APMA 3080

Prof Li is amazing. You can tell she really is passionate about teaching from her lectures. She is always checking in mid lecture to ensure everyone is on the same page and strongly encourages student participation during lecture (you can get extra credit). The exams get more difficult as the class progresses but I have found this course one of my easier ones I've taken here. If you utilize the resources she provides the exams will not surprise you. That was my best way of preparing for this course. I personally never attended instructor OH but I've found TA hours very helpful. Some find the matlab projects annoying but they really aren't bad. I'd say each one takes you max two hours total and you have a few weeks to do them. It may seem irrelevant but they include that in the curriculum so the more difficult application based questions do not appear on the exams. TLDR; prof li is great I highly recommend you take the class with her

Linear algebra is a great resource for nearly all engineering types! The actual course content is easier to compute, and some subjects are easier to understand than others. While the computations can be tedious at times, they are definitely doable in most cases.

The course is set up like so: you are given a worksheet and set of notes every class. You are expected to fill out the notes and complete the worksheet by the beginning of the next class. Every week you would have an additional homework set, and every 2 weeks you would have a programming project to do (which isn't that hard once you get further into the course).

Now, as for the professor, I would reccomend with taking it with someone else if possible, but if she is the best option then go for it. Her positives is that she has a LOT of bonus opportunities, as long as you stay engaged with the course material, and she also appreciates feedback and likes to keep her students engaged.

Now for the negatives. First, I often found her to be rude when asking for help understanding the course content and completing assignments. There were times when I would be stuck on the projects and she would get frustrated and irritated with me and we'd end up getting nowhere. Also, her exams all contain multiple choice questions that ask about the most miniscule, abstract details, and there may be 1 or 2 correct answers, which is actually WAY harder than an average free-response exam. Finally, she can get a bit preachy about a student's learning process, which can make some students feel pretty bad about themselves, but overall it takes away from the time for the lecture.

Overall, while the class shouldn't have been difficult, she found a way to make it more difficult than it had to be. For those earlier reviews that said this class was a "bag of tricks" kind of class, they are 100% right. Also, I will note that the TA's were really helpful in completing the assignments and helping us further understand various topics, and they were actually nice and patient about it, so please visit them to your advantage.

my goat, she is so chill and gives out extra credit in class. exams are not that difficult and also gives pts back for things. very kind and generous. about the course overall: not as much work as other apma courses but still a good amount of worksheets. matlab projects are annoying though but doable.

Professor Li teaches pretty well. She tries to simplify each topic so that students can understand it better, and her lectures are structured so that each topic builds on the previous. Her notes are also really good and have all the definitions/formulas needed on the exams. Her worksheets aren't too hard either.

I personally don't like the Matlab projects because they didn't add any benefit in my opinion. However, I already knew how to use Matlab prior to this class so I might be biased.

Her tests aren't terrible, but her MCQ can be very difficult because they often target very minute edge-cases that draw upon a thorough understanding of the material conceptually. It can be a bit frustrating, but the bulk of the exam is FRQ so it doesn't drop your grade too much if you get them wrong.

Overall, she's a great teacher (with difficult tests), and I would highly recommend taking her for Linear!

this class is generally just eh. Super super conceptual and abstract compared to the other APMAs I've taken, and there is so much content you need to memorize before each test because there is no cheat sheet. It's also just a little bit boring compared to other APMAs. The free-response section of the midterms was always okay—if a problem takes way too long, you're probably doing it wrong and missed some trick that would make it quicker. The multiple choice on the other hand? Awful. Evil. Why. Actually the worst. Very brain-warp-y and its easy to get confused in your own logic. Otherwise, it's easy to get 100% in pretty much all other parts of the class as long as you go to OH to get your worksheets checked by the TA and for help on the projects (most of them are not worth doing alone). The final was better than I expected. Li probably could have made it harder but even she said that she thought the questions were easier than the midterms. She also returned the final grade 24 hours after the test so good for her.

I had heard that Linear Algebra was not that hard of an APMA, and while I wouldn't say it was overwhelmingly difficult, it certainly surprised me. You are expected to memorize so much information and understand how to connect it all together. However, one thing that makes this course not so bad is the fact that so many concepts are intertwined (especially with the "Unifying theorem").

When it came to Prof Li, she was super sweet and accommodating to her students. I would often come late to class or miss class and come to the later section, and she would still give me attendance credit. Speaking of attendance, mid-semester she introduced an attendance policy, where you would get 3% extra credit if your attendance was roughly 80%. She also awarded bonus points for answering questions and completing certain assignments.

