Honestly, I don't understand why people give this guy bad reviews. He's a great teacher and is really good at explaining concepts as well as example questions. I would definitely take him again. The homework he gave wass very well-tied to the stuff he was teaching in class and they are a really good indicator of what you should expect for his midterms and finals. He paced his class really well so it's not too fast or too slow for you. He's a funny guy as well, without having to try hard of course. This is one of the most chill class I have had, not because it was too easy, but because everything is so well-planned that I could literally trust this guy to deliver the best. My TA, Tim, is also a cool dude. So great at explaining concepts and helping us understand the homework assigned. His notes are lit too. If he's teaching again, be sure to take him as your TA. Extremely helpful and a great guy.

Take this class with Professor Marengon! Some of my friends switched out of it but I had to stay in due to my schedule and I am so glad I did because he, along with my TA Joe (best TA ever!!) actually made math enjoyable and easily understandable.
Like most math classes, the grade breakdown consists of 10% homework, 50% final, and 20% for each midterm with the option to drop one midterm in exchange for a higher weighting on the final.

Course Content: Math 31B can be a challenging class, especially for people without Calc BC experience in HS (like myself). Marco made the decision to "flip" the syllabus in that we would learn the more difficult topics (series) first, despite being later in the book so that we wouldn't be rushed. I was hesitant but it was really nice, especially because we weren't rushed with the difficult topics and the final was towards the easier end as it centered on integration.

Lectures/Discussion Sections: Lectures are pretty standard in this class, except Marco does them with a flair of humor, getting comfortable with the class as the quarter goes on. He is always open to questions and makes a strong effort to connect class concepts which is helpful. They are BruinCasted too which is a plus. In discussion sections, we went through examples and my TA Joe was extremely helpful with tips, strategies, and in office hours.

Homework: 10 mandatory problems per week which isn't too bad with a total of 20 assigned so that you can use the additional problems for review. Marco never made us do homework for things we didn't learn in class.

Tests: Tests are fair, not to easy or hard, but the midterms did take the whole 50 minute lecture period, with most students not finishing in time. Final, due to corona, was online and open resource, but still manageable. MARCO PROVIDES A TON OF PRACTICE MATERIALS (4 MOCK MIDTERMS, 5 MOCK FINALS) THAT ALMOST MATCH THE ACTUAL TESTS. Joe's review sessions were also extremely helpful.

TLDR: Take this class!! He may seem hard on the first day but his passion and care for students pays off.

This class was really not too difficult as long as you kept up with the work. Marco can sometimes lose students during his explanations, but is clearly passionate about math and wants to see his students succeed.

Homework is required in this class and constitutes 10 percent of your grade. There are weekly assignments with 10 questions each. They don't take too long and are straight out of the required textbook, so it really isn't overly difficult.

There are also two quizzes during the quarter that are each 5 percent of your grade. The quizzes are one problem each and are straight out of the homework assignments. If you do the homework and just quickly review it before the quiz, you will be perfectly fine.

The two midterms are each 20 percent of your grade. Marco seems to care less about getting the correct answer and more about having the proper steps, so partial credit is often available. The averages on both were in the 75-80 percent range, so they were not curved.

The final can be either 45 percent or 60 percent of your grade, depending on the grading scheme that is more favorable for you; you can either drop a midterm or a quiz. The final was slower paced than the midterms due to the increased time limit, which was nice, but it also seemed more difficult. However, the average was still around 80 percent, which was somewhat surprising.

I would like to also note that there were multiple grading errors made in this class. Both of my midterms were misgraded; on the first one my points were added up incorrectly, and on the second one I lost points despite not doing anything incorrectly. However, Marco and my TA were both receptive to this and fixed my scores accordingly. The final also was miscalculated - this time for everyone -so we did not get our grades back until the first day of winter quarter.

Overall, Marco is a pretty good professor that I would be willing to have again.

