I was very excited to take this class. I usually don't take 8am classes but I made an exception because I really wanted to learn from an industry veteran and was promised to learn modern database technology like NoSQL. Sadly, Ryan Rosario is the most egotistical and childish professor I have ever had. He likes to pretend that he is really helpful by responding to every Piazza question, but most of the time his responses are contradictory, purposely vague, or purposely rude. Rosario picks favorites hard, the students that go this office hours to try and get an internship (because he works at Google) are the only ones in the class that he is nice to. Then to the rest of the class he is just snarky and rude, no matter how genuine someone's question is. He will respond to questions like "The TA said this will be on the final, but you said it won't be, which topics will be on the final?" with responses like "You are entitled and should show up to lecture." He even admits to looking at his photo roster for every piazza so he can respond differently depending on if he's seen their face in lecture before (As an aside, some people like to sit in the back of class, how can he expect to know the face of everyone who shows up to class?). He then proceeded to ban me from Piazza (for calling him out for being rude to students with genuine questions) and claims to have reported me to the police. He gets so personally offended that people don't attend his boring PowerPoint 8am lecture. We are all busy students, who probably all stay up late to finish projects, there are legitimate reasons to miss lecture. Obviously skipping every lecture is pretty unexcusable, but his attitude on Piazza doesn't encourage anyone to attend and support him.

As for logistics, this class is more frustrating than productive. To give Rosario some credit, the late policy is kind (4 late days to use throughout the quarter, 2 per project) even though it is worded confusingly in the syllabus. Some of the projects were kinda fun, although I only really learned in one of the four. The breakdown of the projects is as follows

1A: literally just making a schema. Extremely basic, took me maybe 5 minutes, somewhat arbitrary spec ("choose what types you feel appropriate) but I'm pretty sure everyone got like 100%.
1B: Make a song searching web page using Flask and PostgreSQL. This was the only useful and fun project throughout the class. Perfect project, that I think there is no reason to change (except maybe clarify the spec slightly)

2A: Making a python script that parses reddit comments into clean tokens, with a couple more requirements. In theory this is easy as hell (maybe like 5 regex expressions?) but the spec was horribly confusing and unclear and had a lot of "use your best judgment." If this is graded automatically, I want objective feedback. To make matters worse, they provide a sanity checkng tool that DIDN'T WORK ON SIMPLE TEST CASES. This led to a million piazza posts of confusion with TAs saying to follow the tool and Rosario saying that they won't test on complicated things so don't worry about it. It was a complete mess. I know Rosario has the capability to make a better sanity check tool (seriously the errors in this felt like they had to be coded in intentionally) so I wonder what went wrong here? Plus this only feels vaguely relevant to the class.
2B: this project was a big data assigment with some light machine learning. I can confidently say that I did not learn a single thing from this assignment. It was basically just copy pasting code either from the spec or from stack overflow. Debugging was actually impossible, because the amount of data took hours (over 4 hours on my gaming PC) to load. Theres also no warning of how the code will take on the spec, so I had to turn in the project late due to being caught off guard from this (my fault I suppose). This project was neither fun nor useful and was a signficant step up from the rest of the relatively quick projects.

The projects were only worth 20% of the grade, and the biweekly homeworks (which were incredibly hard, even if you had the book and the lectures slides next to you) were worth 15%. And then there's the tests...

I didn't take the midterm because I had a conflict. Rosario said I could take the test at another time, but then never told me when my make up test was supposed to be, and then blamed me for not asking him when it would be. So I was instead left with a final that was worth 65% of my grade.

The final was the single hardest test I've ever taken at UCLA. It tested you on a ton of random concepts that only appeared in like two slides max. All of the topics that seemed the least important and were rushed over in class were here, along with none of the topics that were covered on the projects or the interesting ones. The topics we were expected to know were frankly unfair. For example, there was a free response question on writing a query in MongoDB. There was literally one slide on the javascript interface in the entire class, and we never once used to were expected to know javascript during the rest of the class. Whenever I looked around during the test everyone was just staring at the ceiling. I don't think there was a single person who wrote an answer for everything on the test.

Unless Rosario has a complete change of heart (which doesn't seem likely), don't take this class. And since Rosario hates me so much for calling him out and doesn't understand why people don't attend his class, he is probably reading this review. So my message to Mr.Rosario is here: I don't hate you, but I just think that your class not only set up many students and me for failure and was frankly frustrating. You need to learn how to take criticism and not be so childish. You shouldn't just assume students are being entitled, and recognize that students not only have legitimate reasons to not attend class and also have legitimate questions and concern that you shouldn't get mad about. Obviously, as the professor you have power over all of us, but try to be considerate next time you teach. You have the capacity to be a great professor, but you are letting your ego get in the way.

hard pass to this guy - one of the worst classes ive ever taken at ucla. he does not care about you learning; he just wants you to feel bad over things you probably missed in each lecture. He runs through about 100 + slides each lecture so good luck getting down every detail. he's snarky on piazza, and just a terrible professor in general. would never take again.

> 8 am
> Slide heavy
> Doesn't give clarifications on Piazza
> Makes a lot of bad jokes
> No clear direction on what we should know for the exam
> Bajillion questions on the final
> 0/10 Professor
> do NOT take 143 with this professor

Rosario is one of the worst excuses for a professor I’ve ever seen, not to mention he’s a borderline crazy (see previous posts on the topological sort incident in class). He gave extremely unreasonable tests that tested irrelevant or uncovered topics in the grand scheme of the class. He let you have a cheat sheet for the exam (one for the midterm and still only one for the final which makes no sense), and usually in CS classes where a cheat sheet is allowed, one can be confident that the material tested on the exam won’t be straight up regurgitations of your cheat sheet, and it will mostly test understanding. Well not with this guy. He decided to have the most random trivial things on his slides be major test questions and if you didn’t have EVERYTHING on your cheat sheet then tough luck (and he made you hand write it, you couldn’t type it...).

