Pieter Spaas
Department of Mathematics
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4.3
Overall Rating
Based on 17 Users
Easiness 2.6 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 4.4 / 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 4.3 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Tolerates Tardiness
  • Needs Textbook
  • Useful Textbooks
  • Would Take Again
  • Engaging Lectures
  • Often Funny
  • Tough Tests
GRADE DISTRIBUTIONS
51.4%
42.8%
34.2%
25.7%
17.1%
8.6%
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
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Reviews (11)

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Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Jan. 20, 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.

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
April 4, 2020

I took Math 32A with Professor Spaas Fall 2019 and had a good enough experience to take Math 32B with him Winter 2020, despite the fact that the class was an 8 AM. Overall, Spaas is a good teacher who gives engaging lectures, assigns straightforward homework assignments, and writes what I considered to be very manageable midterms (the class average for midterm 1 was 77.48% with a 78.75% median, while the class average for midterm 2 was 84.5%). The worst thing about this class, however, is the final exam. We were given 24 hours to complete the final open book and open note due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I can safely say I would have failed if I had been forced to take it under normal circumstances. For reference, I had a very comfortable A going into the final and studied a significant amount, but the test still took me 6 hours to complete and 2 hours to check--and I got an 87.5%. Although I would still recommend Spaas, definitely beware of an EXTREMELY difficult final exam.

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 27, 2020

This is my second quarter having Spaas after having him for Math 32A. Overall, I would say the same that I had said about him last quarter. Most of the time he is clear on most material, sometimes he doesn't explain it clearly but we cannot blame him due to the difficulty of the material. He always stays on track of the syllabus which is pretty nice. I feel like both of his midterms were pretty reasonable, however, his final was a completely different story. We had a take home exam, given a 24 hour period to complete it, open book, open notes. He said that the final would’ve been the same as one where we “complete it in person within a three hour period.” Oh yeah? Well that thing took me over 6 hours, and I ain’t joking. I think he purposely raised the difficulty of the final, knowing that there is a possibility that many of us will cheat using technology. However, I think it is totally unfair to the people who did not cheat at all. There should not be any reason to make it harder when many of us are already stressed because of COVID-19. As I can see now the pattern for his classes is that you will be fine until the final completely screws you over. After all, I would still recommend Spaas since the class was pretty doable and not too stressful, but be prepared for the final.

Helpful?

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 6, 2020

You can till this professor actually cares about student learning and his lectures are definitely pretty clear. The exams weren't especially easy/hard but the grading for both midterms and homework is incredibly picky. I usually get a perfect homework score in my math classes but I've gotten points deducted left and right in this class. For any other class you'd chalk that up to a strict undergraduate grader, but the midterms were graded similarly. The rubrics are incredibly skewed, punishing you for tiny arithmetic mistakes and slight errors. Overall he's a good teacher but I would still not take him again with his strict af grading.

In terms of the course difficulty itself, I'd say it's definitely a step up from 32A but still easier than 33A.

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A-
Nov. 17, 2020

Dr. Spaas is literally the best professor you can take for 32B (and A).
His lectures were usually to the point, but sometimes he would do long proofs that you might not need. Other than that they had a lot of examples and were super relevant to the homework. Definitely get the CORRECT VERSION of the textbook because it has great examples and the homework is literally from there so you need it anyway.
GO TO OFFICE HOURS. He is literally such a nice guy and he explains questions from exams and homework if you have them ready. He never made fun of me for asking (what I thought) were stupid questions.
He also had pretty reasonable exams and homework loads. The final was super hard but I'll cut him some slack because it was the week we all went home from COVID so there weren't clear guidelines for professors yet.

Helpful?

