He is not as bad of a professor as the previous few reviewers make him out to be. If you have trouble hearing him or reading his notes, sit closer to the front of the class; it's a simple fix. He makes it very clear what is expected on his exams, none of which are particularly difficult. Yes, the in class quizzes can be tedious and short on time, but they are worth as little as 10% of your final grade, and 2 out of 7 quiz scores were ultimately dropped.

Yeah, he's probably not gonna be your favorite professor but I found him to be an effective teacher and would recommend him.

He's really not great at teaching. 33A is a really computational class, and you can tell that Gallauer is bored by all of it when he teaches. He just writes down "recipes" in mathematical jargon, and does oversimplified examples to reinforce them. Luckily I had a good TA, and I definitely learned the bulk of the material through discussion.

The textbook is entirely useless so don't bother. Homework problems are not collected, and the textbook contains many errors in addition to offering poor explanations.

He does weekly quizzes during lecture which accomplish not much other than draining time and making students groan at tedious computation. His exams are not terrible, and throughout the quarter my mistakes came from arithmetic errors instead of actual course concepts. The final was harder than the midterm, and unfortunately it constitutes 60-70% of your grade in the class. I did pretty well on the midterms and was confident after taking the final, but it turned out that adding some numbers up incorrectly on the final brought down my grade to a B+, which is somewhat infuriating.

If you do end up with him it's not the end of the world but it's kind of close to it.

What is wrong with ucla hiring department, he is not qualified at all not even close in every regard to a decent tutor. His lectures were extremely confusing. He did a terrific job in explaining a simple and straightforward concept in the hardest and most twisted way possible.

Don't have him, don't, don't.

I'm sure he's a nice guy, but he's an awful professor. First, his communication skills are really poor. He can't speak loudly for his life, and his handwriting is utterly terrible. He doesn't really use any actual examples for concepts, and instead teaches in a more abstract manner. This might work well for some people, but it didn't for me. The weekly quizzes, while not hard, were also always a week behind the material being taught in class. The T.A. I had was good though.

One criticism that is unrelated to the professor: the book is pretty terrible. The explanations are unclear, and the methods the book uses to solve problems are not the ones taught in class, and apparently are not used anywhere other than this specific textbook.

Overall, if you're good at teaching yourself math, you should be able to make it through this course relatively unscathed . If you're not, tough luck.

This is arguably the easiest class I have taken at UCLA, and certainly the easiest math class. The format, which uses weekly quizzes and optional homework in place of mandatory homework, makes it so that you can do just as much work as you need to to understand the concepts in the class. The quizzes are very easy if you understand the material relatively well and do at least some of the homework problems. The midterms are much the same, as they are pretty much just a few quiz questions put together. The final was slightly harder due to having some more conceptually difficult questions, but was still very easy for a final. The only issues I had with the class were that Gallauer was a very bad lecturer and the grading scheme was unforgiving. You must do well on the final or you will not do well in the class, as it is 60% of your grade. However, this isn't too big of a deal since the final is not too hard. Plus, him being a bad lecturer combined with the ease of the class made it easy to skip class all the time, which was nice.

Please do yourself a favor and don't take this class with this professor! I did terribly on his midterms because they required, in my opinion, unreasonable amounts of computation given the time frame. The average was high though, so I guess not everyone agreed with me.
I'm a math major (not a very good one, I must admit) and I found he made everything sound far harder than it really was. He was unpleasant, his handwriting was not very good and he was anything but engaging. Definitely the worst professor I've had.
For perspective, in Winter 2017, I took 115A – the upper-div version of 33A – with a fairly hard but reasonably so professor, and I pulled a B. So yeah, just don't take this professor, no matter what.

It was a difficult start because the professor was gone for around the first month of class and we had three different substitute professors. I took a while to adjust to the professor when he finally showed up, but he isn't bad. Someone complained about how he was speaking too quietly and he showed up the next lecture with a mic. His lectures were pretty clear but not really engaging - also his b's look like d's so that can get a little confusing... Homework is very light/minimal, which is nice in a sense that you don't have a lot of homework but is unfortunate when he gives you like one easy problem to practice with and a lot more difficult problems to solve. He gives you practice midterms/final that were pretty helpful and also reference textbook questions. He's not the most enthusiastic professor I have, but he's capable of teaching and cares that you learn.

he broke me.

Before the quarter even started, we get an email from him saying that he won't be around for the first month or so. Is teaching such a low priority for some professors that they won't even bother being around for half the quarter? He has two different substitutes who both do a better job of teaching and explaining the material than him. He's not a particularly effective professor, and he has a weird way of explaining and wording things; his English isn't fantastic. More on that later.

His midterms were pretty easy, and the practice midterms he supplied were very similar to the actual midterms. They had one or two conceptual questions that were doable. However, his final was absolutely awful. The practice final had no relevance to what was actually tested, and it was more than half conceptual questions. This was especially frustrating because he phrases his questions in a way that made absolutely no sense at all, asking some questions that I don't think even a genius could decipher.

Am I only writing this because I'm frustrated with how I did with the final? Maybe. But, I always say him as unapproachable, cared little for his students, and also he just spoke very quietly in a large lecture hall (we used to be in La Kretz and he used no mic).

Overall, just avoid this guy. The math department already sucks but don't make it any worse than it needs to be.

Awful professor, awful class. His lectures essentially detract from the textbook and he speaks so monotonously and quietly that it's difficult to understand him even with a microphone. Moreover, his tests are extremely tedious and he does not allow you to use calculators, meaning that you have to do hundreds of arithmetic calculations with any small error costing you the question. The class is called Linear Algebra *with Applications*, but it was the most dry and abstract math course I've taken here thus far. And Prof. Gallauer makes no efforts to relate the course material to anything useful, reducing the course to rote memorization of tedious algorithms. Would highly advise against taking this professor (and this course if you can help it) at all costs.