Average professor. Definitely not the best you will ever have but also not the worst. Got a B+ in the class.

Selling the book for this class, Single Variable Calculus by Jon Rogawski, Second Ed. used for Math 31A and 31B. E-mail me at ************* if you're interested. I also have the solutions manual which I'll include in the purchase. I don't go to ucsd, I go ucla, I just like to use my ucsd email for convenience.

I had him for both 31B and 32A. Yeah, his accent sucks but there's a lot of professors with accents at UCLA anyways so you can't really avoid them altogether. He's a pretty fair teacher I would say but students aren't very comfortable asking questions from him during lecture because his answers always have a tone of, "well obviously it's because....blah blah" and makes you feel kind of stupid. He doesn't really do it intentionally, I just think that's a part of his personality, as part of the ego of all nerds. He goes through examples skipping a lot of the simpler steps but making no notice to the students, so it's kind of hard to follow along. We had Professor Kozhan (sp) sub for Liu one day and my god, the difference was made so clear. Students started asking many questions and he answered them so well and explained everything thoroughly. The atmosphere was in general much more comfortable around Kozhan than Liu. Kozhan is a much better teacher/lecturer though his tests (I hear) are harder.

Grading:
The final letter grade will be determined by the higher one of the following two scores:
1. quizzes - 10%, two Midterms - 40%, final examination - 50%;
2. quizzes - 10%, final examination -90%.

If you miss a midterm, the first option becomes quizzes - 10%, midterm - 20%, final - 70%.

His midterms are very similar to his past ones in the test bank but that's not to say they are exactly the same. Of course he changes things and usually, its to make it harder. I got a B in 31B and a C+ in 32A. Overall, I like him and I don't really mind that I got a C+ because that was my own fault for skipping lecture. I literally went 3 times, before each test. If I had to take another math class and he was teaching, I wouldn't mind taking him again if no better teacher with like a 7+ rating on bruinwalk was available.

Professor Liu is a very interesting professor. He cracks some subtle jokes such as "[such and such is] a silly case" (I found that quite hilarious). There are daily quizzes that are easy grades (i.e. you can easily get 100% on them). If you can't get that, you are doing something wrong in the class.

I went through the homework very thoroughly and studied quite intensely even for the easy homework quizzes. Maybe 30 minutes or 1 hour prior to a quiz? Midterms and final exam: many questions were quite similar to the homework questions so do do a good job on your homework!!

I took Calc BC before so I knew most of the material coming in. Comparing Prof. Liu to a good Calc teacher, he is slightly sub-par. He goes over a lot of proofs that we do not need to know. But also, I learned some new things in class that I never covered before in BC such as applications. I thought Prof. Liu was thorough on those topics so that should be representative of how he teaches for the other topics. But as a professor in a big class, he did a great job.
I think most of the blame should be given to the TA as he did not go over the homework questions with us, didn't know what section we were on, and didn't speak clearly.

I knew someone who had the same TA as I did but succeeded in this course (an A- at least). However, he studied hard for the quizzes and for the tests. So, taking Professor Liu is absolutely doable.

Professor Liu really isn't that bad as some people said. Yes he does have a strong accent, but I think it's doable. He explains clearly the material. Well, it's basically examples in the book. I think that's enough to deal with HW.

Quizzes: 10%
2 midterms. Each counts 20%
Final: 50%
OR
Quizzes: 10%
Final: 90%
in case you did really bad in one of the midterms.

The second midterm was a bit harder than the first, The mean was 11/20. But still doable. The final contained 12 questions, 10 of which were basic stuff. No proofs. If you put effort doing HW, you'll be fine with them.

Unfortunately my TA wasn't helpful at all. He only confused us more. He thought us as idiots and explained every single step overly detailed. He wasted too much time and could only get through 1 or 2 problems in each discussion.