Reviews of professor Mehrdad Mahdavi

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
His lectures are really great, very informative. His course helped me really well in my interview process

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
good, interesting lectures on recent ML developments. hw is insanely difficult and requires you to prove things that were proved in neurips/icml papers 1-2 years ago. you need to find the papers and read them thoroughly do to well

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Prof Mahdavi's lectures were dope. I really liked how he explained the algorithms using real-world examples and sometimes applications in machine learning, made the concepts way easier to grasp. I went to his office hours a couple times too, and he was was super helpful,  definitely one of the more caring and smartest profs I've had.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
He was nice enough that he wanted us to go to his lectures and learn things. The lectures were hard and as well as the homework and exams. He did gave in-lecture quizzes randomly as 5% participation grade. Not so sure about how he gave the curve, but it pulled my grade from D to B+. It was very stressful though, until knowing the final grade.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
He's a wealth of knowledge on machine learning and very intelligent. Bases most material from lecture, check 
the slides before every class and read the assigned material. Amazingly passionate.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Class average grade is D. And the gradescale of this course is the same as my first-year freshman course, difficulty is kind of graduate level. Want to survive? Runaway!

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Wonder lecturer on ML. He's also a diligent researcher-- you can discuss interesting new papers, or research ideas with him. He gives challenging HW problems and takehome exams (during covid). Prepare to spent 8+ hours on reading WEEKLY if this is the first time you take a serious AI course. Be sure to ask questions in class or office hour.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
A  hard class, but Prof. Mahdavi was a great lecturer and a fair grader

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Crazy stressful class but not a bad professor at all. Homeworks took forever to do and the class is extremely test heavy. Curve isn't decided til the last day grades are due and there was also no C+ as a grade which was a little annoying.

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
I did not realize how much I learned  from this course until I started interviewing for data science jobs.  The lectures are where you learn the main ideas behind the algorithms. As others mentioned, this is a tough course and take it if you wanna commit a descent amount of time to understand slides, reading, and do HWs. Sharp and caring!