Pieter Spaas
Department of Mathematics
AD
4.2
Overall Rating
Based on 53 Users
Easiness 2.9 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 4.3 / 5 How clear the class is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Workload 3.4 / 5 How much workload the class is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Helpfulness 4.4 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Tolerates Tardiness
  • Needs Textbook
  • Engaging Lectures
  • Useful Textbooks
  • Tough Tests
  • Would Take Again
GRADE DISTRIBUTIONS
41.6%
34.7%
27.7%
20.8%
13.9%
6.9%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

20.7%
17.2%
13.8%
10.3%
6.9%
3.4%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

ENROLLMENT DISTRIBUTIONS
Clear marks

Sorry, no enrollment data is available.

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Reviews (37)

2 of 4
2 of 4
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Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Dec. 19, 2019

Spaas was amazing. The homework assignments were straightforward and honestly shorter than I expected coming into the class. The only helpful thing about the discussions was the worksheet that would be handed out, but it was always uploaded to CCLE so attendance was never really necessary. The midterms were relatively easy (averages > 80%), and the final was unexpectedly difficult, but not impossible. Overall, I was extremely pleased with Spaas and voluntarily enrolled in his 32B class despite it being at 8 AM. If you have the opportunity to take his class, I would definitely suggest doing so.

Helpful?

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Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: C
Dec. 19, 2019

Discussion groups were useless, and the final absolutely murdered me. Professor is decent and takes time to answer questions, but overall, the course was difficult and I often spent time looking at the textbook to understand the lecture.

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2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: B
Dec. 19, 2019

He is a great professor. Midterms are ok, but final is difficult.

Helpful?

1 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A
Dec. 19, 2019

Professor Spaas was amazing. Lectures were clear. Midterms were pretty easy if you did the homework. Final made sure you actually understood a bit more than just plugging in numbers, and rewarded those who actually tried to understand the more conceptual and geometric aspects. His worksheets especially were very, very helpful in consolidating such an understanding, and helping students fill small holes in their knowledge. I'd say the only flaw in his 32A class, if any, would be that he could have given more of different types of relatively harder problems in the worksheets and/or homework.

Helpful?

1 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Feb. 23, 2021

Professor Spaas is an amazing professor! I thoroughly enjoyed my time in his class as he is very caring and will stop mid-lecture to answer any question that you ask of him. He genuinely seemed to care about every student fully understanding the material. Also, he was very fair and gave 24 hours on exams.
The only difficult parts of the class were the quizzes, where you can choose any 30 minute window in a 24 hour window to take them. There were 3 of them, and they're worth a pretty large portion of your grade. They're very conceptual and require a deep understanding of the subject because of the time constraints. There's little to no computations on these quizzes which made them very difficult, even though they were multiple choice.
The midterms were fairly easy, you get 24 hours to do them, and he says that they should take 3 hours to do in total, but I took 5-6 hours on them on average.
Discussions were helpful in getting a deeper understanding of the concepts we were learning, as we'd go over the weekly worksheet, but overall these were not helpful in getting a better grade in the course.
Lastly, the final was pretty rough. It was surprisingly another level of difficulty higher than the finals, with some complex obscure questions. It also had a 24 hour window and basically took me an entire day. Even though the professor says he curves if necessary, I don't think he did at the end unless it was very miniscule, like less than 1%.
Overall, take this class! Spaas is great.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: D
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Jan. 4, 2021

I did awful in this class, but it wasn't the professor's fault. He seemed very nice, and he did a good job in lecture. He dropped the lowest homework and quiz scores, which works in your favor. He also provides practice midterms, which are great. If I had to retake it, I'd go with Spaas again.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Jan. 3, 2021

