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- Stefano Filipazzi
- MATH 32A
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Grade distribution: 10% quizzes, 15% homework, 22.5% each midterm, 30% final
Quizzes:
There are three quizzes. Quizzes were mostly conceptual like many people said, so make sure you are firm on the conceptual aspects. But also make sure you can do the calculations. The averages were 88%, 74%, and 80% for quiz 1, 2, and 3.
Homework (5% correctness, 10% completeness, 1 pt for each problem, 6 pt for correctness for each hw):
There is one homework each week (so 10 hw's) with 20-30 problems. Sometimes there were less than 20 problems, but most of the time it was 20 to a little over 30 problems. Homeworks are totally manageable, but hard to finish in one day. They were due every Friday. He also picks three random problems for each hw and uses those to give you the grade for correctness. Recommend going to OH if you're stuck on a problem since some problems are more conceptual. He drops the two lowest hw scores at the end.
Midterm 1 (50 pts):
I personally did badly on this one, but it was due to my own mistakes. The average for midterm 1 was 87%, with a median of 90%. It was mostly about vectors and we hadn't touched the multivariable part yet, so most people did well. (104/200 people got A's)
Midterm 2 (50 pts):
This midterm was harder than the final (hardest out of the three tests). Both midterms were designed to take 50 minutes, but I and most students definitely took way more than that (like several hours). For me personally, limits were where I got most points off, so make sure you are solid on your limits and practice some difficult ones too. Also, make sure to state EVERYTHING. I got points off for not stating why a function is continuous (the question didn't explicitly ask that). The average was 76% with a median of 79%, so you can tell that it was the hardest.
Final (75 pts):
If I remember correctly, Filipazzi mentioned how some students emailed him saying how difficult midterm 2 was, so he took that into consideration. Idk if it's because of that, but the final wasn't as hard as expected. But make sure you know the conditions for applying certain methods. For example, many people didn't realize that the condition for using the chain rule definition of directional derivatives was that the function had to be differentiable at that point. Most people did well in the final. (121/201 people got an A) The average was 89% with a median of 92%.
Tests overall:
Tests were not unreasonably hard (it was a reasonable difficulty, but definitely not easy), but one con was that it took me several hours to do each test when it was designed to take less time.
Lectures:
Attendance is not mandatory, and it's recorded. He uses many examples and different versions of those can show up on tests, so make sure you understand each example. He asks students if they have a question and kindly explains, so don't be afraid to ask questions.
Discussion:
Discussion attendance rates were really low, and for me personally, it helped just a little but not that much. Attendance is not mandatory and it's also recorded.
Helpfulness:
Professor Filipazzi is very helpful and tries to answer everyone's questions in an easy way. After the first midterm, I emailed him saying how I was having a hard time in the class and that I don't know how to study, and he offered to have a personal meeting to address the problems that I was concerned about. I thought that was very nice of him. I did much better on the next two tests.
OVERALL:
I would take a class with him again because even though the material was hard, he tries his best to explain in an easy way and I can see that he cares about his students. I was expecting a B+ (88.38%) but it got rounded to an A-, so I'm really grateful for that.
Don't slack off if you did well on the first midterm otherwise the second midterm's gonna bite you in the butt. I only managed to scraped an A because Filipazzi had mercy and perhaps rounded up. My advice for this class would be to SHOW ALL WORK because I had a lot of points taken off for not showing enough work or not giving sufficient justification despite having correct answers.
The professor was pretty helpful and responds to emails. However, his classes are structured in a way that's quite hard for you to follow. Sometimes he talks about 1/2 of a section, sometimes 1/3, sometimes 1 whole section, or sometimes he would talk about 4/5 and give you the rest to read by yourself. Also, he does not have a clear rubric for the homework and quizzes. All he says is "show enough work". What is enough? What I've experienced is that doing something might be completely okay for the homework, but on the exams, they will give you ZERO POINTS because they say you didn't show enough work. The rubrics are VERY VAGUE.
Other fun fact, when the professor makes a mistake in class, he would send an email with almost cryptic code trying to explain the case, which makes you even more confused lol.
Also, the class has a lot of homework compared to other lectures with other professors. On average, I would say we had about 5-10 more questions EACH WEEK (and FYI, each question would sometimes take up a whole page or more so don't think 5-10 questions are trivial). Also, all the other professors were dropping a lowest quiz for this quarter but for some reason Filipazzi just decided not to do that...
To my CONFUSION, he had like a 4.5+ rating on Bruinwalk before. Anyways, this class is not very enjoyable and Filipazzi definitely does not deserve all the super high ratings he's gotten in the past.
