I took Ls30A with Dr. V in Summer 2020 and here is my intake:
- The class content is very easy and very manageable
- Actually read the textbook and watch the videos recommended for you in the syllabus
- Dr. V is not good at lecturing...like at all! going to lectures felt like a waste of time and I did not learn anything through her lectures and learned through reading the book
- Super easy to get an A and she provides a lot of extra credit
- Homework is manageable but can be a little hard sometimes
- Coding is a little challenging but your TAs will help you out a lot so go to their office hours.
- The midterm and final were open notebook take home, but were very open-ended so some of the questions were not clear.
- Take this class if you want an easy A, but only if you are willing to put in the effort to self-study!
- Make study groups!!

It was a good class. very straight forward. The midterm and final were kinda hard but very doable. If you did not take any calc it might be confusing and the lectures are kinda fast paced. If you go to office hours and ur chillen.

Dr. Venugopal is a very kind and patient professor. She genuinely cares about her students and wants them to be as successful as possible. If you took AP Calc in high school, the actually calc topics should not be that difficult, although this course is much more conceptual and involves less actual math than regular calculus. I found the coding to be extremely difficult because I have no background in computer science, but the TAs were helpful and I did eventually figure it out.

Dr. V is definitely a very accommodating and kind professor and that's why I think she is the perfect professor for the course. Math can be very challenging for a lot of students and I think that Dr.V does a great job breaking down concepts into easy-to-understand chunks. I found her lectures to be confusing int he beginning of the class but later in the quarter, absolutely necessary. She adjusted the exams to have more collaborative elements which really helped in the wake of COVID.

tldr; if you're willing to be patient to get an easy A, take this class. if not, don't.

Dr. V is a kindhearted soul, don't get me wrong, but remote instruction has already fallen in engagement, and her lecturing even more so. I appreciate that she took ample time to explain applications of her material in depth, but when you're consistently 2-3 lectures behind in material, it's easy to be frustrated with the pace of the class.

This class is very largely conceptual and application: take an equation, understand carrying capacity, population growth, etc. rather than "find the derivative of this function". The discussion (labs) are on CoCalc and you study Python. Pay attention to people introducing themselves on the very first day because you choose your own 4 person lab group, and you're with these people the rest of the semester. I was lucky to form very close friendships with my lab group, but others were not.

We were not tested on coding, but had lab assignments due every week. There are pre-lab (highest grade) and weekly material quizzes (one attempt) every week. Homework is based on completion. The exam is in 3 parts (I REALLY APPRECIATED THIS): study guide (group), individual exam (MCQ), and then group exam (short answer). It was really easy to get an A in this.

LS30A with Dr.V definitely wasn't bad at all. As long as you read the textbook in addition to asking TA's questions you have, you should be fine. The homework is somewhat heavy, but it's mostly busy work. The coding isn't too difficult, but a basic understanding of what coding is will help. The TA's help with the code a lot and I finished most of my labs during class. The review sessions for the midterm/final and the practice tests are extremely helpful.

Venugopal is the worst teacher I have ever had. She doesn't explain things well at all and takes an entire lecture to reach the main point, which she doesn't even explain. If there is any way to take this class with a different professor I highly recommend choosing someone like Conley who actually knows what he is doing

Don't take this class with her. Math that is very easy in hindsight seemed much more difficult learning it from her.

Good teacher, she obviously cares about the subject and whether the students learn! I personally really liked this professor!

She's very good at explaining concepts, but if you don't understand the other concepts that she uses to explain them, then you're sort of screwed. For most of the class, I didn't really understand linear approximation, which made me struggle a lot. In these cases, I would recommend going to office hours.

The labs vary in difficulty, from just easy and boring to excruciatingly difficult. However, there are ~10 of them and you have a week to do each (which overlap).

Also, a lot of the stuff used in exams are lifted directly from her lectures, so watch them!

The midterm was unexpectedly difficult, and both the midterm and final took an obscene amount of time for things we only had 24 hours to complete.

My only problems with this course are with the course itself and not the professor. I would strongly recommend this professor to anyone who wants to take this course.

I feel like people really disliked her for no reason. I thought she was clear and easy to follow. The material and tests were quite easy and basically exactly what she taught. She would kind of go off on unrelated tangents if you asked a question though, so I usually asked my TA for help not her. My TA was Ganesha who was an absolute god. If you have him thank your lucky stars