However, her lecturing felt sometimes rushed. There would be a worksheet after every class that was due the next day at 11:59pm. These worksheets were always much more intensive and complicated compared to what we learn in the lectures or see in the notes, making them often a chore to complete with lots of Googling required. The webworks were also ridiculous at times, with confusing/difficult questions with 3 attempts, no partial credit, and no indication of what you got wrong. The projects, which there were 5 of, were honestly pretty cool, and they showed you the interesting applications for linear algebra.

The midterms were not too awful, but they were very tricky and long, and they required you to have a very thorough understanding of the material. It was necessary to do as much practice as you can and review the notes and make sure you were understanding every single thing you learned. The final exam, on the other hand, was awful. It felt way too long and the questions were very convoluted. Also, it was weighted way too heavily being 33% of our final grade.

Overall, Li is a sweet professor and you will learn the content well, but the course assignments and structure can make it a little annoying sometimes.

#tCFS24

I would not recommend taking the class with Li. The content is fine, although it feels a little to much like a "bag of tricks" type class: it never really gets tied together.

Li's teaching style is erratic and confusing. For example, she uses the word "any" to mean both "for all" and "there exists", after telling us we should figure it out based on "context" . She also changed how the class was run in the middle of the semester, instituting a poorly explained system of attendance and extra credit problems.

Grading for the class is based on in class worksheets, weekly webwork, 2 tests, a final, and matlab projects (which seemed tacked on and unrelated to the rest of the course).

TLDR: take the class, but not with Li.

Li was a very kind and understanding professor, but was not a great instructor. I basically had to reteach myself every topic by watching Khan Academy. The other professors for this class are way worse though, so I would honestly take it with her because at least she's accommodating. She just doesn't really explain things that well. I found it helpful to look at the material before learning it in class. This really helped cement the concepts. She barely gives you any work outside of class so you need to do a lot of independent work to understand the concepts because it's very very abstract and you will not understand it thoroughly without practice.

Professor Li is very sweet and funny. She also cares about her students, and provides detailed lecture notes that are extremely useful for doing the coursework and studying.
Here's how the grading was for this semester:
Worksheets (15%): These are meant to be done in-class after she's done lecturing, but her lectures often leave only 5-10 minutes to work on the worksheet, which is never enough time. They're not due until the next worksheet is released (typically before the first section of the next class date), but in order to avoid having extra homework, I worked on the worksheets while she was lecturing, which I recommend. Be careful, though, since she loves to randomly choose people to answer questions, so also pay attention to lecture if you choose this route. You're assigned to a group of 3-4 that will change halfway through the semester to work on these with.
Homeworks (10%): These were released and due weekly via WebWork, with about 8-15 problems per set. Most of the problems were straight out of the lecture notes with different numbers. There were several problems, however, that were incredibly frustrating, even though I knew the concepts well, since there were about a million math computations, so one small math error would result in the whole problem falling apart. This part should be an easy A. I recommend just using MatLab for some of the longer problems, even though we're technically supposed to do them by hand.
Projects (15%): Five in total, these were released once every three weeks, and were due right before the next one was released. Similar to the homeworks, although a higher percentage of the problems were frustrating math computations, and there were only four problems per project.
Midterms (30%): Two of them, weighted equally. The first one is pretty simple, since we didn't cover the tough material yet. The second one was made much easier than it could've been. Since all of the content builds off of the previous content, the second midterm should be thought of as cumulative.
Final (30%): Basically a longer midterm. She could've made it much more difficult, but didn't, which is much appreciated.

Overall, I recommend Linear Algebra with Professor Li.

#tCFfall2022

This was the best math course I've taken at UVA by far. Professor Li is the nicest person and spent the time to learn every students name and make it feel like she actually cared about our success. The lectures are scheduled so that no lecture is ever too much information, and she gives group work at the end of every class to practice on what we just learned. She also is very generous on giving bonus points and pushing back deadlines if you talk to her.

Workload was a webwork each week that took anywhere from 30-90 minutes, and a MATLAB project due every ~3 weeks that would take like 2-3 hours of work, but again we only had 5 scheduled. There is also an in class worksheet due after each class but half the time you'll finish in lecture and the other half it will just be a question or two left over.

I don't have enough good things to say about this course and have to recommend taking it.