I went to lecture for the first few weeks, but it turned out to just be Pablo reading the textbook and then confusing everyone with his constant tangents and incessant mistakes. He blows off questions for the most part or will continue to confuse people. Once, he was unable to trace back his steps for a basic product rule/chain rule derivative. The quality of his Zoom lectures is horrible and the board is illegible (it's only slightly more legible in person), but he does not care and will ignore those comments, too. His homework problems and practice tests were way harder than both midterms, but nowhere near good enough to prepare for the difficulty of the final. He did not feel that a 60% average on the second midterm was something that should be curved. His review sessions were awful and demonstrated just how little his LA's know. I would hold off on taking this class if you can (I only took it because 2 of my classes for this quarter were dependent on it). All in all, Pablo is laughably bad at teaching and is not a good representative of UCLA.

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.

This man is probably the worst professor you can take for this class. He cannot teach for the life of him, often just reading the textbook like it's storytime and doing the most basic problems. The only way I can even think to explain his midterms and final are like only being taught that 1+1 is 2 and then being given problems about integration by volumes of rotation. If you have any other professor that you can take PLEASE do it and spare yourself from crying everyday over this class.

Pablo isn't THAT bad as everyone says he is. Going in, I got a B in 31A and didn't take calc BC in high school and still managed to get an A- in this class. The grading scheme is an absolute godsend which saves everyone and he drops 2-3 discussion and homework's and discussion which is an absolute godsend because that homework is graded on accuracy which is annoying as fuck. The homework is doable, only 10 problems due every 2 weeks but he will take points off for a wrong answer/ work. The midterms and final are fair in my opinion but that true false is SO HARD and missing 1 is literally -3 points, (for the final it was only -1 point) so if you want to do well on the midterms you have to get all of the true/ false correct. He posts practice midterms which are SO MUCH harder than the actual midterm. I never knew how to do any of the problems and still ended up doing fine on the midterms but the formatting sucks because there's only 5 problems (4 free response and 1 section of true/ false) so if you miss one you literally go down per letter grade. He also gives a lot of partial credit for problems so that really helped me when I didn't know how to do the problems

The final was a story of its own. He didn't print enough exams for the class and took 45 minutes to print them so 2/3 of the class had a 45 minute head start on the final than everyone else BUT that actually worked in my favor because he ended up curving it (he gave and additional 1 point for each true/ false you got correct) and Pablo never curves, but this was just an extreme circumstance so don't bank on any curve because he does not curve. Everyone says the final is so much harder than the midterms, but the final itself was not that bad. It was all multiple choice except for writing the actual answer with 1 or 2 fill in the blank questions and 2 select all that apply questions. I guessed on so many of the questions and got them right. He posts a practice final which is the same format as the final so make sure you really study that if you want to do well. I didn't do that and regret it

Overall this class is so doable because you can bomb both midterms and still get an A.