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
June 12, 2020

I had Professor Spaas for MATH 32A for the fall 2019 quarter and thus decided to take his MATH 32B class the following winter quarter. Building off of his style of teaching established the quarter before, Professor Spaas not only explained the concepts of 32B, but also highlighted the reasons why such concepts worked. He would do so both geometrically as well as algebraically, provided multiple explanations in the hope that one would make sense to us. This is why I enjoyed him as a professor; he made the class interesting and more than just simple regurgitation of formulas and calculations.

With respect to the tests, I believe they were fair for the most part. Each midterm did have an element of time pressure--there were only 50 minutes to complete each--but the questions asked on those midterms were appropriate and definitely solvable. With respect to the final, our situation was a bit different due to the emergence of COVID-19, so we were given a 24-hour period within which we could take and upload our final. Although the final was indeed difficult, it was not much more difficult than I would have expected it to be in person (based on my experience with his 32A final); I was able to complete it in just under 3 hours.

TL; DR: Similar to his MATH 32A class, Professor Spaas explained the reason behind the mathematical concepts, not just how to perform the calculations. The midterms were rather time-sensitive, and the final was difficult but manageable.

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: B+
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
April 25, 2020

I took this class with Professor Spaas after taking 32A with him. First midterm was a little hard; the average was in the 70s and I got just above the average. Maybe seeing how bad people did he made the second midterm easier so I got a 100. However the covid19 pandemic made the final take home and open 24 hours. Because of that he made it extremely difficult and took me 6 hours to finish. I ended up getting a 73 which brought me down to a B+... I remember in his 32A class that his final was HARD. He is a great teacher and I definitely recommend taking his class, but the final exam will hit you like a truck so be careful ....

Helpful?

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
April 8, 2020

Now that I'm in my first math class that is NOT taught by Spaas, I can say that I took him for granted. His lectures are always super clear and neatly formatted. I was always able to follow along what he was doing and refer to the textbook easily as he always taught directly from it. Even though the concepts were hard, he always tried his best to break it down for us and explain it to us. I was never lost because of his teaching style, I was only lost because I was trying to understand the dense material. We had homework due every Friday which was always manageable. I found his discussions particularly useless because he would have us do worksheets which there was no answer key for. The midterms were fair (averages were around a high C/lowB) but be careful of small mistakes because I got marked down a lot for that. The final was insanely hard though. Even though we had 24 hours to do it because of the transition to online school, I spent almost an entire day solving the problems and checking over my work. If it was given in a 3 hour time frame as it was written for, I would have definitely not have had enough time to finish it. The grading scheme is 20% midterm 1, 20% midterm 2, 10% homework, and 50% final. But you can also do 10% homework, 30% of your best midterm score, and 60% final (which I ended up doing both quarters).

Helpful?

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
April 1, 2020

Spaas is a pretty good teacher for 32B. The class is pretty hard but it's mostly just the content not his fault. I did feel like there was a little bit too much homework assigned every week and that the grading was a little too picky, but nothing major. Homework is worth around 10% of your grade, and then there's two midterms (there's a grading option to count only one midterm if one of your midterm scores is drastically lower than the other) and a final. All in all, it's a pretty hard course, but Spaas is a great professor to take it with.

Helpful?

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Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 30, 2020

I would definitely recommend taking 32B with Spaas. This class is gonna be pretty rough no matter who you take it with, but Spaas' lectures are extremely clear and helpful. His office hours are not as helpful because they are overcrowded and he doen't get a bigger room, but I would recommend going to TA office hours. The midterms are on a big time crunch, study A LOT. Do old tests, even if they are from other professors, as well as his practice tests. His exams are difficult, but fair. Make sure you understand the homework and the worksheets from discussion to do well on them. He doesn't try to trick you, but you really need to have a good understanding to do well, and make sure to show all your work very clearly and in a very organized fashion, because it can either really help you to get lots of partial credit or totally screw you if it's hard to follow. I believe the averages on the midterms were a 78% and an 84%, or something like that. The final was super super hard. We had 24 hours and boy did I need it. Overall, I do really recommend this class, but make sure you go to ALL lectures and do the homework ahead of time, because you will most likely need help on it and want to check your answers with other people.

