Professor
Peter Xu
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2025 - I hated this class so much. I am not a proof person, so I knew this was going to be difficult. I would say he is pretty clear in lecture and teaches decently. However, sometimes he decides to change his mind and do the proof a different way (just for funzies), but then he gets it wrong. He posts the entire course lecture notes from the beginning, and those were helpful. There is only one midterm, which I've never seen before in a math class. The midterm was 4 questions. He provided a practice midterm, and two of the questions from the practice were the exact same questions on the actual midterm. The other questions were provide an example of a certain thing and restate a certain proof of a theorem from lecture. Median was 16/24. He shortened the final to 6 questions because he didn't have another proctor. For the final, he provided 37 practice problems with each unit. Based on the midterm, you would think that he would pull at least some questions from the practice to put on the actual final. Like out of those THIRTY SEVEN PROBLEMS, you would think so. However, he put only one similar problem from the practice on the final. The rest were basically all proofs for theorems he went over in lecture. So don't even do the practice problems or redo homework when studying, just go over how to prove the theorems again and stuff in lecture. So I studied a week for hours and hours for that final, doing all these practice problems and briefly going over lecture, and I got 45%. Like it was fair because it was all from lecture, but I studied the wrong things. The median was 19.5/34. You can bring a 3x5 notecard for the final. Homework was assigned weekly, and only 3 problems were graded on correctness. 2 homeworks were dropped. Midterm would be dropped if it increased your overall grade after the final. If you were at a boundary between grades, he said he would take into consideration how much effort you showed in class in terms of answering questions, office hours, etc. Grading scheme: 30% Homework, 30% Midterm, 40% Final. From previous years, the grade distribution looks HORRIBLE. He bases the distribution on the median and how you do in comparison to this. Grade cutoffs: A+ 94-100, A 84-94, A- 79-84, B+ 73-79, B 67-73, B- 62-67, C+ 60-62, C 55-60, C- 53-55 but this changes from quarter to quarter. Although I received an A in MATH 115A, this did not follow in MATH 131A. I didn't think there was a significant gap in difficulty from these two classes but maybe that's just because I hate proofs. In short, study by redoing lecture proofs and don't do the final practice problems.
Fall 2025 - I hated this class so much. I am not a proof person, so I knew this was going to be difficult. I would say he is pretty clear in lecture and teaches decently. However, sometimes he decides to change his mind and do the proof a different way (just for funzies), but then he gets it wrong. He posts the entire course lecture notes from the beginning, and those were helpful. There is only one midterm, which I've never seen before in a math class. The midterm was 4 questions. He provided a practice midterm, and two of the questions from the practice were the exact same questions on the actual midterm. The other questions were provide an example of a certain thing and restate a certain proof of a theorem from lecture. Median was 16/24. He shortened the final to 6 questions because he didn't have another proctor. For the final, he provided 37 practice problems with each unit. Based on the midterm, you would think that he would pull at least some questions from the practice to put on the actual final. Like out of those THIRTY SEVEN PROBLEMS, you would think so. However, he put only one similar problem from the practice on the final. The rest were basically all proofs for theorems he went over in lecture. So don't even do the practice problems or redo homework when studying, just go over how to prove the theorems again and stuff in lecture. So I studied a week for hours and hours for that final, doing all these practice problems and briefly going over lecture, and I got 45%. Like it was fair because it was all from lecture, but I studied the wrong things. The median was 19.5/34. You can bring a 3x5 notecard for the final. Homework was assigned weekly, and only 3 problems were graded on correctness. 2 homeworks were dropped. Midterm would be dropped if it increased your overall grade after the final. If you were at a boundary between grades, he said he would take into consideration how much effort you showed in class in terms of answering questions, office hours, etc. Grading scheme: 30% Homework, 30% Midterm, 40% Final. From previous years, the grade distribution looks HORRIBLE. He bases the distribution on the median and how you do in comparison to this. Grade cutoffs: A+ 94-100, A 84-94, A- 79-84, B+ 73-79, B 67-73, B- 62-67, C+ 60-62, C 55-60, C- 53-55 but this changes from quarter to quarter. Although I received an A in MATH 115A, this did not follow in MATH 131A. I didn't think there was a significant gap in difficulty from these two classes but maybe that's just because I hate proofs. In short, study by redoing lecture proofs and don't do the final practice problems.
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