This class was very challenging after having an easy Professor for Intermediate GIS but with help from the TA & classmates, I was able to do well and I definitely walked away feeling like a GIS expert. Sheng is a very sweet professor who makes lectures decently interesting. The weekly projects are intense and take time but there's no midterm or final. Push yourself and take this class!

Course structure: Labs every week (with ArcGIS software after week 4) are 30% of your grade. Patrick is an awesome TA and will help you with anything you do not understand about the software.
Midterm and Final are each worth 35% of your grade and are administered during lab on weeks 5 and 10. No lectures are held those weeks.
Sheng is good as a lecturer and it takes (at least for me it did) about a week to get used to his accent. He is very knowledge and wants everyone to learn as much as they can. He is deeply passionate about the material.

Sheng is hard to understand, but he cares about the topic. My main gripe with the class was the grading structure of weekly labs. You cannot get above an 80% with out going above and beyond. While I understand this is advanced gis there is little to no instruction on lab projects. I would get remarks on labs saying 'missing two maps and charts,' but I wasn't aware those were necessary. A. Madson was my TA and he is not helpful at all.

I'm taking Geography 7 this quarter with Professor Sheng and the class isn't too bad. My advice is to go to the TA's office hours for doing your labs, they are really helpful. I attended lecture but by the end of the quarter I realized I always just took notes on his powerpoints( which he basically read out loud) but his accent is very thick and hard to understand. If you actually look over his slides and study for the midterm, its super easy. Just basically memorization of info (raster vs. vector data, definition of GIS etc.)

Professor Sheng is my least favorite professor I have taken at UCLA. He turned a course that was supposed to be on Geographic Information Systems (which is about interpreting geographical data to solve real-world problems) into a course on cartography (different types of map projections, how to stylize a map legend, etc.) He spent a lot of time in lecture covering new terms and vocabulary, none of which we ever applied to anything other than test questions. In fact, I found his tests to be more about memorization of terms that about any sort of understanding of the purpose of GIS. I am glad that the reviewer below found his class engaging and enlightening. That was simply not my experience.

Good professor with some clarity issues or confusing instructions. The first weeks will feel really hard as you realize that it is actually an advanced class. However, once you get going the workload is reasonable with one assignment per week. Make sure to work in groups to ask each other questions.