I loved this professor. She was super nice and always helpful and willing to answer questions. For the most part the tests matched the homework/lecture content though she did throw 1 or 2 tough ones in there! Overall I thought the grading was very fair and I felt pretty confident about all the material by the end of the quarter.

Wow indescribably poor at giving lectures. Final exam was a disaser, she kept changing the numbers and parts of questions DURING THE EXAM. Did not stress what to study and during her reviews was often incorrect in her own answer choiced and methodology. Thank goodness the TAs could sympathize with us during the labs.

Dr V is really nice but her lectures are not. I've heard that she is really good in her other class. But I don't recommend taking her for LS 30A. Her explanations were not clear and tests were hard.

Professor V is a nice person in general. However, she cannot teach. Her slides are difficult to understand because her explanations are all over the place. She lectures directly from the textbook, word for word. Her midterm and final does not have extremely difficult material but due to the lack of knowledge/teaching in lectures, it appears extremely hard. Half the material on the final was not covered in review sessions. She made review sessions during class times (ex: 10 am and only went over one problem out of 10) Overall, I feel as if the class is very simple itself however she does not do a good job at explaining the concepts and all the tests are conceptual. Labs are pretty difficult after the first couple but TAs/UAs are willing to help at office hours. Did not enjoy this class at all.

Dr.Venogupal is an absolute disaster. She cannot teach for her life. She is not organized and her office hours are note helpful at all. The TAs did save my butt in this class with the lab though. The class and the topics are pretty straight forward (once you read the textbook). Do not take this class.

take LS30 series but never take Venugopal, trust me.

She is a very nice person, but does not know how to teach. The lectures get cut off everytime because we run out of class time and she says she will review it next class and never does . You can go to her office hours but it does not really help.The course should not be diffucult, but she makes it so .

Dr. Sharmila is an extremely nice professor, but this past quarter was a challenge. She's always positive and high spirited (which was nice for an 8AM), but the problem was that this was her first quarter teaching this course. She often over-explained concepts that were very simple to grasp (for example, calculus derivatives), and it just confuses the class. She loves to use the iClicker for participation, and if you ask a really good question, it will be used as a class discussion.

The class concepts are not what you should be worried about because honestly, you should be good with a basic understanding of calculus. Beware of the labs for this course. The labs consist of computer coding that grows increasingly difficult as time goes on. Go to TA office hours as frequently as possible to get the best grade you can. Luckily, everything was equally weighted (20% for hw/midterm/lab, 30% for final, 10% for participation) so overall, it gave you good wiggle room. I got a C on the midterm, a D+ on the final, and still managed to get a B in the class because of my labs and homework.

Dr. Venugopal is very kind and really cares about her students' learning, but the course is not interesting or very thought-provoking. We watched one video that was engaging and fun, but that was about the most fun I had; it was extremely difficult not falling asleep (don't sit in the front of a 40 person class). The homework is easy and short and counts for a small percentage of your grade. She gave us midterm and final study guides that were very helpful for them.

Take the LS30 series by all means, but TAKE THE CLASS WITH A DIFFERENT PROFESSOR. Conley is amazing, Garfinkel is amazing, and Jane (if she ever teaches LS30A) I'm sure would be fine for LS30A too since I heard great things about her LS30B class. Venugopal is horrible. I did not enjoy her class at all and regretted having to wake up for her 8am just to complete the clicker questions. I learned all the material by reading the book while taking detailed notes and watching a few of Conley's Bruincasts when he reviewed LS30A in the beginning of his LS30B class. I learned more about LS30A by watching 30 minutes of Conley's Bruincast than I had in weeks of attending Venugopal's lectures. Venugopal does not lecture the material well at all and she will not lecture a good portion of concepts central to the course. For some reason her LS30A classes are always at 8am and she will spend half of the lecture trying to review/reteach what she tried to lecture on the previous class meeting. She will not cover all of the material that you are expected to know for exams (she will put things you never discussed on exams, trust me) and will make basic concepts much much much more difficult than they need to be. This math series should not be all too complex as a whole....Venugopal somehow makes it so much harder than it needs to be. Homework is graded for correctness and it is graded pretty harshly in my personal opinion, Should you get lucky, she won't assign a final project at the end of the quarter, but with my luck she assigned it and it ended up being extra work that I had to stress about during finals week. She tends to change her grading scale. When I had her she did midterm 30%, final 30%, homework 15%, labs 15%, project 5%, class attendance 5%. The class really sucks but if you're willing to put in extra work on your own time to learn all of the material by READING THE TEXTBOOK without cramming the day before an exam (I also learned so much by studying tons of old midterms and finals), making sure that your homework is perfect or near perfect upon submission, and making sure that your labs are perfect or near perfect upon submission then getting an A shouldn't be all too bad. (She might give extra credit you never know with that one...some quarters she did and some quarters she didn't).