I somehow managed to get an A in this class, but I really didn't expect to. After attending her office hours, I realized that Professor Radko does care about her students, however, there are several reasons why I found her class frustrating at times.

I think the most frustrating thing about the class was that she would often put tricky curveball problems on the test, where if you didn't know one tiny trick to solving the problem, you would not get it at all. Luckily the class was curved (which gave people like me an advantage), but I found it frustrating coming across problems on exams that her lectures and studying from the textbook did not prepare me for. The only good thing about this was that it motivated me to study A LOT and really understand the material.

The homework was also graded quite harshly in this class. On the first half of the assignments I would get 90% or less. Why? Even though my work was complete, I made one tiny mistake on a problem that they would still take points off for. After that I learned to become a perfectionist on my homework assignments and make sure EVERY problem was entirely correct (even if it meant going to office hours to ask).

Professor Radko is also hard to understand in lectures at first, although you will gradually understand what she is saying better.

So to sum it up, understand that if you take math with Radko, you will have to work hard to get an A in the class. And in the end you still might not if you get enough of those "curveball" problems on the exams.

Pretty decent professor - straightforward instruction and exams.

The concepts can be hard to grasp at times (32B is said to be the hardest out of the 31/32/33 series, and so far I agree). The material covered after the second midterm (Stokes, Green, etc) is by far the most difficult, and in Winter 08 & Spring 09, Radko went pretty slow in the first few weeks and had to rush through the last few sections. Don't check out during the last two weeks!

The standard grading scale is 10% HW, 10% quizzes, 25% each midterm, and 40% final. There is also an alternate grading scheme where you can drop your lower midterm and weight everything else more, and she uses whichever one benefits you more. The class is curved. The HW & Quizzes (4 or 5 - during discussion) generally serve as grade boosters. The means on the midterms in Spring 09 were a 72% and 66%, respectively. She's a VERY fast grader; grades are up within 24 hours of a test.

Radko put up practice exams for every test, but there were ALWAYS huge errors in the solutions, so take them with a grain of salt.

Don't hesitate to take her - she's pretty solid.

Radko is a VERY nice and polite professor. She's decent at explaining concepts, and her tests are fairly straightforward. As for the course material itself, it starts off pretty easy, but then a lot of somewhat difficult theorems and concepts get crammed in the last two weeks of the quarter, and it's a real pain in the ass. All in all, the professor was good, but the course is kinda hard. Be prepared to work your ass off like I did, unless you're some kind of genius.

Dr. Radko was a good teacher for 32B. She uses lots of pictures to help explain concepts. The only complaint that I had about her was that her final was ridiculously hard. It was curved of course but it was very different than the midterms and the homework. I dont know if that was just a fluke that quarter or not. Overall I think that she was a good teacher and I wouldnt hesitate to take one of her classes again.

Well the material started off easy and so did the class, but it slowly got harder. By the last concepts I was totally lost, so i don't know if this was a teaching error or just a crazy leap in the material. I went into the final with a decent grade, but the test was just insane. It didn't even need to be that hard since the grades weren't inflated or anything before, but I'm talking like 40% or worse bad. Very hard class by the end and the final was just a stupid ownagefest.

Professor Radko was a very nice professor and was willing to help me understand the material. In order to prepare for the midterms, I just did a lot of practice problems from the textbook. I did really well on the midterms and the homework was pretty easy. The final was more difficult, but that is only because the last week of the class is when all of the difficult theorems are introduced. Overall, I would say that her notes on the board are very clear and consistent, which helped me understand the material. My biggest complaint was that the answers she e-mailed to us for the practice midterms always had errors in them! I also personally think that she could have explained some of the harder theorems better. I recommend Radko for Math 32B and I think she is a good professor. With some outside studying, the material will be easy to understand and you'll probably do well on the exams.

Professor Radko was really really nice and was extremely willing to help, but I don't think her teaching methods were very effective for this particular course. I like the fact that she did example problems in class, but she fell short on explaining the concepts, thus resulting in the TAs explaining the concepts to us. Because each and every problem is different, it would have helped if she did proofs or explained the concepts more thoroughly so we can figure out how to do any type of problem. Her quizzes and midterms were really easy, and the homework wasn't exactly hard, so basically a lot of people, even the people who just memorized the steps rather than know the concepts, did well on those. However, her final was very, very hard, which was really unexpected because her midterms and quizzes were so easy. There were a lot of nasty calculations and a lot of confusion because there were so many theorems to know that when it comes to the problems, it's hard to figure out which theorem you want to use. Even if she allowed us to have a notecard during the final, it didn't really help much. I personally do not trust her practice midterms and finals because her solutions always have some sort of calculation errors, which leads me to question whether her method was wrong or whether I just did it wrong. I was rather disappointed in this class because I actually liked the material that was taught, but I don't think Professor Radko prepared all of us adequately for her final, which was ridiculously hard.