Extrmely hard course, but I disagree that he hate his students. Prof.Nguyen allow my late submission of homework(and no point deduction) though his syllabus said no. And he reply email very quickly, almost in 30 mins to 1 hour, so you can feel free to ask any time. He also give a lot of hard practice and talk about that in class. If you attend every class, you will be expert of actuarial problem. His exam is tough, especially his Final exam(I spent totally 3 hours for 7 questions), a lot computation and you should remember dozens of formula( no cheatsheet in exam). So I advice you study this course as a 5 credits course.

If there was a burnbook for professors he would definitely get the fugliest sl-t review. He hates his students so he gives them the worst tests, of which 30% is nothing he ever mentioned or taught.

Prof Nguyen isn't the best math professor I've had at UCLA, but he's definitely up there. When I took Math 178A with him, I felt like he knew the material well (although sometimes he forgets formulas) and explained it clearly. He wrote on the blackboard but he also posted lecture notes on BruinLearn. In lectures, he also handed out practice problems printed for us, sometimes with a list of formulas. He also responded to emails at lightning speed and is generally super helpful.

Homework was pretty tough but manageable (we didn't have a good TA). If you have the formulas all at the back of your hand, the midterm was quite easy and fair. The final was brutal, but Prof Nguyen curved our grades at the end. Since the math department has had trouble getting professors to teach lately, if you do end up with Prof Nguyen for this class, you should be fine as long as you do the homework and genuinely try to understand what's going on and unpack the symbols and notations.

I disagree that prof hates his students. He's very responsive to emails and very helpful in office hours. If you just went to office hours once a week, he'd do almost the entire homework for you. Additionally, although his exams were hard and had no cheat sheet, we knew what material to expect. He gave us plenty of practice and we never saw a question on an exam that we hadn't seen in either homework or the practice problems. He is clear when instructing and doesn't make as many mistakes as some other professors do. 178A isn't meant to be an easy math class. I think his course was fair, but you had to work hard for an A.

This class isn't easy, but if you put in the work on the homeworks/lectures and go to his office hours, you can succeed.

Just don't expect to do well on his exams with only a surface level understanding of the material