MATH 1310

I believe that most of the professors for MATH 1310 are grad students, so keep in mind that my review is only specific to Don Phillips' class. He was a super nice and understanding instructor, and clearly enjoyed teaching. If he felt like he didn't do a good job in class or had an "off" day, he would type up an extra set of more thorough notes or re-explain during the next class just to make sure we didn't suffer from his self-perceived shortcomings. I swapped into his class from another, but even the other instructor had been super nice and entertaining. My friends who took MATH 1310 with other instructors also had great things to say about theirs, so I wouldn't worry too much about which instructor you choose, as most of the issues I describe seem to be a common trend among the majority of the school's Calculus instructors (even for the APMA calc courses).

The only classwork we had were questions in the notes (only collected for grading on occasion) and on WebAssign (some weeks had more assigned WebAssigns than others, but you can work ahead so it's not so unbearable. You can also request multiple automatic 24hr extensions on the site for every assignment that isn't class-prep for Don's class). You get a grade for taking notes on the class-prep assignments on WebAssign, and we had 3 quizzes during our worksop over the semester. We had 2 midterms and an exam. Most people I knew did pretty poorly on the first exam (65% or less with the curve), but they curved the grades on both. I hadn't studied on the first and got a 57% post-curve, and actually studied for the second to get an 81% post-curve (again, most people felt like they did pretty bad after this, but I did not compare grades with anyone on this exam so maybe they did better than expected). I took a year-round AP Calculus AB course in 11th grade, and this class was still pretty challenging since I'd forgotten how to work through most of the material. If you have no experience in Calculus, brace yourself.

As previously mentioned, so many people had a lot of difficulty with the exams which my peers and I chalked up to the structure of the classes. The whole MATH 1310 shares class notes (called "class activities") which is why this is a problem for a majority of classes regardless of which grad student you choose for an instructor. The class notes questions are usually very simple, and only the group questions (meant to be completed with your table) are thought-provoking. Don Phillips did a pretty nice job at explaining how to solve problems, but I felt like he lacked the "why" in solving problems. Because practice questions were so easy and the concepts weren't always discussed in-depth, the test questions would catch people completely off-guard. They required more conceptualization and a deeper understanding of the topics, which we did not get from notes and certainly did not get from the WebAssigns. However, the MATH 1310 department also publishes a ton of practice exams with keys on Collab, which is why I got an 81% on the second midterm. Walking out, everyone was complaining of the difficulty, but I had felt pretty confident (even though I did spend hours working through all of the published midterm 2 exams from previous years).

Overall, this class may be hard to succeed in since midterms and the final exam make up a combined 65% of your final grade, especially without previous experience in Calculus. If you need help, most of the instructors I met seemed extremely approachable and capable of offering help during office hours.