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Professor Marengon is a nice guy. His lectures aren't super boring as he'll say/do funny things purposefully or not. I could tell that he genuinely cares about us, and he does regularly ask the class if we have any questions during his lectures.
The only problem though was that I was often so lost, I usually had no idea what to ask. Like a lot of other reviews say, he tends to explain even simple concepts in the most convoluted ways possible. It's not his accent -- it's easy to understand (at least to a native English speaker) and even pleasant to listen to. It's that he loves to do proofs for most of the lectures, and it's not clear how to tell what you need to know from what you don't. I liked a comparison that I saw on another review: it would be tough to learn basic addition as a 6-year-old from his way of teaching because it would focus too much on why 2+3=5 and not how to solve the problem (which is what 1st-graders and non-math-majors care about generally).
Even though I got a pretty crappy grade, I probably would have done worse if I focused on studying the confusing notes that I took in class rather than the lesson summaries in the textbook, which do sum up each lesson nicely. You do unfortunately need the latest edition of Rogawski's textbook (4th for my class) because they change up the ordering of the homework problems between editions. As a side rant, these new editions of the book are just ridiculous schemes to squeeze even more money out of students. The author's been dead for over 7 years and they're still releasing new editions every couple of years!
Professor Marengon sends out mock midterms and finals, which are very important to do! They cover most of the topics that appear on the tests. But once again, the only problem is that he believes in the teaching philosophy of making the tests exponentially harder than the preparations for the tests. As a result, there are "tricks" (as he likes to say) that you have to know how to do to solve some problems on the tests that aren't covered in the homework or mock exams. Grading is also tough, and partial credit is given out sparingly.
Other than that, the homework is easy to complete once you actually understand what you need to do, whether it's from getting help from office hours or KhanAcademy. My discussion class wasn't very helpful though, as the guy would just do examples of the lesson's simplest variations of problems on the board, not preparing us for the difficulty of the problems on the exam. It would be nice if they would give the class exam-level problems to work on while it was easy to receive help from the TA.
I do appreciate the two different grading schemes that the professor uses (another review goes into detail on these). I don't think the curve's very big during Fall (maybe half a letter grade) mostly since all of the students that I talked to already took Calc BC, and engineering students would have to get a 5 on that exam in order to skip Math 31A! As someone whose school didn't offer BC (which is why I took 31A over the summer to get through math prereqs faster), I felt very behind the students that were able to treat this class as a review. If you haven't already taken some form of Calc BC, I'd recommend waiting until Winter Quarter to take this class with a possibly higher curve, and ideally not with Marengon.

In my opinion, Marengon was enjoyable overall. The main complaint I heard from a couple of my study-mates (and Bruinwalk) is that he lectures so quickly that you are stunned and unable to formulate questions to ask. The way I avoided being stunned in lecture was by skimming the section of the book that Marengon was going to cover next for FIVE minutes. Made a HUGE difference in keeping up in lecture, especially when he does something like the Error Bound for Taylor Series. I had a 4 pm class and I was skimming the material at 3:50 pm and then rushing from Boelter 4404 to MS 4000A. Fun times. Also, it takes a while to get used to his notation, such as "R --> R+" (fancy R) means the domain is all real numbers and the range is all positive real numbers (he will write this beside the exponential function b^x as a property).

Another point(!) is that his lectures follow the book very closely; a substantial portion of his examples are textbook examples. Marengon expands on the examples, of course, picking out the details that you might miss by skimming the textbook. I think this is a huge plus over, say, Hsu's lectures for 31B--two of my roommates skipped most of his lectures (and subsequently did better on the midterm) because his lectures apparently were not too textbook-grounded.

Oh, and did I mention that he has pretty good penmanship? https://imgur.com/UhZkjmP https://imgur.com/IK6Q8jk

The homework (10 graded, 10 ungraded per week) is very helpful, both to practice your skills in general and to prep for exams. Marengon doesn't randomly choose problems, as I found out when he was demonstrating a homework problem and remarked that he "chose this problem because so that it was doable." There are two quizzes given in discussion, which consist of a single question taken from both the graded and ungraded homeworks.

His midterms and final weren't too bad, but that's coming from a guy who got 93, 100, and 91 on the midterms and final respectively (the averages were between 73 and 75 for all three). They are all based on the lectures (which are mostly based on the textbook) and the textbook. If you understand his lectures and the textbook, and did the homework, you should find the exams unsurprising. Even better, Marengon posts practice midtermS and practice finalS. Some of my study-mates encountered at least one problem they considered a curveball on each exam, however. I did not take BC beforehand, so this was all new material; being my first quarter, I attended all the lectures. I did a study group in which we went over the practice tests before each midterm/final. I found those extremely helpful.

