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.

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.

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

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.

I love Professor Spaas! He was the first math professor I had at ucla, and he was amazing! His lectures are normal, but the way he explained things were really clear for me. Homework is given every week, but it's really light and in discussion you just do worksheets he assigns. (not mandatory though) His tests are decent; some found the final crazy hard but for me it wasn't horrible unless you study well enough. I liked his teaching style so much I took 32B with him again :) Overall, I recommend taking this class with him, you will learn so much!

Final was atrocious and absolutely destroyed my grade (which was 100% going into the final). I still decided to take his 32B class next quarter, please Spaas don't murder my grade or I can't transfer to the major I want :(

In general, his class contends are clear and he is very helpful, but exams got harder and harder. The first midterm was fairly easy (I did badly due to personal psychological reasons). The second midterm was harder in contends and the number of questions. The exams were in class, so they should be done in 50 mins. In each exam, there were 5 questions with approximate 3 questions within each question. The final was hard. Within 3 hours, 10 questions (or 8) needed to be finished. The calculation was hard and there was a question testing did you fully get the definitions of some knowledge.

I liked his class and tried to attend most of it (it was at 8:00 am). Going to classes definitely helped to understand knowledge. He is a good professor, but I hope he can make his exams have a consistent difficulty level.

Besides the fact that the class was at 8am, it was very good. Professor Spaas' lectures were very clear and he goes over plenty of examples. The midterms (particularly the first one) were quite easy and since you have the option to drop one, I suggest trying to do very well on the first midterm so you don't have to care as much for the second one. However, the final is much more concept-based than the midterms were, so watch out for that. Overall a good class and a good professor and I'm taking Spaas for 32B as well.

Pieter Spaas is the MOST wholesome professor I had. Constantly roasting himself about his inability to do math or making fun of his little mistakes make going to lecture worth it. The final was rough, and midterms were decently tough, but imo, that's just the content of the course. Pieter did the best he could to lecture, and he was ALWAYS helpful during office hours (he even got them moved to a bigger room when he realized a lot of people were coming every week!) He always held extra office hours right before exams too. He WANTS you to do well on his tests, so there's nothing tricky on them, really. The tricks on his tests involve if you understand what's going on conceptually rather than just using the formulas. Unfortunately, I do have to say that the discussion sections seemed pretty useless. I stopped going halfway through the quarter. The worksheets always felt unnecessarily hard, harder than the exam? I couldn't even do half of the questions on the worksheets during discussion and just ended up not doing them at all, because they don't count for anything and I still did decently well on the exams. I liked Pieter, so decided to take him again for 32B!

Professor Spaas is a fairly good lecturer and is occasionally funny. His midterms were not too difficult, but because the max number of points you could earn on each was 40 points, making a small mistake could cost you a significant percentage of the points. His final was much more challenging in the sense that you needed a stronger understanding of the material in order to answer some of the questions, but overall the difficulty level was still reasonable. The discussions were not very helpful -- my TA passed out a worksheet and spent the majority of the discussion period going over the first few (often the easiest) problems, leaving us confused on the remaining harder questions. My TA also did not post answers to these worksheets online, which would have been very helpful. The homework load in this class is reasonable, with one homework assignment due each Friday. Each homework assignment took me around 3 hours to complete, which is honestly not bad considering that it's a week's worth. When doing the homework, it is often helpful to skim through the chapter of the textbook just to refresh your memory on what Spaas taught. Also, Spaas posted practice problems for the first midterm and the final, which are very helpful to do.