Spaas is a great and clear lecturer. I liked his teaching style and he was very straightforward about the material and the homework was always based directly on the notes. He moves a bit fast but it’s not too terrible. I had TA Talon Stark, he often taught some of the material ahead which was helpful. The work in the class is 3 quizzes, 2 midterms, 1 final and then homework from the textbook every week as well as a worksheet for discussion. We pretty much never finished the worksheet in discussion so they were not all that useful but I would definitely still go for the first few weeks and then decide whether you find it helpful. There were also no answers so if you were confused you have to hope your TA or some other student would help you. I thought the worksheets were actually pretty good for gaining more understanding especially to do better on the quizzes. Quizzes were pretty conceptual and full of trick questions so be really careful when taking them. First midterm was pretty straightforward but it took me 2.5 hours overall and the recommended time was an hour (maybe just difference with online format). Average was 95 percent. Second midterm had a lower average (like 83 percent). But as other said, small mistakes absolutely kill you because one point off is 2.5 percent gone since the midtermsa are only 40 percent. The final was not bad at all. I got a pretty decent grade without studying too much. All of the exams are just PDFs posted on CCLE that you complete and submit on Gradescope within a 24 hour period.

Also as others have said, Spaas is so wholesome. He dropped our 2 lowest homework grades and because of the pandemic, he also dropped out lowest quiz grade. His class is not ridiculously difficult and is completely doable. Would definitely take Spaas again!

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Jan. 3, 2021

tl;dr: yeah spaas is great

disclaimer: i took multi var calc in hs but ucla wont take my credit :( so im taking it again so ymmv.

Spaas is a great prof. he explains stuff clearly on his notes and answers questoins. he publishes his notes on ccle so you can easily cram by just reading his notes and nothing else.
there are a couple quizzes (2-3ish) and a couple midterms.

Quizzes are a mix of conceptual and plug and chug. Not too difficult but not the easiest. Midterms/finals are mainly "do the same thing we did in class but with different numbers". Maybe 1 or 2 conceptual questions but its pretty doable. i took this during covid but he was chill and let us take 24 hrs for midterms/finals (30 min for quizzes tho). You could def finish the quizzes/midterms/finals in the time he expects u to do them in, but if u wanna check ur work expect to take 2x the time. Ngl i think spaas gave the most reasonable quizzes compared to other profs.

If youre reading this and this helped you out, pls review ur profs!! itll help us all out uwu

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Jan. 1, 2021

Spaas is great. His lectures are really helpful and clear. His tests are much harder than the homework assigned, so be prepared. The hardest material in the class (at least for me) is taught in the last week or so of the quarter. I recommend studying some of this in advance - it was not easy to cram for the final. The textbook was pretty useful for the class.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 29, 2020

I would give Pieter Spaas my 2nd kidney

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A
Dec. 19, 2019

Spaas was amazing. The homework assignments were straightforward and honestly shorter than I expected coming into the class. The only helpful thing about the discussions was the worksheet that would be handed out, but it was always uploaded to CCLE so attendance was never really necessary. The midterms were relatively easy (averages > 80%), and the final was unexpectedly difficult, but not impossible. Overall, I was extremely pleased with Spaas and voluntarily enrolled in his 32B class despite it being at 8 AM. If you have the opportunity to take his class, I would definitely suggest doing so.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: C
Dec. 19, 2019

Discussion groups were useless, and the final absolutely murdered me. Professor is decent and takes time to answer questions, but overall, the course was difficult and I often spent time looking at the textbook to understand the lecture.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: B
Dec. 19, 2019

He is a great professor. Midterms are ok, but final is difficult.

Helpful?

1 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A
Dec. 19, 2019

Professor Spaas was amazing. Lectures were clear. Midterms were pretty easy if you did the homework. Final made sure you actually understood a bit more than just plugging in numbers, and rewarded those who actually tried to understand the more conceptual and geometric aspects. His worksheets especially were very, very helpful in consolidating such an understanding, and helping students fill small holes in their knowledge. I'd say the only flaw in his 32A class, if any, would be that he could have given more of different types of relatively harder problems in the worksheets and/or homework.

Helpful?

