THIS WAS THE WORST CLASS WITH THE WORST PROFESSOR EVER. do not take this class with pablo at all costs, wait for another professor to teach it. if i had one word to describe pablo, it would be CLUELESS. he can't solve basic problems and adequately answer students' questions. i had a tutor with a phd in math help me throughout this entire course, and even he said that the questions pablo would assign were completely unreasonable. i spent over 25 hours a week studying for this class and i was still barely able to get my well deserved A.

midterm 1: probably the easiest test out of all of them, but still had pretty low averages. initially he only wanted to curve the midterm for lecture 2, but after lecture 1 found out, they had to fight and argue with him in order to have him fairly curve everyones' midterm.

midterm 2: AWFUL. literally a 60% average and he refused to curve because he was mad about the whole curving situation from midterm 1. definitely way harder than any of the content he went over in class or assigned for homework.

final: probably even worse than midterm 2. such hard and long computations, and it included concepts we didn't even cover in class. mostly focuses on the content after midterm 2, but still has a few questions from midterm 1 and 2. good luck with this one, he provides no guidance or help whatsoever.

cherry on top: he lied and told us he was sick 2 days before the first midterm and that he had to cancel lecture, office hours, and the review session that many students were dependent on. come to find out, he was doing a conference at ucsd that day. extremely unprofessional and i honestly don't know why ucla is keeping him around. he's a bad name for the math department and the school as a whole.

hopefully this convinced you not to take this class, and if it didn't all i can say is good luck and you will struggle a lot :)

I never thought I would ever write a review. However, this class was absolutley the worst class I have ever taken. Pablo Sanchez Ocal is quite frankly the most incomptent professor I have ever encountered. His homework assignments are obscenely long and do not capture what he teaches in class. His lectures are done completely on a white board. He can code a whole website for the class filled with useless information, but not figure out to how to project his lecture on the screen. His midterms did not represent what he covered in class. Essentially, he lectures on the easiest examples from the textbook and makes constant errors, and then he proceeds to give the hardest exam possible that are basically trying to trick you every question. He also is a petulant child. He had two lectures for this class. He curved one lecture's by 10% and did not curve the other class. Obviously, this is not fair. When students expressed this, he got very upset and proceeded to not tell us what he was going to do until 2 weeks later and said he would curve no more. He is just awful and does not know how to be teacher. I am so happy I never have to see him again. He needs to be fired.

Professor Pablo's lecture is relatively easy to follow because a lot of information are from the textbook. The exams are not tough since he already goes through similar questions in the review sessions.
In short, as long as you do your homework and listen to his lectures with attention, it will not be hard to get a good grade

Lectures were straight forward and notation was generally similar to that of the textbook. Your homework problems will be from the textbook as well, and exam problems look pretty similar to homework. There are some multiple choice problems and true/false that account for about 25% of your exam, and the remaining 75% is usually free response (so you can get partial credit). The grading scheme is pretty standard, you can drop your lowest midterm (there are two midterms total). You definitely need the textbook for this class, so get it early on in the quarter or before it starts.

Professor Sanchez was an engaging lecture, but if you had to skip lecture for health reasons or just personal reasons, you couldn't because none of his lectures were recorded. That means that if you were lost it was hard to catch up. Homework was graded on correctedness, which is fine, because he ended up dropping the homework, but it sucked because we never had answer keys and didn't get our homework back for quite a while. I wish that the class was more online friendly and that the grade scale was made more clear.

Pablo really gives tough problems to get you to think. All the questions for midterms and finals come from the textbook. The midterms were awful because they were just multiple choice, but because of a cheating scandal the final was made free response, which makes it much easier to at least get partial credit for your work. I would not recommend his class simply because of the exam structures, but I gain a deep understanding of the material.

Very tough class. Pablo is not a bad lecturer but he's not great, and he goes through material pretty quickly. For a simpler class he would be fine, but I struggled in this course material very much (even after taking calculus BC in high school). He is very generous with his grading systems, however. If you take this class, study a lot and make sure you go over and understand the 'difficult' sections of problems in the textbook.

I just made an account so that hopefully I can deter anyone from taking Ocal's class. Word of advice, DO NOT IGNORE HIS RATING AND WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HERE ARE SAYING. I made that mistake when I enrolled in the winter. His rating was a 2.2 at the time and I thought that I could manage. Everything people have said so far has been mostly true. The first quarter of his class is somewhat okay since the topics are fairly straightforward, but once the course hits integration by partial fraction decomposition, that's when it all goes downhill. Ocal is a terrible lecturer. His pacing is way too fast and explanations are too confusing. The problem he picks out to demonstrate on the board would be relatively easy but then homework problems would require you to use some type of technique Ocal has not taught you. For example, I remember he was talking about how to find the error bounds of taylor polynomials. He picked out a cosine function in which the max value of k would always be a 1. However, on the homework, he would assign homework that would have functions that involved natural logs. I would have to spend hours of my own time trying to figure out how to do this problem because Ocal failed to teach.

Homework is unnecessarily long and tedious. Every week you are assigned upwards to 30-40 long arduous problems. You are not given the answers to these problems so good luck if you want to know if you're doing them right. The final and midterms are also harder than they need to be which would be fair if he allowed cheat sheets and calculators, but he doesn't. His midterm 1 average was around 60% and, to his credit, he did curve it by 8 points. Then his midterm 2 was around the same area but this time, refused to curve.

Long story short, do not take Ocal. Put it off for a quarter if you have to. If you think I am exaggerating, I am not. The only reason I see anyone taking his class is if you are already strongly familiar with Calc 2 concepts. I have talked to multiple people that had Ocal and none of them liked him.

This class in of itself is very difficult content wise and there is only so much help a professor can provide. Ocal did his best in constantly asking if the class had any questions during lecture. According to others, he sometimes did not show up to office hours so it may be best to check in with him beforehand. That being said he is very good at communicating with students and with the class (he would sometimes email the entire class an explanation on difficult HW problems). His homework assignments were short, and you were given about two weeks to do each of them. He also provides helpful links that also explain the material. His three grading schemes are very nice. I failed the first midterm but was still able to end with an A because of the third-grading scheme. The thing that helped me the most with this course were Peer Learning sessions which are a great resource :) Overall this is a pretty doable class if you are willing to put in the extra work and look for outside resources.

He can be a bit confusing during lecture, but that has a lot to do with the fact that the content of 31B itself is fairly confusing. I do think he's nowhere near as bad as some of the reviews portray him. His homework is very reasonable and he gives 2 weeks for them. While the exams were pretty rough, his grading scheme was great so I still ended up with an A.