Venugopal is a nice woman, but not a good professor. Her class is not engaging and she explains things very poorly. In addition, she scheduled her one-hour review session during a lab, so no one in that lab could attend. Even if they had attended, it took her the entire hour to complete just one practice problem (incorrectly). The class is interesting, but if possible, don't take it with Venugopal/go to Conley's review sessions.

Everyone on BruinWalk complains about Sharmila as a horrible professor, but in reality, she is not bad at all. She is always in a good mood during lecture and is easily accessible. She provides a study guide and several practice exams for both the midterm and finals. The coding is difficult, but doable. She has an engineer's brain so sometimes the lecture is confusing, but if you read the textbook sections prior, it will be easy. She assigns the least amount of homework and really cares about her students. Overall, the class material is not that difficult if you study the book and ask questions. I am glad I took this course with Venugopal and signed up with her for next quarter as well.

Venugopal is not nearly as bad as people would like to mention on bruin walk. Her class is easy and straightforward, and sometimes she does start to over complicate simple topics, but that in no way makes her a bad professor. She genuinely cares for her students and is a nice person.
Tips for doing well: Work in groups for the labs, as they are probably harder than the actual course material (but not actually that hard, TA's and LA's help, so it is more than manageable). Homework is graded for correctness, so make sure you actually go through it and think while you do the questions. I found that reading the textbook was actually pretty helpful as it is simple to understand. Her lectures are pretty much out of the book, so showing up to class and reading the book will make it quite hard to do poorly in the class.

Professor Venugopal cannot explain concepts to save her life. You would almost be better off not going to class because all of her lectures are so convoluted and will often leave you confused over the simplest concepts. This class ruined my passion for science because of how painful the lectures were. I also ended up with a terrible TA, if you get Ning Wang as your TA, you can count on never knowing what is going on in lab. She is by far the worst TA I have ever had. Overall, this class was horrible and I don't understand how UCLA lets this professor keep teaching here.

People always say bad things about Venugopal but she is honestly a pretty cool professor. I will admit she can be a bit confusing at times but if you follow along and pay attention then her lectures make sense. Also, if you took AP Calc AB (like I did) then you should have a pretty easy time in this class because a lot of material covered in AB is in this class in my opinion. Overall, for 30A i would say if you have to take her then it will definitely not be as bad as all the reviews say she is.

overall yes, but the class could have been set up differently to better prepare you for ls30a. highly recommend to take instead of math3a

This class was pretty good I feel like I learned an adequate amount. The professor itself is very sweet and tries her best to get her point across to all her student whether through her TA's or in her office hours. If you have previous calculus experience then this class should not be too difficult for you.