There're a lot of negative reviews of this professor so I feel like I should provide my own input and experiences.

This class is a must take at UCLA if you thoroughly enjoy S&M. 10+ hours of weekly homework, uncurved <70% test averages, and a condescending passive-aggressive professor left me more humiliated than I have ever felt here at this school. If you wish to make what is hands down the most difficult undergraduate math class at UCLA even more excruciating, Clover May is your best choice.

Avoid her. If you don't have a choice, my advice is no matter how good at math you are, even if you're the next Terry Tao, or understand the content completely and just taking the course for credit, don't think lightly on this class, write as much explanation in your solutions as you can. You'll be punished very hard for not explaining something well, according to May's standards which is not very clear either.

Note: this review is being posted from the middle of the quarter.

It feels like Prof. May has confused 120A for a lower division course. When I take an upper division pure mathematics course, I expect a proof-based course that teaches the theory of a subject, not a course that skips the details of important, accessible proofs just because they depend on a little linear algebra (115A is an enforced prereq!). I expect to have my time respected with interesting proof results on homework that extend on the lecture material, not pointless computational exercises that take painfully long on 3 (!) assignments per week.

To recall the course description from the department: "There are some beautiful theorems that if a curve in 3-space forms a closed loop, it has to bend at least a certain amount, and if it forms a knot, it has to bend at least a larger certain amount. Another beautiful theorem is the celebrated isoperimetric theorem, that among all closed curves of a fixed length, the circle encloses the largest area." Well, we moved on to surfaces already and covered none of these beautiful theorems.

If the goal of the course is to allow students to develop an interest in differential geometry so that they may choose to study it more in the future, to put things lightly, Prof. May is not helping.

I appreciate Dr. May, as they are trying to be very understanding during the pandemic. I won't lie the workload is intense; but content-wise, the class is a good combination of theory and computations. The computations help me further understand what I'm doing so I appreciate the computations. Without it, I wouldn't understand this material at all.

I am not a fan of Professor May. On one hand, she emphasizes how we are doing so well in the class and how she's happy we are learning, despite the COVID conditions and even extended all deadlines by one day. However, her explanations were pretty subpar. I asked her a question about how I would approach some type of question before the second midterm and her response was super generic along the lines of "I don't know just do it". Unfortunately, that question came up on the second midterm and absolutely rocked me. She is also super anal about how we write in complete sentences for everything. I can understand why she wants this but giving so many penalties for it really irked me. Also, every week, we had one homework assignment and two check ins due. I would maybe appreciate these checkins but I didn't learn anything from them and were a chore to complete. On a more positive note, our TA Zach was super chill and was very open to help us. I think this may be her last quarter at UCLA but I would personally avoid her class in the future.

I took this 2 years ago as a freshman in remote, and it's still the worst class I remember. In freshmen the Stockholm syndrome kind of prevents you from doing stuff, but looking back after taking so many more classes, I should say it's not the way math should be taught.

Personality: She tries to play her "nice" personality at classes, but as the quarter progresses, I realize she is such a picky and careless person.

Workload: I spent a whole day typing out my 24-hr exam on LaTeX, still lost a few points for not using specific phrases that are not even Mathematically required. The class is not curved, so the difficulty decides what grade you get. I consider the effort I put in the class wasted, because most of them are spent not learning/understanding, but remembering May's conventions and habits.

Grading: Not curved, and the class is harder than average (not in terms of concept difficulty but really just about learning which word she wants you to write).