MATH 1320

I had Jiacheng Miao for my TA and he would often present the wrong information on the board to the point that students would often be the ones pointing out mistakes he was making. He made simple mistakes like thinking that -2 + 3 was -5 to getting entire concepts wrong. He showed a blatantly wrong procedure for partial fractions. He would give quizzes that hardly reflect what was even briefly talked about in lecture and he often refused to tell us what would be on the quiz until we got a few weeks into the semester. My main teacher even briefly mentioned how Jiacheng would send the quizzes for approval less than an hour before discussion and then would go ahead with it anyways regardless of if the teacher had points of contention with it. It got so bad that main teacher now shows up to our discussions to make sure that Jiacheng isn't telling us total BS. Also, you'll never know what Jiacheng is taking points off for because he never explains it. It's truly such a reassuring thought to know that he is part of the grading process for the exams and indiscriminately takes off points with zero consistency between people. He'll take off a point on one person's exam but not at all on anothers.

If he's your TA, hope you have a good professor to balance out. If they're both bad, please drop. If, in some twisted way of fate, he is your main lecturer, DROP THIS CLASS and run!

Bad. Horrible. Awful. This may rehash the review below at times, but here we go. Diego was incompetent; his quizzes were nothing short of unfair and ill-timed. We never had adequate time to do it. His grading was unbelievably arbitrary. I compared my midterm with a friend in the course, and she got docked more points on a problem that he graded, even though we had the same steps. He never pointed out where points were lost either. His mistakes were often in basic arithmetic; we corrected him often. He would ask us if he did problems right. Encouraging, is it now? He might be a better TA for a higher-level math course, but this one was bad. As I told my roommate after he asked me how a quiz or exam in this course went, it was not reflective of my abilities as a student. I like to think I know how to do calculus; this class turned me away from math.