Sherry is a really good professor. She is very approachable and I genuinely like her class a lot.
The class has a usual 10% HW, 25% midterms and 40% final distribution.
Her tests are quite simple and she has a few extra credit questions too.
Lectures are pretty nice I would say, but the difficulty of the lectures increased around week 7.
Definitely would recommend taking Sherry if you have the choice!

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I would die for Sherry Gong. She is an amazing lecturer and gives you lots of worked examples in lectures. Her exams are the same difficulty as the homework and are worded similarly. Sometimes she loses students during lecture or goes off a tangent about proofs, but she does a mini recap in the next lecture which is super helpful.

I took AP Calculus in high school and got an A+ but I found myself struggling in her class. It was her first time ever teaching so I tried my best to forgive her less-than-average lectures but I just could not understand her teaching. I really don't think teaching is her calling. She went through everything super fast and it seemed like she didn't care if we were confused. Exams were extremely tough. I recommend taking calculus with Conley. I got an A+ in his class.

Lectures: I had 8 AM lectures so half of the class was still waking up but she really tried her best to make the lecture interesting.

Homework: extremely light workload, like 10-15 problems per week. She didn't even collect them. You just had to come to the discussion to take weekly quizzes that are exactly the same homework problems.

Tests: Professor Gong is new but her tests are fair and straightforward. On our midterms and finals, there were 50 points available but she only graded them out of 40 points, which honestly saves my grades so many times.

TA: Matthew Stone is a godsend, you're probably fine without going to lecture. Just reading the textbook and attending the discussion most likely suffice.

Warning: I came into 31A thinking it was just Calc AB and I barely passed the first midterm. Don't underestimate the course, take your homework seriously, read the lessons before and after class, make sure your algebra is solid and you would probably ace it!

I really enjoyed taking 32A with professor Gong - not only did she do a good job of generally explaining the course material, but she really put in the extra effort to make sure the class ran well, and to make sure that we understood the material! She held extra office hours, responded to emails, and in-class would often re-explain previous concepts if the class seemed unclear on them - a really good skill! In my one-on-one interactions with her, she's been very helpful, even answering general questions I had about math; and my other friends in the class have found her office hours really helpful. In addition, the homework she gave was very pointed and relevant - if you did the homework every week, the midterms would be simple to do - no curveballs there! I will say, I did find the final to be quite challenging, and barely ended up getting an A overall - my only criticism of this class was that we didn't get a practice final, which made some of the questions a bit surprising. Overall though, Sherry is a great professor - she really puts in the extra mile to make sure her students understand her material, and I'd love to have her again!

I am really glad I got the chance to take Math 31A with Professor Gong. She's an extremely smart woman and her knowledge is vast. Since Fall 2018 (which is when I took it with her) was her first time teaching any class, many students felt that she didn't explain stuff clearly or that she wasn't good enough. But you gotta go easy on her, after all, it was her first time and lecturing 120 kids for the first time is a pretty intimidating experience.

Grade Distribution
Her grade distribution was very fair, in my opinion. She assigned weekly homeworks (which weren't graded), and had weekly quizzes in discussions (which usually had questions from the homework). These quizzes were worth 10%. There were two midterms and a final for the class. She gave the option of dropping the lowest quiz score and you could either drop your midterm with the lower score with a higher weightage of the final or have both your midterms counted towards the final grade, with a lower weightage of the final. I don't quite remember the exact numbers of how much each exam was weighted, but she took the grading scheme which yielded a better score for each student out of the two.

Midterms and Finals
Professor Gong's midterms and finals were very well prepared, because it contained a well balance of easy, moderately hard, and difficult questions. For the major part, I found her exams to be on the easier side, but she didn't fail to surprise because sometimes she would throw in a hard question which would really give everyone a hard time. Her midterms were of 40 points and final 100 points, and in addition to that, she also gave an additional question worth 10 points on all the three exams as a chance for those who'd like to attempt a harder question to do so. But a score of 40 and 100, for midterms and finals respectively, was considered 100%, i.e. a perfect score. With that, it was quite possible to score >100% on her exams, which was really helpful because it could help cover up any errors made elsewhere.