Now what’s even worse about him is his handling of assignments. All of his homeworks were super bogus questions that he took from someone else online or straight out of the textbook, and he couldn’t even answer some of them and always just graded on completion. That’s okay, but it seemed really disorganized having a deluge of piazza posts every week about irrational/unsolvable questions on the homeworks to which he would say not to worry about correctness, so everyone probably just put down gibberish. And the projects... Jesus Christ. Usually in CS classes, it is understandable to grade students project submissions using a script, but this man could not write a script for his life and so when (a lot) of projects wouldn’t run on his test script he would just give you a 0. This was weird because my friends and I thoroughly tested and met all spec requirements, and there weren’t any specific “test script adherence” points to follow. And to top it all off, he even provided sanity checks/submission checkers to “make sure your submission doesn’t get drastic points taken off”, and on several occasions he tried to give my partner and I 0s or Fs because his script sucked... and we passed the sanity check! Like what even is a sanity check for? Also, not to mention he basically tried to fail like half the entire class on a project (that was straight up just complicated string parsing, I don’t know why he felt this was a necessary PROJECT for a DB class but whatever) because apparently they had to manually grade our submissions for not working with his bogus script. He initially said no regrades, but when the entire class requested regrades, he had to oblige everyone’s grades went from Fs to 100s...

He’s just a janky and disorganized professor, but what really makes him bad is his guise of fairness, acting like he wants everyone to learn rather than be focused on a grade, but then he fails you on projects because he can’t write a script. I haven’t even gotten my grade back, but I really don’t care cuz I’m just glad to be done with his BS. PEACE OUT RRR ✌🏽

He blazes through ~120 slides a lecture at 8AM when everyone's tired & unfocused. Studying is hard because the material is seriously so boring, and he doesn't give out a list of topics for the midterm or the final. Save urself a headache and avoid this guy.

He is probably one of my favorite professors so far, I think I took advantage of the office hours a lot and also spent a great deal of time studying. My goal is to learn as much as I can, so I don't think this class is as bad ( maybe because it fits my goals better). I do believe Rosario is trying hard to make this a good class, and it is hard to avoid many issues when it's still being taught for the second time , and we all need some understanding at some point of life. Also, I do think the exam was hard, but that doesn't necessarily mean the grading would be bad . Overall, I still thank him a lot for everything.

Rosario at first seems like a chill guy and I feel like I learned a lot of practical stuff in the class. Midterm was very reasonable. But his final was the biggest load of BS I've ever seen. He pulled the most random stuff that he had only 1 or 2 slides on and made them worth a lot. Decided to test us on the most niche stuff rather than meat of coursework. Also kind of a weird guy, he would get angry when he was wrong, and it always seems like he was trying to flex his industry experience. I would try to avoid him, but it's not the end of the world big you have him.

Course Material: very dense, some useful, some a waste of time. This course covers so many different topics at a hastened pace. His lectures are powerpoint based; each are ~100 slides and each slide is pretty dense in content. In addition, you also need to read the textbook for certain chapters, which is also pretty dense. Much of what he covers is useful and practical, but he also covers some obscure and unimportant stuff. Try your best not to skip lecture if you can, or else you can fall behind pretty quickly.

Projects: time-consuming but otherwise reasonable and practical. There are 2 partner projects, each divided into an "A" and "B" part; i.e. (1A, 1B, 2A, 2B). Part A of each project is easy and are really warm-ups for the "real" work that constitutes part B. Part B comprises the majority of the time and work for each project. You are given 2 late-day passes (i.e. you could submit 2 days late without penalty) for each project, and there is no other late policy. I advise to start as early as possible on the projects (particularly the Part B's) and to use late passes on the Part B's.

Exams: I found the midterm reasonable and the final a bit challenging/unreasonable, in part because of the sheer amount of material covered in this course. Anything in lecture, even seemingly unimportant and obscure topics, are fair game for the exams. As of this post, midterm average 66%, final average TBD.

Homework Assignments: reasonable and graded mostly on completion. There are five homework assignments, and he drops the lowest homework score.

Also, if your Final Exam "letter grade equivalent" is higher than your midterm "letter grade equivalent", he replaces your midterm grade. Likewise, if your Final Exam "letter grade equivalent" is higher than what would be your final grade, then your Final Exam grade becomes your final grade.

Overall, I found this class to be challenging compared to other CS electives, in part because the course is very material-dense. I did find the exams (the final in particular) to be unreasonable, and I do agree with the sentiments of other reviewers in this regard. However, the professor does seem to have good intentions, by introducing more practical and useful applications in this course and by trying to grade as fairly and consistently as possible.

I agree with just about everything else that's been said so far. Here's an example.

One lecture we were discussing how to run transactions serially. The professor mentioned that you can use a topological sort on a precedence graph to obtain the correct order of transactions. He then proceeded to give an incorrect explanation of topological sort. When a student pointed this out, instead of humbly accepting his mistake, Rosario snapped at the student and in a flustered tone, told us to just do a topological sort.

A student watching this all unfold might be thinking that since CS 180 is not a pre-req for CS 143 and since our professor doesn't even know what a topological sort is, this topic will probably never show up again.

Well, on our final, topological sort reappeared even though it had never been discussed again. I guess we were just expected to learn it on our own from one refrenece to it in lecture.

Experiences like this are what make the class so frustrating.

The funniest part about this professor is when a student pointed out his mistakes on the slide, he explained that he was not the person who made the ppt. When he could not explain himself, he would say there are some different implementations. Also, every time he said this won't be on the test, do NOT trust him. If you have to take this class with this professor, god bless you.