THIS WAS THE WORST CLASS WITH THE WORST PROFESSOR EVER. do not take this class with pablo at all costs, wait for another professor to teach it. if i had one word to describe pablo, it would be CLUELESS. he can't solve basic problems and adequately answer students' questions. i had a tutor with a phd in math help me throughout this entire course, and even he said that the questions pablo would assign were completely unreasonable. i spent over 25 hours a week studying for this class and i was still barely able to get my well deserved A.

midterm 1: probably the easiest test out of all of them, but still had pretty low averages. initially he only wanted to curve the midterm for lecture 2, but after lecture 1 found out, they had to fight and argue with him in order to have him fairly curve everyones' midterm.

midterm 2: AWFUL. literally a 60% average and he refused to curve because he was mad about the whole curving situation from midterm 1. definitely way harder than any of the content he went over in class or assigned for homework.

final: probably even worse than midterm 2. such hard and long computations, and it included concepts we didn't even cover in class. mostly focuses on the content after midterm 2, but still has a few questions from midterm 1 and 2. good luck with this one, he provides no guidance or help whatsoever.

cherry on top: he lied and told us he was sick 2 days before the first midterm and that he had to cancel lecture, office hours, and the review session that many students were dependent on. come to find out, he was doing a conference at ucsd that day. extremely unprofessional and i honestly don't know why ucla is keeping him around. he's a bad name for the math department and the school as a whole.

hopefully this convinced you not to take this class, and if it didn't all i can say is good luck and you will struggle a lot :)

I never thought I would ever write a review. However, this class was absolutley the worst class I have ever taken. Pablo Sanchez Ocal is quite frankly the most incomptent professor I have ever encountered. His homework assignments are obscenely long and do not capture what he teaches in class. His lectures are done completely on a white board. He can code a whole website for the class filled with useless information, but not figure out to how to project his lecture on the screen. His midterms did not represent what he covered in class. Essentially, he lectures on the easiest examples from the textbook and makes constant errors, and then he proceeds to give the hardest exam possible that are basically trying to trick you every question. He also is a petulant child. He had two lectures for this class. He curved one lecture's by 10% and did not curve the other class. Obviously, this is not fair. When students expressed this, he got very upset and proceeded to not tell us what he was going to do until 2 weeks later and said he would curve no more. He is just awful and does not know how to be teacher. I am so happy I never have to see him again. He needs to be fired.

Very tough class. Pablo is not a bad lecturer but he's not great, and he goes through material pretty quickly. For a simpler class he would be fine, but I struggled in this course material very much (even after taking calculus BC in high school). He is very generous with his grading systems, however. If you take this class, study a lot and make sure you go over and understand the 'difficult' sections of problems in the textbook.

Professor Pablo's lecture is relatively easy to follow because a lot of information are from the textbook. The exams are not tough since he already goes through similar questions in the review sessions.
In short, as long as you do your homework and listen to his lectures with attention, it will not be hard to get a good grade

Professor Sanchez was an engaging lecture, but if you had to skip lecture for health reasons or just personal reasons, you couldn't because none of his lectures were recorded. That means that if you were lost it was hard to catch up. Homework was graded on correctedness, which is fine, because he ended up dropping the homework, but it sucked because we never had answer keys and didn't get our homework back for quite a while. I wish that the class was more online friendly and that the grade scale was made more clear.

Pablo really gives tough problems to get you to think. All the questions for midterms and finals come from the textbook. The midterms were awful because they were just multiple choice, but because of a cheating scandal the final was made free response, which makes it much easier to at least get partial credit for your work. I would not recommend his class simply because of the exam structures, but I gain a deep understanding of the material.