MATH 1320

Dimou was a pretty good professor. He would sometimes get frustrated with the class if no one answered a question and one on one he could be a little intimidating and also get frustrated if it seemed like you were asking a dumb question. However, he was very available in office hours (would definitely recommend going) and by email, and seemed to generally care about his students. A lot of his class was tied to the same standards as the rest of the 1320 classes and I'm not quite sure what was unique to him and what every class had to do. Before every class we had to watch a prep video and complete a prep "quiz" on webassign (these were pretty much the same format as the homeworks on webassign but shorter). We also typically had two homeworks on webassign a week. Webassign allows multiple tries per problem and often gives videos of similar problems to solve or you can hit "practice another" to solve a similar problem and not waste your attempts on the real one. Usually you do not lose points per attempt except for a few homeworks in the middle of the semester that were mainly multiple choice so be on the lookout for that. Webassigns do take quite a bit of time to work through so plan for that. It can be very frustrating if you just don't know how to do something (and a lot of the problems are much more difficult than what is done in class). I highly recommend getting ahead on your webassigns so you can go to the MCLC to help with these. There were also a few written homeworks that were counted in the same category as quizzes so you definitely wanted to do well on these to boost that grade and going to MCLC was a great option for that (and even office hours if you can get it started early enough). In class, Dimou would pretty much just go through and annotate notes (that you can print out beforehand) and solve a few practice problems. He used learning catalytics to ask questions to the whole class (but these were only graded for participation). He also let us in breakout rooms for a bit at the end of class to begin our homework. During discussion there were usually quizzes every week with some exceptions. I felt like these got easier as the year progressed and were okay on time although harder than the class problems usually (except when he started giving us content from the day before on the quizzes and made it easy because of that). Finally, for tests, these were made by the coordinator of 1320 and Dimou and the other instructors did not know what was on them. They were pretty hard (a lot of problems that were more conceptual and could be solved quickly if you saw it right away but otherwise were a bit of a time crunch). There were 4 exams (the fourth was a non-cumulative final worth just as much as the other exams). Overall, if you have to take calc 2, survey is probably easier, but taking with Dimou is not a bad option.