students’ lab report or questions related to class material
- demonstrate unprofessionalism in grading: carelessly glance over students’ lab report carefully and do not assign grades based on a uniform standard; fail to respond to students’ re-grading request when points are unfairly deducted

But Professor Bouchard's notes are very clear and the course will indeed improve your Matlab skill and stats to a great extent. Even though the average score of the test is around or below 30/100 and the first lab report grade is also 30/100, I received satisfactory scores for this class. If you study really hard your hard work will pay off.

If you are reading this, then more than likely you have heard horror stories about Bouchard and 114. And, you also probably don't have much of a choice about taking this class. But, let me address a few things.

The class is very difficult, no lies here. On top of the lab reports, Louie gives the hardest homework assignments I ever had at UCLA, and exams aren't a walk in the park (although if you study and do the hw they actually aren't all that bad). Ultimately, however, I ended up appreciating the class. Louie is very rigorous, derived, and straight forward in his lectures, and ultimately the lectures are clear. He also provides incredibly detailed notes, which are long but you MUST study them to do well. Be sure to go to the TA's to make sure your lab reports are well written, as you shouldn't lose sight of the fact that they are the biggest portion of your grade. The class is hard, and you will have to work your tail off, but Bouchard is actually a cool guy, he just enjoys challenging people.

The previous reviews are pretty accurate, but I’ll try to tell you what this class was like online during COVID. First of all, there were multiple times this quarter when I thought to myself: this is the worst, most miserable class I’ve ever taken. We felt like we were set up to fail. The homeworks were trash, long, and confusing. The lab reports asked for a way too much, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at any moment. He wants you to catch on to a lot of Matlab commands and detailed statistics concepts very quickly. If you get a chance, maybe do some beginner Matlab tutorials before you start this class. This class was the first time in all my years of undergrad that I pulled all-nighters, and I pulled many of them. He did the flipped classroom thing, but as a result, lecture felt so useless and like a complete waste of time. For the lab, we basically just got sent the data and wrote the reports as if we actually did the experiments.

Louis himself: total jerk, no doubt about it. Too many people stayed silent during this class and were probably afraid to reach out for help, but for the brave souls who did, he basically would roast them every time they spoke. He kept telling us that anxiety is normal after he gave us an oral final, and that this class is supposed to be hard, and that we are supposed to be struggling. Kind of a bummer that he has to teach since he really doesn’t look like he’s into it at all. However, our collective jaws dropped Week 10, when students started expressing concerns over the George Floyd protests. To our surprise, much like the Grinch, Louis’s heart grew three sizes that day. We didn’t even think he had one. He probably doesn’t want this to be known, but he made our final presentation and final oral exam optional. And at the end of the quarter, he didn’t give anyone less than B-. All that pain, all that suffering, was perhaps worth it.

That being said, we had some incredible TAs that saved our asses. They graded pretty generously and were pretty understanding, and they seemed to provide you the help you need as long as you showed you were putting in some effort.
Moral of the story: form study groups for the homeworks, get started on the lab reports EARLY and I mean EARLY, go to TA office hours, don’t get on Louis’s bad side. I don’t think I learned a single thing all quarter besides maybe how to graph a histogram on Matlab.

The only class I've had that's miserable enough to warrant a review, and Bouchard just makes it worse.