The professor was a terrible lecturer. Like I had heard before that he had a thick accent and I was prepared to try to learn, but this was unreasonably hard to understand. Moreover, his handwriting is really bad and when introducing material for the first time, it's hard to tell what concept he's even talking about. He also sometimes uses terms or notation without saying what it means, which makes it even more confusing. I also felt like he wasn't very open to questions. For example, when one student asked a question, he just pointed to something on the board and didn't explain it at all. Tests are all computational. This was really difficult for me. Even though I felt like I knew the ideas, I kept making mistakes in multiplying large matrices or row reduction and really paid for it in the tests.

Liu isn't a nightmare, but he's not the ideal professor. Very thick accent.

I stopped attending his lecture because I could learn the material more easily from the textbook. Honestly, the textbook combined with the 3blue1brown series on linear algebra is sufficient to teach you all of 33A. If you don't have the motivation to do this, then take a different professor.

I don't recommend taking this class with Liu; his lectures are very difficult to understand, and his tests involve a lot of messy computations that make you want to question your existence.

Homework: Very doable, just a few exercises from the book every week. He also posts the entire HW for the quarter during Week 1, which is nice.

Midterms: A joke. His midterms are basically just using a formula and making sure you avoid computational mistakes. If you do so, it's rather trivial to get a 100%. I got 20/20 on both (medians for both were 16/20).

Final: Definitely harder, but I was still surprised that the median was so low (44%). As promised by Liu, 60% of the exam was of similar difficulty to the midterms. However, they were some conceptual questions (about 40% of the test) that I'm guessing most people had no idea how to approach. I honestly don't think it was too bad, and am confident that the median would have easily been 60-65% had Liu been a more effective lecturer.

Overall: Avoid if you can. The only good thing about the class is that the curve is great because of the low median on the final.

If at all possible, try to take the class with another professor. I felt like the material for 33A shouldn't be hard in itself, but the professor made it especially difficult to understand anything. The midterms make you think you know maybe an inkling about linear algebra, but they were fairly straightforward and completely computational, hence the 16/20 and 18/20 medians. However, for the final, there were a couple of conceptual questions, and hell if I knew anything about linear algebra to answer them. I think for the majority of the class (or at least for the people who couldn't attend another professor's lectures -- I know quite a few who just went to Visan's instead), nobody knows what's going on in linear algebra conceptually. Sure, we can do computations, but that's just straight up memorizing. The final was pretty terrible for that reason, but luckily the median was 22/50. Curves will definitely be your friend in this class.

Honestly, the material in 33A is not that difficult compared to some of the other math classes at UCLA. That being said, I highly recommend staying away from this professor. He is an extremely boring and confusing lecturer. Lecture was completely useless for me. I had to teach myself from the textbook. His tests are not hard, but they are tedious and he makes them out of 20 points. A couple small computational errors will drop your grade drastically. Overall, if you have to take him, you will be fine. But if you can avoid him, do it!

His accent is horrible; I'm still not used to it. But his exams were fair, as they were all computational (except the final, which included 1-2 proofs out of about 11 problems). I agree that the material in 33A doesn't really start to sink in until after the first midterm. The average for the midterms was usually in the C range for our class, so it's not hard getting an A. He doesn't put your homework scores or midterm grades online, so you go into the final with no knowledge of where you rank in the class. I went to class once a week for about 20 minutes, but went to my discussion every week, because my TA was really helpful. I highly recommend going to Professor Liu's "reviews"; he basically tells you what to study for the exams.

Introductory linear algebra is already confusing on its own; it's its own branch of math that doesn't utilize any previously acquired knowledge. Liu doesn't help much more as his class is comprised entirely of dishing out theories, proofs of theories, and theoretical examples. Some lectures will be VERY confusing. However, after the first midterm, the material starts to sink in and the class will get somewhat better.

The first midterm was somewhat challenging, the second midterm was easier, and the final was difficult. No calculator is allowed on any of these tests, so one can imagine the pain of multiplying a bunch of matrices together and trying to find determinants, inverses, or eigenvalues of matrices with larger dimensions. It's all about being careful; messing up an earlier calculation can result in the whole problem being wrong.

Liu puts computational problems on the first two midterms, and the final comprises of mostly computational problems and then one or two proofs. Hope that the curve saves you.

其实他真的蛮好的！