Professor Andrews is a super reasonable guy. He was super understanding when I had some health issues come up right before a midterm. Although the tests themselves were difficult, he did a great job of teaching the harder calculus topics that I did not understand when I was taught them in high school. The only thing I struggled with was when he lectured and I felt like the examples he gave were a lot easier in class than on the homework and tests. But overall, I really liked him as a person.

All right. You’ve heard the fantastic reviews below mine, as well as the glowing recommendations on the UCLA Math major Facebook group. Your first pass, even after declaration of the math major, was also thankfully (but barely) good enough to land you a spot in Andrews’s lecture.

Now that you made it, what to expect? Your grade is determined by 5 quizzes and the final. Quizzes? Hard as flying &$@£, but do not fear. The grading scheme makes it so that you always have 100% on your quiz category, but the worse you do on the quizzes, the more your final matters. So you could get a 70 average on the quizzes but if you get a 90 on the final, you’ll get about a 93 in the class. The averages/medians were low on all exams (<= 60), so it’s important that you get ahead of the curve. No oral final for this quarter and probably subsequent quarters because the math department didn’t follow through with having oral finals.

Lecture-wise, you really can’t ask for much better. What I will say has already been said in the other reviews.

As for how to do well? A general pointer: you have to BREATHE the material presented to you in lecture. Every major concept, you must be able to manipulate and command swiftly. Study the quiz preparation materials as deeply as you can, and try to develop a strong intuition by solving the problems yourself as quickly as possible. If you do not understand a concept, you will be heavily punished for it. For instance, he did this thing with true/false questions where you would get NEGATIVE points if you guessed incorrectly (so the questions could potentially dock points from OTHER questions if you put in too many incorrect responses). Since this was so stressful, I’ll offer some tips. First, you need to ingrain every major theorem and quiz prep result in your head. Every single clause/hypothesis of a major theorem, you need to play with and commit to memory so that you know if a true/false statement seems off. Draw pictures for these questions to see if you can find counterexamples. Do not use theorems in answering these questions until you are entirely sure that their hypotheses are satisfied. It is immensely painful to realize that you got negative points for a question because you accidentally cited a theorem or thought you were right when in reality you weren’t.

And lastly, the final, I would argue, is a fair exam, aside from those damn true/false questions, as knowing the concepts and studying the quiz prep should allow you to do well. Since a good score on the final will ENSURE success in the class, you really want to take the time to, again, learn how to breathe the material in 131A. Understand the workings of epsilon delta proofs, as well as when/why you would use max. Same thing for limits of sequences. Hammer the formal definitions of differentiability and integrability into your head. I know it’s going to be tough, but by really developing that intuition and learning as much as you can from your quizzes, you can pull greatly ahead of the curve on the final. Andrews is an amazing professor, but to do well, you must put your best foot forward and push yourself to master the material. 131A is a juggernaut, so take advantage of the lectures and the resources that Andrews gives out to you.

I never write reviews, but Professor Andrews is too fantastic of a lecturer to not write a review on.

First of all, his lectures were super engaging and concise, and made the course material seem less dense and dull. His entire lecture notes (about 110 pages) were also available on the course website. I personally loved his lecture notes as they were almost identical to the lecture and were very very clear. He also spent the first week mostly talking about quantifiers to make sure that the students had a firm understanding of statements and proof structure. As this course was mostly about proving whether a given statement is true or false, having a strong foundation on the quantifiers and proof structure definitely helped for the quizzes and the final.

There were 5 quizzes on even weeks (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) and a final exam. All the questions from the quizzes and the final exam were based on the lecture notes and the quiz preparation problems. The solutions to each quiz preparation problem sets and the quizzes were uploaded on the course website fairly quickly, with great clarity and detail. Professor Andrews was also extremely helpful during office hours, and he would answer any questions that come up very thoroughly and made sure the students resolved their questions and were content when they left his office.

