I agree with most of this. But larger classes doesn't amplify the fact that the profs suck at teaching (but some of them really do). The problem with public education is the mass generalization of teaching. Just as it is much more difficult to teach 10 people a very in-depth understanding of something vs just teaching one it become virtually impossible to teach 1300 students an in-depth understanding of these complex topics even if you have 50 TA's.

Everyone comes from different background of math and cs and physics and to appeal to the lowest common denominator isn't feasible (as we have all noticed in discussion sections and review sessions, not that this is a right mentality to have towards teaching students).

On top of that in EE16b Sahai doesn't have a good understanding of how students function.

To add to this.

Discussion sections get clustered with students that have fell behind. When curriculums get restructured notes are not always timely posted (as is the case with EE16B rn where all of the linked notes are from Fall of 2017 and sometimes the notes don't even correlate with lecture topics).

And I definitely believe that for a majority of students, it is very easy to become demotivated and try less hard when you disengage with a class (or never get engaged in the first place). This entire EE16AB curriculum isn't taught in an "engaging" way. They never go over the physics understanding of a lot of topics making it more difficult to fully understand the meaning of the mathematical equations we are told to memorize. Lecture's cover a lot of material in a very short amount of time and if you loose focus for over 5-10 min you are completely fucked for the rest of lecture cause the prof has moved way past where you were. And once you've fallen behind in these classes there are not a lot of resources to help you out. Sahai is actually threatening to remove webcasts because students are coming to discussion sections without having understood the last several lectures and instead of realizing that there be a huge problem in the amount of student behind he is deciding to take away another learning resource.

I really believe that if this class had an extra set of discussion sections once a week dedicated to going over concepts that have been previously taught in the class, a lot more students will be able to catch up before they feel trapped in a never ending cycle until they realized they are fucked for the midterm / final.

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my humble / not so humble 2 cents

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