Professor Tabuada is an extreme effective professor. He's organized, he does a good job explaining concepts, and he really wants to make sure that everybody understands. He doesn't grade on a true curve, but as long as you get at least a 87.5% on everything, you get an A. The tests are pretty fair and theres one midterm and final, but the MATLAB project was relatively confusing and he did not really help that much. You definitely want to read the assigned reading before lecture to fully understand the material in the class.

Professor Tabuada is a very nice professor, but his voice is way too soft to be heard in the back of the classroom. In addition, his handwriting is pretty sloppy for us students to read at times (e.g. he writes his 1's like 2's and his x's like n's). He still delivers the material in an effective manner, but sometimes, he just glosses over points that turn out to be very important later on in the course.

One weird thing about him is that on exams, he doesn't let his TAs help him answer any questions because if a student has a question about the exam, he wants to make sure that the question is answered the way he wants it to be answered. The exams themselves is about half straightforward and half curveballs, but they're not too bad overall.

Also, it's important to realize that Tabuada does NOT curve, so knowing the averages and standard deviations on exams doesn't really give you an indicator of what your final grade will be.

141 sounded interesting to me, but I realized that I didn't really like this class much. A lot of the stuff is very similar to 102. He was a good lecturer, and he actually assigns book problems (something I'm not used to anymore). That can either help you or screw you over. For me, it was a little bit of the latter. The MATLAB project we had to do at the end kinda sucked, especially since it had no relevance to material on the final. I heard Balakrishnan (sp?) teaches this class too, and I'm sure you've heard the infamous stories of him. Take this class with Tabuada if you need it.

His lectures are great and very straight forward. He writes very clearly on the board. I think a lot of students found his tests a bit challenging though.