Professor Zocchi wasn’t necessarily the best, but the course is pretty manageable if you have access to solutions from previous quarters (which I didn’t have personally). The HW is not straight from a textbook, so you can’t look up the solutions apart from possibly incorrect answers off Chegg. If you know the HW in detail, then the midterm is not so bad. It helps tremendously having old exams since some elements may be unchanged. The final exam was fairly similar to the provided practice problems, so make sure to know them by heart as well as all the homework if you have sufficient time.

Selling a collection of past exams with full midterm solutions and the practice final, homework solutions, and highly organized course materials including lecture notes and grade distributions. *************

Zocchi did his best to lecture on the material but the first half of the class was a definite disaster. I hardly understood the lecture and it took hours to do the homework, which was usually only 5 questions. The only reason I could do the homework at all was because of my TA working them out with us. My biggest piece of advice for anyone taking him (and I’m sure this applies to his other classes), read the textbook and DO OTHER NON-ASSIGNED PROBLEMS. He writes his own homework and that will definitely not be sufficient to prepare you for those exams. I only did the assigned homework for the first midterm and got a 37% but did a TON of extra problems for the final (non cumulative) and got a near perfect score. He said that 80%+ was an A but the curve had to be a lot higher with me getting an A-. He curves at the end so you really don’t know what you get until the quarter is over

If you can, try to get a different professor for this course. I never really learned the material during lecture, Zocchi is an okay guy but not much of a teacher, could hardly hold my attention, and rarely answered questions. I just went to lecture to get my notes and then learned the materialfrom the TA and on my own. Zocchi also went over the most important part of the course in the last week of class, but told us specifically that he wouldn't test on it, so me and many other students did not learn it. Anyway, from simply studying the few homework problems he gave and reviewing the notes I was able to get a B, but if you want an A you'll probably need to study a lot or example problems from the book (which he hardly follows, and the sections are sometimes difficult to find), and make sure you know ALL the notes. And his exams only have 4 questions, each question worth 5 points, so each point is worth almost a percent.