This class is pretty easy if you do the bare minimum and put the work in, professor is very accommodating and gives a lot of extra points.

Overall, this class was alright. If you've never taken calculus before, like me, then this class may be challenging for you. Dr. Bennoun is a very fair professor and definitely cares about his students opinions and takes their feedback to better the class. Despite all this, this class caused me to switch my major due to it's extremely annoying coding lab and confusing content. LS30A is definitely a unique form of calculus, and you'll either love it or hate it.

Bennoun was an amazing prof to have for my first quarter at UCLA. He's very approachable, helpful, and genuinely seems like a nice person. The class itself was pretty easy at first but got harder at the end since concepts became more conceptual and less "mathy." I say this as someone who scored pretty well in AP Calc BC and was expecting to take Calc 3 before being told the ls math series was the primary pathway for premeds and not the math 31 series. Classes with Bennoun are a bit different from the typical lecture. He teaches with slides which he annotates on his ipad like a whiteboard but there are a ton of iClicker questions to keep people focused, and whenever the majority of the class doesn't give the right answer, he gives about 5 minutes for people to discuss their answers with the people they're sitting next to so that more people reach a consensus on the right answer. I met a bunch of people from having to discuss iClicker questions with them and I felt like I was wayy more likely to make friends/acquaintances in this class than any other. The canvas homepage is organized super well and you can find every bit of material in the course from the very beginning. The textbook is FREE (Bennoun sends a link to download the pdf right at the beginning of the quarter). There are two assignments that need to be done once a week for the class: homework and labs. Homework is due every week on Wednesday at 10 pm and from my experience usually takes 1-3 hours to complete. Labs are meant to be started in the 2 hour lab section you have every week, with the previous week's lab being due at the start of the current week's lab section. The labs actually involve coding with what I've heard is a simplified version of Python. You start off basic with naming and initializing variables but it gets much harder as the weeks go on. If you have experience with coding you'll be fine, but I really felt bad for the people who didn't. I had taken AP Computer Science A in high school and would always finish the labs during the two-hour lab section (sometimes I'd even finish early and get to leave up to an hour before the end of the section), but from what I heard most people would have to finish the lab on their own time and struggled without help from the TA when they were on their own. And then there was the TA strike. I cannot stress enough how overly generous Bennoun was with grading and class resources because of the strike. Our grade thresholds were lowered by 3% so an 87 still counted as an A-, the final ended up being wayy easier than the midterm (I finished in 1 hour and the final was supposed to be 3 hours), the lab practical was cancelled, and everyone got full credit on a bunch of their labs at the end of the quarter for some reason. He made it almost too easy. Bottom line: Bennoun is a great prof and he makes sure that everyone has everyone has what they need to succeed (plus a bit more).

I didn’t always find the content super easy, as I had trouble paying attention in class. The labs and homework could be challenging for me. However, Professor Bennoun is the most accommodating professor in the world. Due to the TA strike, he shifted grade thresholds down by 3%, allowed a double sided note sheet for the final, and removed the lab practical, instead making our lab grades take the place of our lab practical grade. In addition, he gave 3 extra credit points total for filling out surveys regarding the class. Lastly, he gave us full points for over half of our labs in order to make up for inconsistencies in grading. I got a low B on the midterm and a B+ on the final, but ended with an A+. The professor has 3 different schemes of grading for the class and whichever is the highest is ur final grade. Though I did not do too well on the midterm or final, completing the homework and labs, along with all of the accommodations the professor made, allowed me to end with an A+. I will be taking this professor next quarter!

Dr Bennoun is so incredibly nice and I would take a class with him again but you are not going to enjoy this class if you don't like math, especially calculus. It's the worst thing ever and if you already have trouble understanding mathematic concepts, you're gonna have an even harder time applying it in this class. On top of that the coding is absolutely awful. It starts out easy and you think you can do it, but then all of a sudden it's impossible. At least it was for me. I would say that if this class is not required for your major, don't take it unless you're prepared to be challenged in these areas or if you like subjects like math/coding.

