The reviews from his 32A class had students talk about how grateful they were that he would be leaving to teach at Berkeley. One year later, he's back and I understand why they expressed such relief. His lectures are lacking. I understand that the content is boring, but he consistently makes errors in his computations during his live lectures. This, combined with the general air of uncertainty about the direction of the lecture, leads me to believe that he begins each lecture entirely unprepared with only an idea of the content he intends to cover.

Another red flag about this professor is that he either skipped or postponed lecture on 3 or 4 separate occasions. I understand if he has a valid reason, but he chose neither to provide that reason nor adjust the difficulty or structure of the course around these missed lectures. Instead, he decided to post lengthy recordings of lectures en masse around test times. In one case, he postponed a final review lecture and held it during finals week.

In a similar vein, the organization of homework and test dates are horrid. Instead of spacing out the homework assignments like a reasonable professor would, he opted to not assign homework during the first three weeks, and then cram six assignments into the last seven, at a rate of about one per week. Moreover, he chose to have two midterms, which would normally be fine. However, the first midterm was at the end of week five, and the second one was in week nine. The grade for the second midterm was not released until partway through our 24-hour final.

The tests are also very difficult, much more so than the course material. The lectures and homework are largely computational, but the exams are very conceptual, to the point where a student could not reasonably expect the content on said exams. This, combined with the failure to provide any actual direction on how to solve missed exam and quiz problems, led to a general unpreparedness for the final.

All in all, Professor Venkatesh is disinterested in teaching the course and apparently intentionally makes succeeding in the class as tedious and difficult as possible. Do not recommend.

Well I think Siddarth is a good professor overall. He is going to Berkeley next quarter so Bruinwalk doesn't really matter. But as I saw complains on finals, I still want to put this comment down. To start with, he knows what he is teaching and doesn't rely on slides except when he needs to check on his notes for examples. He shows steps for solving each type of problems and is clear on the methods, both algebraically and geometrically. His final is admittedly significantly harder than the homeworks (by the way, he gives a lot of homeworks and the last one consisted of 53 questions due the day before finals so remember this) but I personally think the test overall is well made. You can't solve those problems by simply plugging numbers into equations, this is, at least for me, how a test should look like. I missed something on the final also, but I still think it is well designed. On thing for me, however, the final is definitely longer than it should be, and I had to ask many clarifying questions regarding what the problems mean so spaces of improvements here. Like you shouldn't except students to think hard for a consecutive 3 hours cause many problems do explain some depth of thinking. Also, Siddarth should consider what topic to put on midterms and finals. Many things we learned between midterm 1 and 2 are not even asked in midterm 2 and what's asked in midterm 2 are mostly not in finals. Overall, in terms of the teaching, he is a decent professor, and good luck to him and his future students in Berkeley.

Awful Professor, lectures weren't helpful, homework was unnecessarily long and hard, the professor often missed lectures and posted them days later forcing students to be behind on lecture. Quizzes were okay. No part of this class had answers given even after the assignment to check work, not homework, quizzes, or midterms. Low effort professor in a class with difficult concepts and coursework, don't take him unless neccessary.

Unreasonable. None of the review materials helped for the exams. He didn't care about this class at all because he's leaving. I wish I took another professor for my first quarter here.

Lectures: At least for the Zoom classes, he start the second he opens Zoom. Being one minute late is a full page of notes missed. Fast talker with poor microphone. Difficult to understand at times. Writes big and scrolls rapidly, leaving little time for notetaking. Sometimes would cancel lecture 15 or 20 minutes before they're scheduled to begin. Very slow in posting lecture recordings. (When he says he'll post something on Sunday, it means Sunday night at 11:30pm)

Office Hours: Often late, and occasionally missed entire office hours altogether. When he's in, he sounds slightly impatient, sometimes cutting off students to answer before the student has fully asked the question.

Homework: long and slightly tedious but occasionally helpful. A lot of physics application questions which are annoying. Most of them are good practices for the exams though.

Quizzes and Midterms: tests mostly applications of formulas and computation with few proof-based questions. Not too bad in terms of difficulty. However, very disorganized scheduling caused Midterm II to be during week 9 and the grades came out 30 minutes before the Final was due. Did not serve for function of helping the students understand what they need to know for the Final.

Overall: Not the best professor to take for this class. Requires a lot of your own figuring out things by reading the book, looking over notes multiple times, finding other online materials, and talking with the TAs. Please put aside time early on to start homework.

PS. I do think I'm slightly harsh on the judgement. He seemed quite sick and mentioned he had severe headaches during lectures/office hours sometimes. He also seemed to be teaching from a very different time zone. He didn't do a good job communicating that to us and it doesn't justify the poor student experience but this is part of my attempt to understand him.

One of the worst professors I had. AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!! You can keep reading for more information on why. He cancelled lecture about 4 times and instead of just catching up during class time later would cram all the material into videos he would release barely prior to an exam. As an example, before the second midterm he released a review sheet for material we barely covered less than 2 hours before it was released. All of the work he shows during lecture is very computational as well as the homework where as the exams are mostly conceptual.

DON'T ENROLL IN HIS LECTURE!!!
His final is SUPER HARD!

Professor Venkatesh was alright in terms of covering the content and answering questions. I think it would have been helpful if he held more review sessions and didn't assign so many homework problems (that were half graded on correctness). The two midterms were pretty standard level (although I found them challenging), and the final was just ridiculously hard. I felt extremely blindsinded by it because a lot of the problems were conceptual while what we had done for homework was very much calculation-based. The general consensus is that he really screwed us over for the final. I would not recommend taking this class with him (although he is going to Berkeley so it doesn't even matter).

I would say Venkatesh is a very good lecturer. He clearly knows what he's talking about and I found that the organization of the class was straight forward. The class consisted of him going through notes and he is definitely engaging and always shows proofs for things instead of just merely telling you things to memorize without context. He often explains topics through different angles to give you a more holistic understanding of the concept (ex: the algebraic and geometric applications of a concept were often discussed). I got a 66 on the first midterm and was able to end up with an A. I also see a lot of comments saying his tests are outrageous and I can tell he definitely saw these criticisms because I always though his tests were fair and if you can understand his lectures and do the homework you should be fine. I personally though his final was very easy and so did lots of other people because practically everyone finished early. Overall, definitely take him if you're considering him for Math 32A.

He isn't teaching at UCLA after this quarter so this is pretty irrelevant. I will say, as most other reviews have mentioned, the first two midterms were fairly easy while the final was extremely difficult (but curved). Also, I personally didn't like his lectures. It felt to me more like he was teaching the material as if we were reviewing it rather than hearing it for the first time.