Selling solutions manual for Jon Rogawski and Colin Adams Calculus Single Variable 3rd Edition. In excellent condition. Text me at **********

Dr. Andrews is very smart. I will give him that. He knows what he's talking about and can clearly show you what is going on in the code. The problem arises in the fact that he himself was not a very interactive lecturer. The class honestly asynchronous class because he would have you watch videos beforehand and give quizzes based on the video (graded on completion) and go over the quizzes within the class. Because of this, the class did not become as engaging as I would have liked it to be and it also made the understanding of the basics contingent upon how well you can understand the videos and textbook (both of which could be quite a bit unclear at times). He was a bit rude (I don't think he intended to come off like that but whenever questioned something or whenever there were clarifications he always seemed to push back a little bit which makes it discouraging). His cutoff for an A is high, but he does change it so you're not required to have the 95% he states in the syllabus for an A. This was a summer class and I had many things going on. I personally did not put in enough effort to get an A and fully deserve n A-. However if you do take this class, it is not a free A you will have to work for it somewhat.

Math 31B is has a lot to do with sequences and it was both interesting and annoying at the same time. On the flipside, Professor Andrews is very interesting and engaging. I'm sad that he is leaving academia but it was good being able to take a class with him. He sort of taught with a "doesn't give a shit" attitude, in a good way. He is very colloquial and expressive in regards to how he teaches math. Here is his SoundCloud account https://soundcloud.com/mjandr

PROS:

* Andrews is a great human being

* He assigns a lot of homework that really helps with grasping the subject matter

* Math can be fun

* Practice midterms/finals are very helpful

CONS:

* Some problems are frustrating, but that's math

* Apparently his tests are tricky, personally I felt like that was an exaggeration. There were still some oddball questions but it wasn't impossible

TIPS:

* Please check your homework, I didn't do that and was fine losing a few points every assignment because of my sloppy handwriting or simple algebra errors, but they add up. Personally, I used Desmos to check some of my graphs/derivatives, but I've seen people use Slader (or Chegg?)

* Do the practice tests

* If there is a hint on the midterm, ride/die with it, don't be a bonehead and ignore it

This class was super easy other than the coding. Andrews explains things pretty well but can get off track easily. Reading the textbook is really helpful in understanding material.

Andrews is a nice guy at times, but sometimes it is difficult to approach him. Do not bother going to his review sessions, go to Conley's instead. Halfway through review sessions, he would get worked up and not even bother to finish the problem. Also, keep in mind that if you did not take the AP Calc in high school take another professor, Andrews does not like doing algebra during lectures leading to confusion (personally).

Overall, I really enjoyed my experience taking PIC 40A with Andrews! He was always super helpful in clarifying any concepts or debugging code, so I would recommend going to office hours. There were a couple of components to his class:
1. LECTURES: Usually recorded, and the professor types out his code instead of using slides, which I personally preferred. His lectures can be fast-paced due to the nature of this class, since you have to cover HTML/JavaScript/CSS/etc, but he posts all of his snippets online with notes to review later. There is no textbook, only his snippets. Attendance is not graded but definitely go to class if you want to do well on the homework and exam.
2. DISCUSSIONS: Optional. I typically didn't attend them, to be completely honest, but it's helpful if you're having trouble grasping a concept and want to try more examples.
3. HOMEWORK (70%): There were 9 HW assignments total this quarter, with your lowest grade dropped. You usually get about a week (sometimes more, sometimes less) to finish them, but make sure to check Gradescope/Canvas frequently so you don't miss when it's posted. In my experience, they can take from 1.5-5 hours to complete. I learned a lot from these homework assignments, and I liked how the latter ones culminated in a completed Shut The Box game – it was cool seeing the final product. As a tip, always read ALL the directions carefully (especially the grading criteria), read over your code and check for minor mistakes, and validate your HTML before submitting! It may seem like a long process, but I got some points taken off because I was too careless with my code!
4. EXAMS (30%): Due to the online quarter, the midterm exam was cancelled. The final exam consisted of a 3-hour long homework assignment with 4 problems that was open for 24 hours. The level of difficulty was very reasonable, if you followed along in lectures and were familiar with his snippets. It was open notes in the sense that you could use any of the professor/TA/your past code, but not from the internet.

I am currently selling the Calculus: Single Variable 3rd edition loose-leaf textbook by Rogawski/Adams (ISBN **********397) for $30.

If interested, feel free to contact me at *************