Well, what a class!

This is a tough class, but Forlano is a great choice and makes it much easier to get through. His lectures are good and explain the essential parts of the material well, and he does many relevant examples. His first two tests were pretty simple, with a lot of questions being exactly like examples from the lectures with different numbers. The final kicked it up a little bit, but not in a way that felt unfair. More like combining multiple skills from the class into one problem. Homework load was very light compared to other math classes I've been in, with 5-8 questions due every week as the only assignment. Overall, I would strongly recommend Forlano for this class.

At first I was a bit worried coming into the class seeing that the past reviews spoke on how hard the exams were but honestly I was pleasantly surprised. But just as a side note: I has 115A the previous quarter with a professor who did not care at ALL so I learned to self study and still did that a bit in this class just because I found the material not super intuitive at times. However with that being said, Professor Forlano and our TA Patrick really care!! The first week we went over mathematical logic and sets since it was not expected of us to know all the mathematical lingo or how to do proofs, so that was really helpful. Then after we went through the typical material in the course, with weekly homeworks that at first were a bit time consuming but shortened as we progressed through the quarter. Only ~3 problems were graded, but it was really helpful to work through all of them for practice. Forlano has OH 3 times a week as well as open contact via email to set up 1 on 1's, and he was always there to answer any questions we may have. One of the best things about the class is the grading. The professor and TA understand that this is an introductory class, so grading was surprisingly fairly lenient and I always did better than expected. However, that does not mean they were lazy and you did not receive feedback. Even for questions you did not lose points for, they would leave helpful comments about your work and what did/didn't work, so definitely looking through those were super helpful!
Overall, this wasn't a walk in the park and in all honestly I attended many OH sessions and did a lot of practice to get a good grade. However, I do think Forlano and our TA did a great job this quarter, and if you have the option to take Professor Forlano you should consider it :)

Real analysis is a tough class, but Forlano gave relatively engaging and very clear lectures, so paying attention was easy. Also I think his accent is kinda cool lol. I didn't end up reading the textbook at all since his notes were good enough for me. His handwriting is a little messy, but still readable for the most part.
You definitely learn a lot doing the homeworks. The workload wasn't all that bad, only 4-6 problems are assigned out of the entire set, so it usually only took 3-6 hours to do each week.
The homeworks are weighted high, so be sure to do them carefully. Doing the non-assigned problems is recommended just to get exposure to more material.
The midterms were relatively fair, if not a bit long. The final, in my opinion, was a step up in difficulty compared to the midterms, and took me significantly longer to complete. I spent about 7 hours on the midterms and about 14-ish on the final, but I am a slow worker, so ymmv.
The grade is determined on a semi-straight scale, where >90% gets an A-, >80% gets a B-, etc., but where the cutoff for A/A+ and B/B+ is determined by Forlano.
30% is from the Final
22.5% is from the midterm you do better on
17.5% is from the midterm you do worse on
29.5% is from homework
0.5% is from end of quarter evaluation.

Good lecture flow, however, sometimes monotone when he speaks. In the online setting, midterms and final kinda kicked my ass bc they actually took like 8 hours to do, but idk how that translates to in person.

If you just want an easy A, Forlano is not your professor, as he generally tries to center his exams at an 80-85% median. If you really want to learn the concepts taught in class, Forlano is a great professor to take 170E with. He does a great job of breaking down the concepts in lecture for everyone, including non-math majors, went through all of the 170e curriculum (apparently one of the other 170e professors winter 2023 did not get anywhere close to finishing), and the homework generally does a good job of expanding on the concepts in class. Lectures may have been a bit dry, but he did record them via bruincast, so watching at 1.5x speed worked well, pausing when I needed to take notes.

The homework tends to be on the theoretical side, with lots of "demonstrate X given Y" questions; some are fairly trivial, a few required a lot of calculation that I felt was unnecessarily long (extensive double sum problems anyone?) and/or required some insight, so I would definitely recommend blocking off your schedule to attend, in addition to discussions, office hours with a TA or the professor for the occasional question you get stuck on. I also heard before taking his class that homeworks are very long, but I personally didn't experience that, probably because I took heavy advantage of office hours (the TAs for my class were awesome but are graduating soon - thanks Ben Jarman for all of your support!). While the homework was not super close to the actual exams (the exams were almost all computational), I felt that it did a good job of forcing understanding of the topics needed for them if you first put in decent effort on the homework yourself before getting help. At the beginning, homeworks due friday only used concepts taught the week before it was due, but towards the end it started catching up with concepts touched on wednesday being used in the homeworks due that friday.

