Reviews of professor Farah Vandrevala

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 1.0/5
(Took Fall 2020) Farah does an excellent job in teaching EE478 and makes the lectures very interesting with many hardware coding examples. The course however is supposed the be based on Dr. Fritz old course syllabus, so not much is apparently original. Labs are the biggest component of this course and very fun to complete. They are group labs.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Lab instructions are like hieroglyphics to decipher. Grading is inconsistent and poorly thought out - especially from the TAs. She frequently repeats mistakes that I have been told she failed to correct since last semester. When you ask the TAs for help, they start reading the manual for the first time - useless. Everyone is behind. MC exam is bad.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
Definitely a more demanding class. No there weren't any exams which I appreciate. The homeworks could be quite difficult to figure out though. Maybe it's just me but in the lectures I sometimes could barely follow anything she was talking about. Granted signals and systems is a difficult concept to follow.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Basically, you need to read the document she provides before or during the lab to know what data you need. TA only checks some of the parts, but the lab report asks for more. Some of the TAs are not helpful, when you ask questions regarding to your circuit, they will come up and fix the courses directly. it is not helpful at all

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
She is super lenient with assignments and actually wants you to do well. Lectures are a bit complicated but office hours and recitation helps, as long as you put effort you can get a good grade.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
This professor really went downhill this semester. The grading is so harsh and there's no room for mistakes. Her idea about timed long assignments was one of the most unbelievably stupid decisions from an academic perspective I could have ever seen. The has also become fairly passive aggressive and rude honestly.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 1.0/5
Prof. Vandrevala was really caring, she conducted office hours and even offered to stay longer if we had questions. Even after doing so much for students, some decided to cheat on the second exam. She made a lot of changes to the grading criteria to benefit students. It is disheartening to see students cheating, after all this commitment and help.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Professor Vandrevala one of the best EE professors. While there is a lot of homework, it makes sense since she doesn't give exams. She also gives plenty of opportunities for extra credit and/or dropping assignments.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Don't take this course for an engineering elective. Lots of homework, if you don't know the circuits to begin with, the course makes less and less sense as you go on. She doesn't go into detail for new topics and provided us with one to two examples which weren't the same as the assignments. Made people feel stupid for asking questions in class.