BEST PROF EVER
Professor Bennoun was so incredibly helpful and accommodating. He gave us every single resource we needed to do well in the course, and the workload was completely manageable. He's also super funny and keeps the lectures engaging. He's a great lecturer and you can tell he wants all his students to succeed. The only thing I didn't like about this course were the labs but that's just because I suck at coding. Even then, the coding was beginner level and very doable with the help of the TAs. I'm taking 30b with Bennoun again next quarter because of how great he was. I definitely recommend!

HE'S THE BEST

He genuinely cares about student learning, and he made adjustments to the class structure and even canceled our tough final coding part as a result of the strike.

The TA/LA is also amazing, they all help us as best as they can and there's plenty of office hour opportunities to ask questions.

Midterm / Final was straight forward. I got a 100 on my midterm but I'm still awaiting my final grades. Very fair in terms of content asked as the review sessions were literally what our test was.

The only tough part for me was coding, but that's because I don't have coding experience. It's still doable as they teach you how to do it, but it takes a while if you don't know what you're doing.

Prof. Bennoun is by far the greatest instructor I've ever had in my life. If LS30A is offered with him as the professor, TAKE IT. He is extremely knowledgeable on the LS30 content. His slides are easy to understand and the iClicker questions are really helpful to check for understanding and do practice problems as a class. Lab sections aren't bad, though some of the labs are pretty frustrating (especially as someone who has never done code before). Please take advantage of Prof. Bennoun's office hours; they are so helpful (especially when going over homework questions).

I took this class thinking it would be easy because I took AP Calculus and thought it was manageable. I was also told this class would be an easier version of calculus due to lenient professors and it being geared toward life science students. This turned out to be false. The topics are EXTREMELY abstract and for me, as someone who prefers pure math, it was very difficult to understand. Combined with a total lack of online resources about the topics it was really hard for me to do well on homework and tests. His study guide was significantly easier than the midterm and final so it made it hard to know what to expect. Bennoun is a super nice guy but I despise his class. The coding labs are very difficult if you have never coded before and the homework is not at all similar to lecture topics. Overall, only take this series if you know you will enjoy basically entirely conceptual math (the only math we did was a one day lecture on integrals and even then they were extremely basic and short lived).

Bennoun is a great professor! Don't get me wrong. However, DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE. TAKE ANOTHER MATH COURSE. DON'T DO IT. Personally I have a bone to pick with my NSA for telling me I needed to take this course and this course only, when there were other math courses I could have taken. Just to reiterate, Bennoun is a great professor, but this review is for the course overall (across all professors, since the material is the same regardless of who is teaching it). For context: I'm an MCDB major, and in high school I excelled in math. I got a 4 on AP Calc AB (during COVID, but the second year, when the tests were in person again) and had a AP Calc teacher that was really strict and nationally rated/awarded for teaching. That being said, when I went to college, I expected math that introduced new concepts but wasn't necessarily more difficult....This course made me feel like I was losing brain cells. We hardly do any actual math (which, if you don't like math, then...cool, I guess!), but instead the math is all a bit...theoretical? Like, "what would happen if we changed this variable?" or "why does the human body do this? (????????)" instead of like, "solve this equation" or "derive this solution" or something similar and more straightforward. Admittedly, the class is easy, so if what I said seems good for you, then cool, take the class. However, the worst thing in this class was not the class itself but the labs. I knew the labs involved coding but not to this extent. The first two or three labs were relatively easy even if you weren't paying attention, but then all of a sudden you're running out of time on the labs because you spent 45 minutes trying to figure out why you're getting a syntax error in a code you've typed millions of times before, and then it turns out that you have an extra space somewhere, or a semi-colon instead of a colon, or a myriad of dumb little mistakes. Sometimes labs would take me days to figure out because I would get frustrated, and wouldn't want to go back and finish them. However, I got through the labs! Now I'm in LS 30B, and guess what? I hate it. The labs are exponentially more difficult. The jump from 30A to 30B is less like a jump and more like a 100m sprint. I really, really, really, REALLY wish I had taken another math course, but at this point it's more cost-effective to just finish the class and suffer until March.
Don't take the class if you don't have to. Seriously.