The most notable thing about this professor is his clarity. His notes are super neat and coherent, really useful to revisit when reviewing for tests. Lectures were well-paced so we were always perfectly on schedule. He also enunciated very clearly so rewatching the lectures at a higher speed was very efficient. The material is definitely not super easy, and it is easy to fall behind which is what happened to me. The TAs and professor are helpful during office hours so it would be a good idea to make use of those. Overall, I would definitely take another class with Prof. Spaas, just judging from how clear he was in the material.

Very enjoyable class with difficult exams. He likes to throw in humor without taking away from his lessons and was very accommodating, answering questions and repeating if needed. He always has office hours before exams to answer questions if needed. Homework-wise, we had weekly assignments that sometimes are a breeze and sometimes includes difficult conceptual questions. His midterms were semi-difficult, including one or two questions that require a strong grasp on the topic to solve and the others being pretty simple applications (in order to not kill our grades). The final was tough in a similar format to the midterms with more questions and more time, but luckily overall grades were curved up afterwards.

Dr. Spaas is literally the best professor you can take for 32B (and A).
His lectures were usually to the point, but sometimes he would do long proofs that you might not need. Other than that they had a lot of examples and were super relevant to the homework. Definitely get the CORRECT VERSION of the textbook because it has great examples and the homework is literally from there so you need it anyway.
GO TO OFFICE HOURS. He is literally such a nice guy and he explains questions from exams and homework if you have them ready. He never made fun of me for asking (what I thought) were stupid questions.
He also had pretty reasonable exams and homework loads. The final was super hard but I'll cut him some slack because it was the week we all went home from COVID so there weren't clear guidelines for professors yet.

Pieter's a great professor, everything's very clear and his examples are easy to follow. For the lectures (covid quarter) he writes on notability and streams that, and after class he posts both the lecture recording and the notability document, so it's easy to go back if you missed something.

He also posts all of the homework questions from the book on ccle for free (so you can "check and make sure you're doing the right questions", what a g). If you ever want to look at the textbook it's not hard to find a link to a pdf, but you don't need to.

I personally never went to discussion, if you want more practice then it can't hurt but as long as you understand the lectures and all the homework problems it's not necessary. The homeworks aren't unnecessarily long, I rarely felt like a question was a waste of time. And all the answers are on Slader, so it's not hard to check your work if you want.

The funniest joke I've heard in a long time was when they said that the midterms were designed to take "approximately one hour" and final was designed to take "approximately three hours", I guarantee nobody in the class did it in that. Personally the final took me seven, so make sure to give yourself all day to do it. The tests are challenging, but without a strict time limit (24 hours) you can get a good score if you take your time and really understand the material.

Overall I didn't hear great things about how the other 32A classes were run, and compared to that Pieter did a great job. If I have an option to take a class with him again I would, no doubt

Professor Spaas is a great and sweet professor who clearly cares about his students. Lectures and notes are clear, homework is easy although the final isn't, and the grading scale is reasonable. Overall, I would highly recommend taking this course with Professor Spaas.

I would give Pieter Spaas my 2nd kidney

Spaas is great. His lectures are really helpful and clear. His tests are much harder than the homework assigned, so be prepared. The hardest material in the class (at least for me) is taught in the last week or so of the quarter. I recommend studying some of this in advance - it was not easy to cram for the final. The textbook was pretty useful for the class.

tl;dr: yeah spaas is great

disclaimer: i took multi var calc in hs but ucla wont take my credit :( so im taking it again so ymmv.

Spaas is a great prof. he explains stuff clearly on his notes and answers questoins. he publishes his notes on ccle so you can easily cram by just reading his notes and nothing else.
there are a couple quizzes (2-3ish) and a couple midterms.

Quizzes are a mix of conceptual and plug and chug. Not too difficult but not the easiest. Midterms/finals are mainly "do the same thing we did in class but with different numbers". Maybe 1 or 2 conceptual questions but its pretty doable. i took this during covid but he was chill and let us take 24 hrs for midterms/finals (30 min for quizzes tho). You could def finish the quizzes/midterms/finals in the time he expects u to do them in, but if u wanna check ur work expect to take 2x the time. Ngl i think spaas gave the most reasonable quizzes compared to other profs.

If youre reading this and this helped you out, pls review ur profs!! itll help us all out uwu

Spaas is a great and clear lecturer. I liked his teaching style and he was very straightforward about the material and the homework was always based directly on the notes. He moves a bit fast but it’s not too terrible. I had TA Talon Stark, he often taught some of the material ahead which was helpful. The work in the class is 3 quizzes, 2 midterms, 1 final and then homework from the textbook every week as well as a worksheet for discussion. We pretty much never finished the worksheet in discussion so they were not all that useful but I would definitely still go for the first few weeks and then decide whether you find it helpful. There were also no answers so if you were confused you have to hope your TA or some other student would help you. I thought the worksheets were actually pretty good for gaining more understanding especially to do better on the quizzes. Quizzes were pretty conceptual and full of trick questions so be really careful when taking them. First midterm was pretty straightforward but it took me 2.5 hours overall and the recommended time was an hour (maybe just difference with online format). Average was 95 percent. Second midterm had a lower average (like 83 percent). But as other said, small mistakes absolutely kill you because one point off is 2.5 percent gone since the midtermsa are only 40 percent. The final was not bad at all. I got a pretty decent grade without studying too much. All of the exams are just PDFs posted on CCLE that you complete and submit on Gradescope within a 24 hour period.

Also as others have said, Spaas is so wholesome. He dropped our 2 lowest homework grades and because of the pandemic, he also dropped out lowest quiz grade. His class is not ridiculously difficult and is completely doable. Would definitely take Spaas again!

I did awful in this class, but it wasn't the professor's fault. He seemed very nice, and he did a good job in lecture. He dropped the lowest homework and quiz scores, which works in your favor. He also provides practice midterms, which are great. If I had to retake it, I'd go with Spaas again.