Your feedback has been sent to our team.
20 Ratings
Hours/Week
No grades found
— Students
Prof GG was a great professor! Not going to sugar coat it, this class is hard, but it's my favorite APMA class so far. He kept the lectures light hearted with his jokes and has a flair for the dramatic. I never missed a single class. Sometimes it's hard to finish the worksheet in class, but group work is encouraged and he's always friendly during office hours. He loves his coffee and always brings plenty of energy to class. The written homeworks can be really confusing, but the class worksheets are a great guide. The midterms, while challenging, are graded with plenty of partial credit. For us, he also dropped a couple of worksheets at the end of the semester and dropped out lowest written homework grade. GG is the best!
P.S. That "party" he keeps mentioning that's suspiciously scheduled at the same time as the final exam? You guessed it, not a party :)
Obviously no one takes APMA classes for fun but ODE wasn't too bad with prof GG. As long as you are there for the lectures and the group work you should be fine with the material. As far as math lecturers go, GG has been one of the most engaging and fun ones I have had. Problem sets, assigned through WebWork, usually take a good amount of time so its the best to get an early start on them.
This course got better the farther along I was into it. I started out really confused, especially with the structure of no textbook I felt really overwhelmed at first, but the content only got easier as I went on. Start on the WeBWorK at least a day or two in advance and do your best to make every class. The quizzes were definitely the hardest part of this class, but they were open note so that made it a little easier. Overall, GG is a cool teacher, he's really personable and funny, but I think his teaching style is a little more disorganized for my taste.
The material is pretty interesting and not insanely difficult. If you mess up on a test, then there's plenty of opportunities to boost your grade. The final also has a decent curve. I really enjoyed Guadagni as a professor, but four days a week is a lot for this class. Overall, I enjoyed the material and recommend this professor.
Professor Guadagni is an all-around nice guy, this class is difficult but if you do your work on time and really study, you'll do well. For every exam (including the final) he lets you use a 1-page (one-sided) formula sheet. I made a good formula sheet and studied for the final for the whole day on the day of the exam and got a 93. STUDY.
He's a nice guy but I don't think he was really that great of a professor. It's a confusing course and he sometimes goes off on tangents that don't really matter. Every lecture you'll do groupwork which you can take home if you don't finish but obviously it's nice to get it done in class and out of the way. During these groupworks he's a lot more helpful and can explain it pretty well if you have questions, it's the lectures themselves that aren't really that great. There were 6 or 7 quizzes and 1 drop - take these seriously and study more than just the night because they're more like mini exams and actually pretty hard. Doing poorly on a couple can really tank your grade. Three exams and one final. You get a single page cheat/formula sheet for the exams and apparently we weren't supposed to get one for the final but he said he convinced the other professors to let us have one so that was nice. As someone who got an A+, I recommend reading through/copying down the notes he posts before each class and doing the practice problems as these will be very similar to the groupworks, quizzes, and tests. HW can be even harder than test questions sometimes but it wasn't usually bad and it was typically around 10 questions a week on webwork
Prof. G is actually the best guy. Very nice and funny and very open to answering your questions. Sometimes the way he explains things can be confusing but if you look through the lecture notes it'll make a whole lot of sense. He also gives out a lot of group worksheets that you'll most likely have to finish outside of class which can be annoying, but its worth it to have such a great guy as your professor.
PRINT OUT THE LECTURE NOTES. This was the most helpful thing I had... to follow along in class and to look up things later. I think the lectures were helpful in giving an overview of the material, and the ability to practice in class and ask questions about worksheets was nice. I wish the TAs were at the workshop office hours more often... I think half the time I arrived and they weren't there. When they were there, they were helpful. I forgot to do several of the daily online questions, but I think they definitely help make this class very present in my priorities. I'm glad Professor G still accepts the worksheets later than normal because they help me understand the material more when I am behind... Plus it's a nice balance to the online homework hard-deadlines. Find a good partner to do the worksheets at the beginning of the semester... you can take turns if one of you is super stressed. Overall, I like how Professor G has a friendly atmosphere for the class and takes time after class to explain things to people who need help, even if it's a Friday.
Guadagni's "teaching" style did not work for me at all. Every class he talked for about 10 minutes and then we would split into groups and do worksheets that took much longer than the class period allowed. We would have to stay at least 10 minutes after class if not more everyday. The quizzes took the entire class period and were basically the same length as test and much more difficult. If you take this class expect to learn everything on your own when you're doing the webwork.
This class was an interesting experience for sure. Guadagni really launches into the material, so it's easy to feel overwhelmed early on. He isn't much of a lecturer, so I recommend reading the posted lecture notes prior to going to class. He also had us do worksheets almost every class, which really sucked if you didn't have a solid grasp on the material after reading over the lecture notes. The quizzes were also ridiculously hard at times; however, the tests were much more straightforward, making it much easier to succeed there. Guadagni himself is a character, and it causes some people to really like him and others not so much.
TAKE IT. The class is excessively hard, his tests and quizzes are way harder than everyone else's, but if you do the extra credit assignments it's nearly impossible to get an A. You may even get a significantly better letter grade than the people who did better than you on every test in other classes
Guadagni used a new teaching style where we did group worksheets in class instead of lectures. I thought I would hate it, but the group-work was actually very helpful and Guadagni didn't come off as a great lecturer so it may have even been for the best. His tests were pretty straightforward and MUCH easier than his quizzes. He also let us make a formula sheet for a lot of the tests which some other professors did not. The homework took a while and sometimes we had to finish the group work outside of class, so you definitely have to put time in to do well. (for me at least) He's a pretty funny guy and all in all not a terrible class.
Guadagni was a really good professor. He explained things well and was very light and happy about things which was helpful for making differential equations more bearable. The new teaching style he uses with Fulgram is really helpful as well, and really got me to learn the material very well. Theres also a lot of helpful documents they put up on Collab that is really helpful as well. I really enjoyed this class... well, as much as you can enjoy a calculus class.
I remember once reading that Professor Guadagni used to teach at Hogwarts. This makes sense, seeing as the class had a great emphasis on magical applications of differential equations. Professor Guadagni is a world-renowned unicorn hunter. He also created the Haley-Bop comet by round-housing a burning ferret into the sun. This one time, I was late to class because my time turner wasn't working, and he made me strip clean an M1 Abram tank using nothing but a toothbrush made of unicorn hair. He also extracts gypsy tears during the annual meeting of his Wolverine Hunting Guild.
One of the most work-intensive APMA classes, a single differential equations HW problem can take up a full page of lined paper. Midterm difficulty is fair, while weekly quizzes tend to test much harder problems and in greater depth. To do well on quizzes, do homework and understand it. To do well on tests, do practice tests and understand how to do each type of problem. It's not terribly hard to get an A- in this class if you're good at math, but you'll have to work hard for an A. Very little curve.
Get us started by writing a question!
It looks like you've already submitted a answer for this question! If you'd like, you may edit your original response.
No course sections viewed yet.