Took this class with Prof Chen. Super easy, honestly. Very scary on day one, but turns out to be a big softy. The test questions were verbatim from the homework. Though I heard Najjar is a bit tougher, so you may want to avoid him unless you’re computer engineering in which case you’ll probably want to learn the material really well.
Took it with Daniel Wong. His lecture slides are great, and are way better than the textbook - although the newest edition (5th) isn't terrible. I understood everything. Maybe it has something to do with him being a good at teaching, or maybe it's because I understood 61 well. This class is pretty much 61 with some extra stuff ( single/multi cycle, pipelining, caches, VM). I had difficulty with caches, but that might be because I slacked off within the last 2 weeks of the final.
Took the class with Chen. Lecture was pretty boring and hard to pay attention to, but you're fine as long as you can do the homework since exams are very similar to them.
Take this with Zizhong Chen if possible. He straight up takes the homework problems and literally tweaks the numbers and doesn't change anything else at all then puts it on the exams word for word. No final in this class, just 3 exams and 4 homeworks, where exams are 25%/ea, homeworks are 5%/ea and there's 5% attendance (he takes attendance literally everyday, just passes a piece of paper around at the start). Course involved pipelining, caches, CPI calculations, optimization algorithms, locality stuff, a single datapath for MIPS and some MIPS to C Code and C Code to MIPS conversions. Sounds kind of scary but it's honestly pretty simple once you start doing it.
Computer Architecture with Hodjat. The material isn't too bad but Hodjat is not the best at teaching it. Super chill dude though ngl. He's passionate about the subject. The material isn't too bad to learn, some of the stuff later in the class like vm and caches can get tricky. You don't code in this class, just an extension of cs61. Learn about vm, caches, piplining, cpi and stuff. It's not difficult in the typical sense. Just t
I took this class with Walid Najjar. The concepts we dealt with aren't too difficult IMO. The grading scale was rather generous - there were 2 exams (no final), and the one you get a lower score on counts for 35% of the grade while the one you do better on counts for 45% (total 80%). And we got 7 free percentage points on top of the 80. There are also a variety of homework problems and quizzes, worth 5% and 15% respectively. The lowest scoring homework and quiz gets dropped. Test questions are very similar to the quizzes - the homeworks are slightly harder. The first exam did have a question we did not cover, so we got the same question except with different numbers on the second test.
No final, 3 midterms based closely on hw, with extra credit questions
Kuan-Chieh in Summer 2021. This class was not too bad in the beginning, but it picks up. Most people didn't have a bad time in this class, but with Kuan-Chieh, it was sort of a hot mess. He's a really nice guy, but there's just a lot of content that he doesn't teach very well. A lot of the content on exams could not be found in the textbook nor his lectures. Aside from that, the material is somewhat challenging.
If with Wajid, focus on the practice problems.
Zizhong Chen is a pretty solid professor
Daniel Enright is the last person you want to take 161 with. He was a TA for awhile in 120A, and now he's teaching a class. The first exam average was a 60% with a deviation of 20. I dropped after I found out my score because there was no way to recover. He didn't know how to teach the material well enough so I was confused on the homeworks. There is a curve in the class that is announced at the end. His expectations on the first exam were unreal.
Took it with Chen. Lectures are boring and useless but he takes attendance. Overall, I just ignored the class and easily passed with little effort. The tests are like the HW so just study that and look over the slides. I hate that he curved the tests instead of our grade. I doubt a lot of people got As.
I don't know how but Elaheh Sadredini made this class a living nightmare to study for. The homeworks were intensely brutal and any lecture notes didn't help with them at all. This class was abysmally difficult given the reviews on here, and honestly makes me wish I took this class with someone else. The questions on the HW were very vague to the point I had to ask myself if I rather spend 10 hours trying to figure out a single question or study for my other classes while maintaining my sanity. This class is nothing but a time consuming mess and unlike other professors that teach this class, there's also 1 lab or project really to add onto the stress of barely passing. HWs and Exams were weekly and they were the big assignments that made or break your grade. This class 100% sucked and I rather take CS 141 all over again, at least then I'd be doing some useful and practical even if it were writing pointless latex documents. Oh and don't bother thinking you're going to get any help on the HW during discussion, BECAUSE THE TA WILL ONLY GO OVER THE RIDICULOUS LAB! Don't even bother thinking that working with your peers will help, I got marked down just because of my wrong work even after reaching a general consensus. This class can just burn and rot away in my memory like all my other general eds for all I care. I'll give credit where it's due, Elaheh is brilliantly intelligent in this area of CS, but that's just it. Don't expect more, take with another professor.
Elaheh Sadredini is the worst professor I have ever taken. Listen to the review above me and take it with literally anyone else.
<3 Prof Knight. Pretty easy class, focused on learning concepts, not math or logic etc. No coding at all. HW and quizzes are ezpz. The Zybooks is a bit laborious though.