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-
Jan. 20, 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?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
April 4, 2020

I took Math 32A with Professor Spaas Fall 2019 and had a good enough experience to take Math 32B with him Winter 2020, despite the fact that the class was an 8 AM. Overall, Spaas is a good teacher who gives engaging lectures, assigns straightforward homework assignments, and writes what I considered to be very manageable midterms (the class average for midterm 1 was 77.48% with a 78.75% median, while the class average for midterm 2 was 84.5%). The worst thing about this class, however, is the final exam. We were given 24 hours to complete the final open book and open note due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I can safely say I would have failed if I had been forced to take it under normal circumstances. For reference, I had a very comfortable A going into the final and studied a significant amount, but the test still took me 6 hours to complete and 2 hours to check--and I got an 87.5%. Although I would still recommend Spaas, definitely beware of an EXTREMELY difficult final exam.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 27, 2020

This is my second quarter having Spaas after having him for Math 32A. Overall, I would say the same that I had said about him last quarter. Most of the time he is clear on most material, sometimes he doesn't explain it clearly but we cannot blame him due to the difficulty of the material. He always stays on track of the syllabus which is pretty nice. I feel like both of his midterms were pretty reasonable, however, his final was a completely different story. We had a take home exam, given a 24 hour period to complete it, open book, open notes. He said that the final would’ve been the same as one where we “complete it in person within a three hour period.” Oh yeah? Well that thing took me over 6 hours, and I ain’t joking. I think he purposely raised the difficulty of the final, knowing that there is a possibility that many of us will cheat using technology. However, I think it is totally unfair to the people who did not cheat at all. There should not be any reason to make it harder when many of us are already stressed because of COVID-19. As I can see now the pattern for his classes is that you will be fine until the final completely screws you over. After all, I would still recommend Spaas since the class was pretty doable and not too stressful, but be prepared for the final.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 6, 2020

You can till this professor actually cares about student learning and his lectures are definitely pretty clear. The exams weren't especially easy/hard but the grading for both midterms and homework is incredibly picky. I usually get a perfect homework score in my math classes but I've gotten points deducted left and right in this class. For any other class you'd chalk that up to a strict undergraduate grader, but the midterms were graded similarly. The rubrics are incredibly skewed, punishing you for tiny arithmetic mistakes and slight errors. Overall he's a good teacher but I would still not take him again with his strict af grading.

In terms of the course difficulty itself, I'd say it's definitely a step up from 32A but still easier than 33A.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A-
Nov. 17, 2020

Dr. Spaas is literally the best professor you can take for 32B (and A).
His lectures were usually to the point, but sometimes he would do long proofs that you might not need. Other than that they had a lot of examples and were super relevant to the homework. Definitely get the CORRECT VERSION of the textbook because it has great examples and the homework is literally from there so you need it anyway.
GO TO OFFICE HOURS. He is literally such a nice guy and he explains questions from exams and homework if you have them ready. He never made fun of me for asking (what I thought) were stupid questions.
He also had pretty reasonable exams and homework loads. The final was super hard but I'll cut him some slack because it was the week we all went home from COVID so there weren't clear guidelines for professors yet.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
June 12, 2020

I had Professor Spaas for MATH 32A for the fall 2019 quarter and thus decided to take his MATH 32B class the following winter quarter. Building off of his style of teaching established the quarter before, Professor Spaas not only explained the concepts of 32B, but also highlighted the reasons why such concepts worked. He would do so both geometrically as well as algebraically, provided multiple explanations in the hope that one would make sense to us. This is why I enjoyed him as a professor; he made the class interesting and more than just simple regurgitation of formulas and calculations.