1 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
Feb. 23, 2021

Professor Spaas is an amazing professor! I thoroughly enjoyed my time in his class as he is very caring and will stop mid-lecture to answer any question that you ask of him. He genuinely seemed to care about every student fully understanding the material. Also, he was very fair and gave 24 hours on exams.
The only difficult parts of the class were the quizzes, where you can choose any 30 minute window in a 24 hour window to take them. There were 3 of them, and they're worth a pretty large portion of your grade. They're very conceptual and require a deep understanding of the subject because of the time constraints. There's little to no computations on these quizzes which made them very difficult, even though they were multiple choice.
The midterms were fairly easy, you get 24 hours to do them, and he says that they should take 3 hours to do in total, but I took 5-6 hours on them on average.
Discussions were helpful in getting a deeper understanding of the concepts we were learning, as we'd go over the weekly worksheet, but overall these were not helpful in getting a better grade in the course.
Lastly, the final was pretty rough. It was surprisingly another level of difficulty higher than the finals, with some complex obscure questions. It also had a 24 hour window and basically took me an entire day. Even though the professor says he curves if necessary, I don't think he did at the end unless it was very miniscule, like less than 1%.
Overall, take this class! Spaas is great.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: D
Jan. 4, 2021

I did awful in this class, but it wasn't the professor's fault. He seemed very nice, and he did a good job in lecture. He dropped the lowest homework and quiz scores, which works in your favor. He also provides practice midterms, which are great. If I had to retake it, I'd go with Spaas again.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
Jan. 3, 2021

Spaas is a great and clear lecturer. I liked his teaching style and he was very straightforward about the material and the homework was always based directly on the notes. He moves a bit fast but it’s not too terrible. I had TA Talon Stark, he often taught some of the material ahead which was helpful. The work in the class is 3 quizzes, 2 midterms, 1 final and then homework from the textbook every week as well as a worksheet for discussion. We pretty much never finished the worksheet in discussion so they were not all that useful but I would definitely still go for the first few weeks and then decide whether you find it helpful. There were also no answers so if you were confused you have to hope your TA or some other student would help you. I thought the worksheets were actually pretty good for gaining more understanding especially to do better on the quizzes. Quizzes were pretty conceptual and full of trick questions so be really careful when taking them. First midterm was pretty straightforward but it took me 2.5 hours overall and the recommended time was an hour (maybe just difference with online format). Average was 95 percent. Second midterm had a lower average (like 83 percent). But as other said, small mistakes absolutely kill you because one point off is 2.5 percent gone since the midtermsa are only 40 percent. The final was not bad at all. I got a pretty decent grade without studying too much. All of the exams are just PDFs posted on CCLE that you complete and submit on Gradescope within a 24 hour period.

Also as others have said, Spaas is so wholesome. He dropped our 2 lowest homework grades and because of the pandemic, he also dropped out lowest quiz grade. His class is not ridiculously difficult and is completely doable. Would definitely take Spaas again!

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
Jan. 3, 2021

tl;dr: yeah spaas is great

disclaimer: i took multi var calc in hs but ucla wont take my credit :( so im taking it again so ymmv.

Spaas is a great prof. he explains stuff clearly on his notes and answers questoins. he publishes his notes on ccle so you can easily cram by just reading his notes and nothing else.
there are a couple quizzes (2-3ish) and a couple midterms.

Quizzes are a mix of conceptual and plug and chug. Not too difficult but not the easiest. Midterms/finals are mainly "do the same thing we did in class but with different numbers". Maybe 1 or 2 conceptual questions but its pretty doable. i took this during covid but he was chill and let us take 24 hrs for midterms/finals (30 min for quizzes tho). You could def finish the quizzes/midterms/finals in the time he expects u to do them in, but if u wanna check ur work expect to take 2x the time. Ngl i think spaas gave the most reasonable quizzes compared to other profs.

If youre reading this and this helped you out, pls review ur profs!! itll help us all out uwu

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
Jan. 1, 2021

Spaas is great. His lectures are really helpful and clear. His tests are much harder than the homework assigned, so be prepared. The hardest material in the class (at least for me) is taught in the last week or so of the quarter. I recommend studying some of this in advance - it was not easy to cram for the final. The textbook was pretty useful for the class.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
Dec. 29, 2020

I would give Pieter Spaas my 2nd kidney

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
2 of 4
4.2
Overall Rating
Based on 53 Users
Easiness 2.9 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 4.3 / 5 How clear the class is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Workload 3.4 / 5 How much workload the class is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Helpfulness 4.4 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Tolerates Tardiness
    (29)
  • Needs Textbook
    (36)
  • Engaging Lectures
    (32)
  • Useful Textbooks
    (36)
  • Tough Tests
    (28)
  • Would Take Again
    (34)
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