Exams were in my opinion fair: they were very similar to the practice exams Forlano gave out (but not like copy-pasted wording) and weren't super difficult but they weren't easy either. Forlano also clearly made an effort to minimize multi-part question penalties, so almost always part B was solvable even without knowing how to do part A, and grading was also generous and fast (<7 day turnaround for all exams even with 160 students). Definitely make sure you work on a cheat sheet for the exams as you go along, as you'll need to know the different types of random variables and how to use them by the second midterm.

Not specific to Forlano but just 170e in general, but definitely get used to doing basic double integrals before taking this class. It appears at the very end, and unfortunately 32a isn't a prereq/coreq but 95%+ will have taken it, so you'll be at a massive disadvantage if you don't.

All in all, I would definitely take another math class with Forlano, You do not need the textbook.

Avoid him. Homework and tests were unnecessarily difficult and way harder than the other prof. strict grading. focused too much on proofs in lecture when we weren't tested on them

This class is what I would call a doozy. I went into it moderately confident I would pass but came out of the final doing the mental calculations on how much I would need to request as a regrade to pass. I don't consider myself the strongest at math however, I got an A in Math 31A, B, and Math 32A so I felt at least a little bit prepared before I enrolled.

I don't ever learn directly from lectures anyway but I will say the room we had caused the microphone to glitch quite a bit so I couldn't hear the recordings and would have to go to the lecture in person to be able to get the info (that is not his fault tho).

Homework was a set of problems and 5 would be graded. In my opinion, the homework was graded a bit too easily which meant that I would think that I understood the material far more than I did. I basically got 100% for the homework portion of the class. THE HOMEWORK IS NOT LIKE THE TESTS.

Now onto my downfall in this class. The tests.

The first midterm was in my opinion relatively fair. Did I do well? No, but that's more on me for focusing on other classes than this one. But there's the second grading scheme, right? And that one takes your best midterm score only, so all I had to do was do better on the second one and it would all work out. I'm sure you can see where this is going.

So I studied like crazy for the second one and got a saucy 48%-- worse than I did on the first but higher than a lot of the folks I spoke to. Forlano refused to release any averages or stats for the second midterm because he claimed it was "not representative" of how people did-- so I can't say for sure how it went for others. While I will concede that the first midterm was fair, the second one was crazy. The lecture hall was full until the end and I remember looking around and seeing half the people around me with a good portion of their test blank with like 10 minutes remaining-- madness.

So it was safe to say I was not overly excited to see what the final had in store.

The final was once again quite difficult but I will say I was able to pull a 71% off somehow. When I calculated my grade it would have come out to about a C- raw score so he put some type of curve on it for the class-- hooray.

Overall, he's sort of funny in lectures and pretty nice during office hours but I wouldn't take this class again. Even if I would have gotten a better grade it caused me too much stress at the end of the year worrying about whether or not I would screw my GPA. If you're gonna do it I would put all your effort into the first midterm and then do a little prayer for the final.

Justin Forlano produces the most boring lectures I have ever attended. They are so long and drawn out and filled with content irrelevant to the class. The majority of lecture is long tedious proofs, which don't seem important for a class where you never have to do a single proof. That said, you will get by fine by skipping class. Reading the textbook is infinitely more engaging than his lectures, and the textbook is damn boring. Class attendance was actually comical when I went, maybe 10 students showed in a class of 160.

The content of the course isn't actually too hard, and notes sheets are allowed on midterm and final, so you really don't have to know anything.

If you can take another professor, do it. And if you are stuck with forlano, save yourself and never go to class.

Dr. Forlano is very clear and helpful. His tests are very direct if you do all his homework (he gives hints for tough questions as well!). I think the homework is lengthy, but given they account for 30% of the grade I think it is okay (there are 8-12 questions per homework, so it can take very long). He is very kind and responsive to questions and emails. More so, if you find any mistakes/concerns for your scores, he is very understanding and thoughtful during office hours. Overall, I think if you are willing to take your time for the homework, I definitely recommend Dr. Forlano!