If you end up stuck with Marengon and fear the worst, don't worry too much; just skim the content before lecture, commiserate with your study-mates on homework/practice finals, and don't panic when you don't understand his derivations in lecture as they're probably in the textbook.

And get ready to hear "Can you hear me in the back?" every lecture.

(tl;dr at end)

As long as you make the effort to go through the materials prior to the class and you make the effort to understand the logic he applies, Marco is a good professor. I felt that his ideas were explained clearly and he did not go particularly fast with his explanations - he goes through multiple examples for each new concept introduced. If you aren't on the same wavelength as him then it goes without saying that you will be lost in the class - he assumes that all concept he explained in prior lectures are well understood when he moves forward and he usually won't go over them again (apart from a brief recap at the start of the lecture).

As for the examined materials, the homework is somewhat challenging but it ties in to the material of class well. I wouldn't recommend doing it right before the lecture it is due because it can take a while to finish and doubles as a good study session. The quizzes were very easy - we got two of them consisting of one problem each, each taken from a previous homework. The midterm exams were relatively tough due to time constraints however I felt that the homeworks given were adequate practice for them. With 3 hours to finish it, the final was a good reflection on how well I understood the concepts.

Overall I would rate Marco as a good professor for 31B as long as you make an effort to keep up with and understand the concepts. The examined work is fair and there were no absurd problems thrown our way.

Marengon is an absolutely horrid professor. I did not understand a single thing spoken in lecture. When I went back to teach the material myself, a lot of the material was painfully easy to understand, yet his explanations obfuscate even the simplest things. His explanations went by really fast, and he made jumps in logic that he didn't explain. After every lecture, I would leave incredibly confused. He could have written Egyptian hieroglyphs on the board and spoken in R'lyehian, and it would have been equally as effective. As for the people saying the bad reviews are too hard on him because of an accent, it's not about that. I understood his articulation but not his explanation. If Marengon taught the same group of kids throughout elementary school, they would enter middle school not knowing basic addition.

He would stop and ask if anyone had any questions, which I appreciated, but I was so lost that I didn't even know which questions to ask. I have had to essentially ignore my other classes in order to teach myself the material from this class. This could have been the only class I had the entire quarter, and I still would have struggled. The amount of stress and confusion generated from this class has been greater than any other class I have ever taken in my life by several degrees of magnitude. That’s saying something considering I have had drug addicts as teachers before. I always wondered what pain caused them to turn to drugs. This class has given me a better idea.

I would tell anyone I know that plans to take this course to stay away from taking it with Marengon. If you do, it is guaranteed that you will have a stressful quarter. He will suck out anything interesting about any of the material, and he will make you hate anything to do with math. You will dread going to lecture, and you will have to slave yourself for the smallest possibility of a passing score. This class was a harrowing experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

In addition, his tests were unnecessarily hard. On top of his inability to explain anything, there were types of problems that we didn’t encounter at all in class, and the practice final that he gave us was noticeably different than the actual final. That final was the hardest test I have ever taken despite the fact that the two weeks before test I focused solely on that test.

I find it appalling that a place like UCLA would let such an abysmal educator anywhere near one of their students.

This class was definitely tough for me. I took 31A last quarter and took AP ABCalc in high school so I should have been prepared. Marco is just not the best professor. His lectures were confusing and not super helpful. He's incredibly awkward which is kind of adorable though.

31B isn't that hard as a class, and Prof. Marengon explains it super well!!
He's super funny, engaging and he's genuinely interesting. I know that's a stretch for math, but this might be one of my favourite math classes. There's homework once a week, and he gives a TON of practice midterms and finals that act as more or less perfect examples for what to expect. It's a good class :)

Also: special thanks to the TA Joe Breen he's freaking fantastic!! if you can get him please do otherwise find some good final review sessions from him on his youtube channel (courtesy to the shift to online finals) and some good review / problems on his website.