Your life depends on the practice problems/exams that Mariana provides!!! If you do those over and over and get comfortable with the types of problems, you will ace every midterm and final. Honestly, this class was stressing me out pretty hard because the content was difficult for me, but I did the above and did well on every exam. The lectures were okay, Mariana makes it fairly clear what we need to know or not, but you really need to practice by yourself to get your head around the content. She is also kind of bad at communicating. She doesn't respond to discussion posts and didn't show up for the last week of the quarter without notice??? While I guess the following would be implied, it would have been nice for the actual professor of the class to confirm things like what topics are on the final, when and where it is, and so on.

Good lecturer, fair exams. Very understanding professor.

I think some of these reviews are way too awful at least from my experience. She wasn't the most engaging lecturer ever but she got the point across and made things pretty clear to understand and covered the content quite well. The tests also could have been much harder but weren't so I found them fair, even slightly generous maybe as she used homework/very homework-like questions on the tests which was nice. Though there were some issues with class, Vicaria herself wasn't really that bad like some of these reviews make her out to be.

I honestly don't know what these other reviews are saying. This class was the easiest math class I've ever taken. All you had to do was read through and actually understand the slides (understanding the idea; not just memorizing the proof for particular questions) and maybe redo some of the harder HW questions. Also, the thing about her belittling students is patently untrue. All you needed to do when you ask a question is show her why you're stuck, what methods you've tried, and why those attempts failed.

LMFAOOOO PLEASE PLEASE DONT DO IT 💀 💀 💀 Don't get me wrong, the midterms are alright if you study the homework and past exams closely as a lot of questions are similar to the ones from there, but this class overall was not a good experience. First of all, she has a very condescending attitude in general (not going to elaborate but it was bad), and exams were graded extremely strangely. People literally got major points off for tiny things like referring to a theorem as a definition, and it was impossible to know when this would happen. Also, there was a huge delay in grading homework, and most of it wasn't graded until the last week so there was no way to be able to determine our grades. I get that the homework grader was sick, but the professor was generally not receptive to emails and requests anyway. I will also warn you that she does not curve at all and grades completely on a straight scale. There are also no quizzes so 85% of your grade is based on 2 or 3 exams, with the other 15% being homework.

The final, although much harder than either of the midterms, can be done if you meticulously go through the textbook and slides and either totally memorize the proofs there or copy everything, including any homework/past exam problems onto the one single-sided cheat sheet you are allowed for all exams. I literally had no idea what was going on by week 10 and never wrote a formal proof in my life before this class, but I still clutched an A because I filled that sheet of paper with literally every problem I had seen on past exams and prayed that something similar would be on the test. If you did math competitions or have previous experience with proofs you will be fine, but if you're not just memorize all the resources and I guarantee you will at least pass.

If you need to take math 61, I encourage you to do it with Do because his class is significantly easier and better organized. However, if you must take this specific class and haven't really encountered proofs before, trust me, memorizing the homework/past exams/slides/textbook is going to save you.