Professor Goncalves was the best professor I've had at UCLA! I was scared to take this class because I had heard it was difficult, but Professor Goncalves explained everything very clearly and prepared us for the tests very well. I took this class while it was online because of COVID-19, so the lectures were pre-recorded videos, while the actual lecture time was used to do practice problems and give us time to ask questions. We had weekly homework assignments, which were super helpful and reflected what we had been learning in class. He gave us multiple practice exams before each midterm and the final, which were extremely similar to the real tests. Professor Goncalves was extremely kind and helpful during office hours and during Q&A sessions. I would highly recommend this professor!

Absolutely love Prof. Goncalves! I took his class online, and he was excellent at clearly explaining all the concepts. He provides a crazy amount of practice material for the exams, so there's not really anything they can throw at you that'll surprise you. In addition, he was extremely helpful in office hours. Having a good TA helps as well, I had Barone, she's great! There's weekly homework assignments that account for 20%, 2 midterms (each 20%), and a final (40%). He was also fairly lenient in terms of changing up the grading structure to give you the best possible grade. Overall, Goncalves is a great option for Econ 11, especially because a lot of students find the subject matter challenging.

Goncalves is truly the BEST professor I have ever had at UCLA. His lectures are engaging and straightforward; he doesn't waste time explaining concepts you don't need to know. His problem sets can be a bit tedious in the beginning, but you get a long time to work on them and they're insanely helpful for the exams. His exams are super fair and align exactly with what he teaches; most people say Econ 11 is a pain but this was by far my favorite class I've ever taken in the major. I would 100% take any other class with Goncalves given the opportunity; he really cares about his students learning and office hours were super helpful as well.

Being honest, this class was hard at the beginning but that's the foundation for the entire class. If you can understand the early material, the later material will come easier to learn as you make connections and lines to the different theorems. The trickiest part of this class for me were the concepts like the stuff you had to memorize like properties and how to apply theorems to different parts of the problem to find the right solution. This class was math heavy, so a strong foundation in calculus would be nice, but not needed. The midterms in my opinion were fair and true to the practice tests he gave, but he did throw 1 or 2 curveballs on the frq portion and the mc. What really helped me get through this class was a man who took this class already who was willing to help and a strong group study of friends. Approaching this class, I don't recommend reading the textbook but rather rely on the slides to understand the concepts, the TA notes to understand the math behind it, and YouTube for anything else you're having trouble understanding. Goncalves is a good professor in general, but the way he explained some stuff was confusing when there was a simpler way to understand it but I had to connect the dots myself and find relationships after doing the problems like 100 times. He does goof up on his math a little, but overall not bad. Pay attention to the lectures because the small things he say will be tested.

Professor Goncalves did a good job teaching Econ 11. He offered practice exams which were quite useful.

HOWEVER, this class really is NOT easy, and make sure you understand the material and the lectures.

(Personally, I didn’t find the textbook helpful, but it depends on each person.)

Professor Goncalves is a super awesome professor in the Econ department. He does a great job of explaining the material, and is quite clear in lecture. He posts his lecture notes along with the slides, so it makes it easy to review if you missed anything. The class material can definitely be tricky at first, especially since students who haven't taken Math 32A will have to quite a bit of multivariate calculus. However, the class does get easier as you go and get more familiar with the material. He's really helpful in office hours too. I also took his seminar course, where we read academic papers on the economics of crime and policing and discussed them. This was super fun, and it was really awesome to discuss these topics with him, since he's literally an expert in that field. The midterms weren't terrible, but the averages were somewhat low, with the first having an average of 75 and second 65 (medians were 80 and 70). If you studied and paid attention in lecture, it wasn't terrible. Overall a really cool guy, and great professor too.

Good professor, I'll say he's pretty generous on the overall curve for both midterm and final. Midterm 1 is ok, and Midterm 2 and final are both largely the same as those exam papers in past years (likely because the Midterm 1's median does not look good). I receive 92 in Mid 1, 84 in Mid 2, and 95 in Final. It's largely the same as the past papers, so as long as you finished those practices (I didn't do so for Mid 2, so...) you should be fine. But honestly, at the time before the week 10, I felt this course to be a bit boring for what professor's teaching - basically some foundations and applications of multivariable calculus, with a lot of econ concepts (you know, those thoeretical stuffs). However, in the week 10, the professor magically spent a course time in discussing a famous economics incident happening in 2025: "the Deepseek Moment," together with real applications to explain the hidden triggers with economics concepts we learned during the class, and even introducing a term called "Jevons paradox," which is that the technology advancement (i.e. new techniques that make the AI model training) sometimes may not cause the demand for those companies that supposed to be hugely affected (like Nvidia) to get worse, since the demand is elastic enough. The advancement in technology decreases the price for the model training causes more people to join the market and start to train their model for start-ups or other stuffs, making the Nvidia stock price surge after receiving a deep trough. In fact, that trough is actually the best point to buy at that time, and obviously you'll make considerable amounts of money

I know, you may think that just a single course that taught student about a historical event simply will make me to turn 180 degrees in terms of my attitude toward this class sounds insane, but what if I tell you that just a few weeks ago, right after our final week in the winter quarter, the same thing happen to the SanDisk, a SSD storage company that has received an unprecedented shocked in its stock price due to a technical paper released by Google of a technical improvement in using the SSD memory/storage in a more efficient way, almost exactly the same to what happened in the DeepSeek moment in the last year. When the article first come out, SanDisk stock prices falled more than 17% (to around $580 per share), and if you have bought it and hold it till now, April 9th, 2026, there's at least 43% benefit (around $831 per share now) you can earn from that, which means, if you listen to Felipe's lecture on Deepseek, and notice this chance, investing let say $100 thousands, that would be 43 thousands dollars returns within a month. Think about it, 43% returns in one single month! Since it is exactly what happened in the real world, I'll feel my conscience being condemned if I don't say something good to Felipe.

He's the one of a few professors in this school that can actually make you earn some real money right after the class.