MATH 1220

This course is considered to be a "weed out" course, but it isn't really all that bad if you attend class, pay attention, study, and go to office hours if you need help. I think a lot of it depends on your instructor, because they have graduate students teaching. Not every grad student is a great teacher, but I got lucky with mine so I had a positive experience. There is a considerable amount of homework, but it is comparable to that of MATH 1210. It's definitely not an easy class, but it's also not as bad as everyone says.

I took this course with Nicholas Collins. Overall, I didn't think this course was as hard as everyone said it was. I think who your GTA is made a huge difference. There aren't a lot of assignments each week except for webassigns which corresponded with the lectures. I took AP BC calc in high school and I thought the material in this class is pretty different. A bunch of topics is taught including integration, probability, partial derivatives, and series. If you are not a math-oriented person then I would say this class is challenging and take math 1190 instead if you have the choice. As a statistics major, I found this class to be engaging and challenging but nothing overly difficult. If you have the option, I recommend taking this class w Nick Collins. I thought he did a good job of explaining the material. However, he does make his quizzes a bit harder in order to better prepare you for the exams. This is a coordinated course so everyone takes the same exams and your GTA does not create them. It's a game of chance really. Sometimes the exams are hard but other times they are not OVERLY difficult. Definitely take the practice exams released before each of the exams, I found them to be very helpful. Also, GO TO OFFICE HOURS. I found office hours very helpful for clarifying confusing concepts.

This class is very challenging!! Not sure why the Spring 2019 reviews describe the class as relatively easy, coming from a Fall 2021 student it is absolutely not.

The format of the class a flipped classroom with the following dynamic:
-You have to teach yourself the material at home from the calc textbook and provided YouTube videos
-Complete some questions on the topic before coming into class
-Instruction in class (which is confusing and hard to follow)
-Homework assignment on the topic
-Quiz on Friday
-Written homeworks that are week-long every couple of weeks

This all leads up to VERY difficult material on the exams. It escalates quite a bit from the homework questions. I would say that if you have to take this course, as I did, try to take it as your only challenging class of the semester so you can really focus on it. It is a time commitment to really drill the concepts in. The average on the first exam was a 74 but the standard deviation was almost 20%. This tells me that the divide is huge - you're either acing or failing.