As the weakest student entered the classroom Brian Shin realized he realized the student was about to drop. He asked the student “are you not studying enough because you are failing or are you failing because you are not studying enough”. The student who had left it all behind responded equally “If you were unable to understand any of the concepts, would you drop?” Brian Shin responded “Nah I’d learn”. He knew it was time to take action, and said “Stand Proud you are capable”. Unbeknownst to the student, Brian Shin activated his domain expansion “extended office hours”. As the overwhelming intensity of the linear algebra crushed the student, he could only ask one thing, “how?” Brian Shin responded “You failed to consider two things: one, always bet on the professor. And two, throughout heaven and earth, i alone am the diagonalizable one”

If Brian Shin has a million supporters, I AM ONE OF THEM. If Brian Shin has a thousand supporters, I AM ONE OF THEM. If Brian Shin has one supporter, I AM THAT SUPPORTER. If he has no supporters, THEN I AM DEAD. IF THE WORLD IS AGAINST BRIAN SHIN, I AM AGAINST THE WORLD.

Lectures are structured, professor is responsive, exams are similar to hw, hws are a bit long but fair, grading is fair, nice guy, nice class.

Take this man's class. He assigns a short, easy homework and a short, easy quiz once a week. His midterms and finals use questions that are extremely similar to the homework questions he assigns, and his lectures are closely based on the textbook. He also skipped a bunch of sections in the textbook and told us we wouldn't have to worry about them on the exams, which took a huge load off of us when studying.

Quick summary: Shin is NOT like what the past reviews said, idk if he changed or what but think twice before taking his class for 33A. (Haven't take final yet so I put incomplete for the grade)

Reason why:
1. Shin's lecture is based on textbook, true, but he is expecting all students to read all chapters of all materials he mentioned in class. This means that even if he just talked about how simple reflection & rotation look like on graph during the lecture, he is expecting you to know and use formula for orthogonal projection on hw and mt1 on week 4, but this content will not be covered in lecture until week 6.

2. Still the lecture problem, Shin likes to break complete chapters into pieces and jump back and forth between theorem and formula from multiple chapters. I feel the only kind of students who can always follow up with his lecture are students who alreay taken 33A. And he has the habit of directly using order of theorem from textbook instead of their actual name, for exmaple, he would say "we use theorem 1.1.1 here" instead of "using basic row operation", making his lecture even more confusing.

3. If the above two are bad, here is the worst: Shin does not tell you what he is expecting you to learn by yourself. The only clue you will get is his hw cause you likely don't know how to do most of the hw problem by just going to lecture. You really have to dig into those problems and see what extra formula or theorem should be used to solve them, then you can start guessing which formula or theorem Shin would expect you to know for exams. (Oh and he did not allow cheat sheet for mt1 and the class average was a disaster, so he allowed an index card for mt2 but made T/F question even harder to compensate) You might think asking him about this will solve the prblem, but NO. There was a student asking him explicitly about a method he never mentioned but appeared on hw multiple times and seems important and convenient enough to be discussed during lecture, but he answered back with "No, we are not going to talk about this", and later this appears on mt LOL.

Final advise: If you have to take Shin's 33A for whatever reason, at least try to enroll in Latha's section. He is our TA and he is soooooo nice and helpful. I honestly think he is a better lecturer than Shin for this course and he helped a lot.

After a year at UCLA, Professor Shin is still the most engaging and thorough instructors I have had. Even though lectures aren't recorded, attending class was still enjoyable. In terms of difficulty, the midterm and final were not too bad.

TEST IS HARD

Shin is the GOAT. Exams are mostly straightforward and predictable. As long as you can do the lecture problems he does in class you can pull through with a B+/A- on the exams. True/false are a bit tricky and honestly i threw those bc I had other classes to study for. He assigns 2 question take home quizzes every week, but I would just make friends and so each of you can take turns opening the quizzes first each week. He also dropped 2 homeworks and a quiz I think which was cool. Hw & take home quizzes are graded on accuracy. Would take again.

Shin was a great professor for Math 33A! He was clear, understanding, and always helpful. His lectures were based on the textbook but explained much better, so I did not have to read it for this class. The quizzes were pretty easy, too, but the homework was fairly challenging. However, if you can do the homework problems, the exams should be fairly easy, too. Shin's exam grading structure is pretty standard to the 33 series (you can drop one midterm for greater weightage on the final). Doing ALL homework problems (even the optional ones) is how I prepared for the exams. Overall, I thought the first midterm was VERY easy, with the second one being a bit harder (more computationally challenging/time-consuming). The final was fair but not easy. The true/false is somewhat difficult/requires intuition beyond the lecture notes. However, Shin is definitely one of the better (and easier) 33A professors with fair grading and tests so I would recommend taking the class with him.

Dr. Shin is fantastic. He's a very clear, straightforward, and entertaining lecturer. If you're coming from either of the 32 series classes, this class is really easy. I got an A- because I had a really rough quarter, so I barely studied and did not keep up with the work. If I could get an A- barely putting in effort, you'll be fine if you study. This class is very "applications based" in the sense that you're doing work without really understanding what it is you're doing, why it's useful, or why it matters. It's a lot of memorizing how to do problems and just understanding the nuances of how problems change. The homework is the most difficult part of the class. If you can do the homework, you should be fine on exams. The quizzes are reflective of the multiple choice questions on exams, and that's about it. Discussion is optional in the sense that there's no participation grade. I don't think you need to read the textbook, but I found it helpful to go over theorems in a different way. Overall, a great class, although it's very different from the 32 series where you really need to understand the concepts in order to do well.