MATH 3310

Professor Slonim was a great lecturer and I really enjoyed having him for this class. The class material was difficult, but also very rewarding, and I felt like I had a strong grasp of the material after taking it with him. One thing that he did which I enjoyed was having us do presentations on various topics that weren't covered in class (metric spaces, for example), with people receiving extra credit for attending the presentations and writing reports on them.

I will note that one weak area of the class is the exams, which are structured oddly. The first exam and part of the final exam were both proof-based, which meant that we were supposed to memorize a set of proofs beforehand and then be able to reprove some of them on the exam. I personally felt like this was a bit too heavy on the memorization side, and didn't reward mastery of the material as much as the conceptual exam sections. The first exam also had a very strange grading structure that was difficult to understand and resulted in grades having large jumps (for example, losing one point on the exam could give you a 99%, while losing two could give you a 90%). I also heard of people getting large amounts of points off on the proof based section of the exam, despite having relatively fine proofs.