Sylvester is really nice! Lectures can be confusing and messy sometimes but learning from the book is very manageable. His midterms I'd say were fair; he has T/F sections so you can't brush off conceptually understanding what everything is. The final was insanely hard but he understood it was hard so he graded it very leniently so that was nice of him... and he offered extra credit!! I liked this class!

For being a newer professor, Sylvester is a great one and really knows his stuff. However, this class became very difficult very fast. Learning multivariable calculus can be a novel experience for most, but Sylvester does his best to make it as palatable and straightforward as possible. In lecture, his steps and processes are very linear and easy to comprehend, but his homework was HARD. The homework requires that you take what you learned in lecture and apply it, but I was in office hours almost every week trying to make sense of what we were expected to find in the problems; there was one question (I think it was from week 9) that I had two engineering tutors try to help me with, and neither of them could figure it out! Also, his online "quizzes" are really more like online tests because they were too long for me to complete in a reasonable amount of time.

The midterms were interesting; the first one was pretty easy (I got an 84% and the average was about 90%), and I guess Sylvester assumed that we weren't being challenged enough, so he made the next midterm harder. Lo and behold I got a whopping 40%, whereas the average was still somewhere about 80%, so imagine my reaction when he decided to make the final harder still. The final went decently enough for me to do okay in the class, but some questions were still pretty difficult, and I scored below the average yet again. My saving grace from all this was Piazza, an online service we used to share practice and challenge questions. He gives up to 3% extra credit for participation on Piazza, so I took advantage of that like there was no tomorrow. He also gives 1% extra credit for being able to describe a map and several of its features (maxima, minima, saddle points etc.).

His grading scale allows one of the midterms to be dropped, which ended up keeping me in the B range. Overall, I learned a lot from this class, but I felt the difficulty was way more intense than it needed to be.

Sylvester is a new professor and an awesome one at that. He can make a few algebraic mistakes but overall he communicates concepts really well (great English, which can't be said for much of the math department) and works through the material quickly and efficiently. He offered a whopping 4% potential extra credit, so the class average probably ended up being around a B+. Sylvester is just a really nice dude in general, and he hosts plenty of office hours too to discuss homework or ask questions.