With respect to the tests, I believe they were fair for the most part. Each midterm did have an element of time pressure--there were only 50 minutes to complete each--but the questions asked on those midterms were appropriate and definitely solvable. With respect to the final, our situation was a bit different due to the emergence of COVID-19, so we were given a 24-hour period within which we could take and upload our final. Although the final was indeed difficult, it was not much more difficult than I would have expected it to be in person (based on my experience with his 32A final); I was able to complete it in just under 3 hours.

TL; DR: Similar to his MATH 32A class, Professor Spaas explained the reason behind the mathematical concepts, not just how to perform the calculations. The midterms were rather time-sensitive, and the final was difficult but manageable.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: B+
April 25, 2020

I took this class with Professor Spaas after taking 32A with him. First midterm was a little hard; the average was in the 70s and I got just above the average. Maybe seeing how bad people did he made the second midterm easier so I got a 100. However the covid19 pandemic made the final take home and open 24 hours. Because of that he made it extremely difficult and took me 6 hours to finish. I ended up getting a 73 which brought me down to a B+... I remember in his 32A class that his final was HARD. He is a great teacher and I definitely recommend taking his class, but the final exam will hit you like a truck so be careful ....

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
April 8, 2020

Now that I'm in my first math class that is NOT taught by Spaas, I can say that I took him for granted. His lectures are always super clear and neatly formatted. I was always able to follow along what he was doing and refer to the textbook easily as he always taught directly from it. Even though the concepts were hard, he always tried his best to break it down for us and explain it to us. I was never lost because of his teaching style, I was only lost because I was trying to understand the dense material. We had homework due every Friday which was always manageable. I found his discussions particularly useless because he would have us do worksheets which there was no answer key for. The midterms were fair (averages were around a high C/lowB) but be careful of small mistakes because I got marked down a lot for that. The final was insanely hard though. Even though we had 24 hours to do it because of the transition to online school, I spent almost an entire day solving the problems and checking over my work. If it was given in a 3 hour time frame as it was written for, I would have definitely not have had enough time to finish it. The grading scheme is 20% midterm 1, 20% midterm 2, 10% homework, and 50% final. But you can also do 10% homework, 30% of your best midterm score, and 60% final (which I ended up doing both quarters).

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
April 1, 2020

Spaas is a pretty good teacher for 32B. The class is pretty hard but it's mostly just the content not his fault. I did feel like there was a little bit too much homework assigned every week and that the grading was a little too picky, but nothing major. Homework is worth around 10% of your grade, and then there's two midterms (there's a grading option to count only one midterm if one of your midterm scores is drastically lower than the other) and a final. All in all, it's a pretty hard course, but Spaas is a great professor to take it with.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 30, 2020

I would definitely recommend taking 32B with Spaas. This class is gonna be pretty rough no matter who you take it with, but Spaas' lectures are extremely clear and helpful. His office hours are not as helpful because they are overcrowded and he doen't get a bigger room, but I would recommend going to TA office hours. The midterms are on a big time crunch, study A LOT. Do old tests, even if they are from other professors, as well as his practice tests. His exams are difficult, but fair. Make sure you understand the homework and the worksheets from discussion to do well on them. He doesn't try to trick you, but you really need to have a good understanding to do well, and make sure to show all your work very clearly and in a very organized fashion, because it can either really help you to get lots of partial credit or totally screw you if it's hard to follow. I believe the averages on the midterms were a 78% and an 84%, or something like that. The final was super super hard. We had 24 hours and boy did I need it. Overall, I do really recommend this class, but make sure you go to ALL lectures and do the homework ahead of time, because you will most likely need help on it and want to check your answers with other people.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
1 of 2
4.3
Overall Rating
Based on 17 Users
Easiness 2.6 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 4.4 / 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 4.3 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Tolerates Tardiness
    (9)
  • Needs Textbook
    (12)
  • Useful Textbooks
    (13)
  • Would Take Again
    (11)
  • Engaging Lectures
    (9)
  • Often Funny
    (8)
  • Tough Tests
    (10)
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