Curve
She didn't curve the class, and was in fact quite lenient in her grading. Although she gave A+ to just one or two kids in the entire class, everyone with a 92% and above got an A. The maximum possible overall score you could get in her class was somewhere around a 125%, I think.

Homeworks and Quizzes
The homeworks she assigned was from the textbook exercises, and was usually on the easier side. I would say that just doing her homework wouldn't suffice to do well in this class, and additional practice of all the questions from the exercises, including the examples is important. The weekly quizzes sometimes contained questions harder than those on the homework.

Professor Gong also gave two points of extra credit on completing the instructor survey towards the end of the quarter. In all, she was a great instructor, and was also really helpful during office hours. She didn't mind going over a concept or a question multiple times in order for the student to understand it better, which is quite commendable of her. I would definitely recommend taking her class.

I honestly feel that Sherry's dedication to this class is very underrated. Although she's not required to, she holds office hours 3 hours per week, and whenever she thinks we haven't fully understood a concept, she would explain it more in-depth during the next lecture. She constantly tries to make sure we're following her train of logic, answers all of our questions, and gives multiple interpretations of concepts/figures to help us visualize. In class and in her e-mails, she tells us very clearly what we have/don't have to know for an exam, and does her best to be fair on tests. On the second midterm, she allowed us to submit corrections for 2 questions for a regrade just because she thought that they were worth more points than necessary compared to other questions. Sherry clearly cares about her students and thinks it matters that they're learning. Maybe she tries hard to do the right thing because she's new, but I think she's a genuinely nice person at heart.

However, I agree with the other reviewers that the final was significantly harder than the (very easy) midterms and that she might not have given us enough "warnings" to help us prepare for it. But I have taken other classes in the 30 series and it was definitely not unreasonable compared to other math finals.

1. [Difficulty]: ★★★☆(FAIRLY EASY. Just as most reviews say, the two midterms are easy with an average score above 90 percent. The final is, indeed, much harder than the midterms but still reasonable. If you study hard enough and do enough practice problems, the final should be moderate. In conclusion, even if you do not perform well in the final, you can still get an ideal score with the easy midterms and some extra credits Dr.Gong provides. PS: she allows cheatsheets.)

2.[Workload]:★★★★(The workload is LIGHT, homework is little with no more than ten questions, all of which come from the textbook, so you can easily find answers to them from the internet. Also, the homework will not be collected, but similar problems may appear on weekly quizzes, so do them for practice.)

3.[Lecture]:★★★☆(The lecture is OK. Be sure to go to the lectures and review with the textbook at the same time.)

4.[Conclusion]: Do take her classes, if you attend lectures, do the homework and practice problems on the textbook, getting an A should be fairly easy. Definitely, recommend taking her for any lower-division math classes.

This class...was very interesting. I took it Winter Quarter and for the most part it was okay until the final. Homework isn't due every week, but there are weekly quizzes in discussion, so no skipping discussion and no going to other discussion sections. For the most part, if you did homework problems, you would do well on the quizzes since the the quiz consisted of two questions and they were very much like the homework. As for Sherry, she is a great professor. Her lectures are concise and she does not focus too much on the proofs. This was good at first, because her midterms were just computation. I ended up getting 100 on the first and a high A on the second one. Not to mention that you also got a full sheet of paper for a cheat sheet. Depending on how much work you want to put into the class, you will be fine when it comes to the midterms. The final, however, that is another story. It's level of difficult was like two times that of the midterms. You could survive both midterms just knowing when to use what formula, but for the final you actually had to understand what was going on in order to apply it to some of the questions. I ended up getting a C on it. So study harder than just memorizing formulas and being a human calculator and you should be good. Hopefully. But overall as a professor, Sherry was very nice. She was easy to approach after class and during office hours, usually hosting extra office hours before an exam. I have also been told that she sometimes had brownies at her office hours.