I don’t know why there are so many bad reviews for Hempel. Sure she isn't the best prof, but she's definitely not bad. She goes over everything you need to know for exams and if you look over that then you should be fine. Her exams were really easy, both midterms and final.

Nadja was a mediocre professor. Homework wasn't graded, but there were quizzes in discussions that were questions straight off of recommended homework problems. The midterms and finals weren't too difficult, and she has a nice grading scheme that selects the scheme that works most in your favor. ALL THIS BEING SAID, I don't think she actually curved the class? It wasn't a difficult class but no one really got an A? My calculated grade was a 88.something% and it was still a B+?? in a math class???? where the test averages were in the 70% ranges? Its possible everyone did really well and the grading schemes really worked in people's favor, but I was thrown off that this class wasn't the "easy A" everyone said it would be

be warned, it's harder than you think

I had an AWFUL experience in this class, and that says a lot considering I'm a math person. 33B doesn't have very hard material, but this professor was so inadequate it ruined the entire course. She came to lectures unorganized and unprepared. The lectures were so confusing, it sounded like she did not even understand what she was teaching. She would constantly make mistakes in the lectures and say "Uh, sorry" over and over again. The concepts were not clearly split up, so at any point in time the class was not *exactly* sure what they were even *trying* to learn.

Don't get me started about the tests.. first of all, this professor REFUSED to upload the practice test solutions online. Instead, she would do them in the last 10 minutes of class, but this was NEVER enough time for her to finish or give reasonable explanations for the answers. In the case of the final, she gave us a set of practice problems and did not even finish giving us the answers to half before the final. When asked if she would put them online (considering it was our last day of class and our final was a few days away) she simply shrugged and said "Well if you don't know this by now its your fault". Not to mention, our midterms were trivially easy but the final was RIDICULOUSLY hard in comparison and seemed to touch of concepts outside the scope of the class. A lot of students got screwed over because of that.

Last things: she doesn't collect homeworks. Instead she gives weekly quizzes, so discussion is mandatory. The TA I had was almost as bad as the professor...
Also, she wasted about 10-15 minutes of each midterm passing out tests because she seems to be the only professor who can't figure out how to do it...