This professor graded his exams extremely unfairly. He showed no mercy on midterm 2 which killed the grades of the majority of the class. All these good reviews you see on here are of students who are ultra math tryhards. If you are an ultra math tryhard then you will do great. If you consider yourself an average or barely above average math student like me, you will not get an A in this class. You will get a B if you are lucky. Steer clear of this professor if you value your sanity.
Professor Filipazzi was really hard for me. I spent a lot of time every week (10+ hours) trying to finish all of the homework he assigned while understanding the topic. I read all of the assigned textbook sections, and went to his lectures live, but I still struggled a lot during the 24 hour midterms. I guess people were doing really well with it, but I found the questions to be so so difficult and spent all 24 hours on the midterms, to still get a C- on both of my midterms. Luckily, I somehow did well on the final exam so I did way better in the class than I expected, but the class was still super challenging for me. His lectures were actually really clear and his handwriting is nice. For some reason the way he writes his f's translated into my handwriting, so now I write in all print with cursive f's lol. Anyways, he's alright, just a difficult class.
Filipazzi is a great option when taking this course, at least in an online format. I feel like some of his negative ratings are a result of the class just being hard, which is not his fault and can't really be avoided if you don't want to screw yourself over for future classes. His lectures aren't anything innovative but are very concise and helpful. I primarily learned the content from them and only referred to the textbook for particular examples. His homework load is relatively high but is expected in a math course and pertained to the lecture and test material. At least online, I would consider the difficulty level of his exams appropriate for the course material, which is difficult. They were a mix of conceptual and numerical, and I would not expect any free points from plug and chug questions. Overall, Filipazzi is a good choice for this class if you want to get the material under your belt for future classes and come out with a pretty good grade as well. If you really just want an easy A, there may be better choices. Also, his accent is awesome.
Overall: Filipazzi is a great teacher and lecturer who is good at explaining concepts and willing to take the extra time to help his students understand. However, he is not lenient in terms of grading or assignments whatsoever. For example, he wouldn't drop a quiz even though other professors dropped one or even two, he won't take late homework, not even for partial credit, etc. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, he just has expectations and won't budge on them.
Homework: due every Friday, drops 2. Some weeks' homework were significantly longer than others, but I'd say they generally took me about 3-5 hours.
Quizzes: 30 minute time limit and very conceptual. There is very small margin of error in terms of time and mistakes in general since they're only out of 10 points.
Exams: 24 hours, but VERY challenging. Midterms were supposed to take 50 minutes, but most people ended up taking 10+ hours. They are definitely way longer and harder than they need to be, which I have confirmed after seeing what exams are like in Math 32B. Many questions will cover topics learned in class, but with weird exceptions and other topics he did not cover in class. Additionally, the grading is super harsh. All I can say is SHOW ALL YOUR WORK because missing one small thing can make you lose half the points even if your answer is correct.
Taken online. Lectures move very quickly, though they are recorded and well-organized. Filipazzi doesn't use slides, he writes out everything, which I personally found to be quite helpful. In short, a pretty good lecturer. However, the quizzes (30 min) and tests (24hr) were often not at all like what we had done on the homework. To do well on them, you have to have a very good conceptual understanding and not just go through the motions, or you'll end up spending upwards of 15hr on the tests, like I did :/. HW is 20-40 textbook problems a week, usually ~3 very difficult problems, and 15% of the grade. If you get the chance, go for Patrick Hiatt's discussion section, the guy gives great explanations.
Taking this as an online course was really not a problem with this professor. He was very organized along with his TAs as they had everything planned out from the beginning and lecture formats were consistent and easy to follow. They also record everything that goes on and offer plenty of office hours. The professor has a slight accent but it was still easy to understand. The class is structured so that the lectures will cover most of the info and if there is uncertainty for homework problems one can read examples in the textbook. He assigns one homework assignment per week which takes about 2-4 hours to do. Including lectures and discussions, expect 6-10 hours each week dedicated to this class if you want to pass with a good grade. Homework problems come directly from the textbook and most are just good practice for the concepts covered in lectures. Some questions come from the challenge section of the textbook which is pretty hard but manageable if you ask during discussion sections. But don't let those questions discourage you because they usually do not matter for the quizzes, midterms, and final. Homework is checked for completeness as well as correctness but he only picks 3 problems to grade. He also drops 2 of the lowest homework grades at the end of the quarter so its not hard to get a perfect score on homework. Make sure to check your answers with the back of the book or slader so that you don't get docked. There are 3 quizzes total for the quarter and they are timed for 30 minutes but as long as you understand the concepts they are pretty easy. The midterms both had around 4-5 questions and of those questions there were usually 1 or 2 really tricky questions. He gives a 24 hour period to do the midterms (meaning you can spend 24 hours if you wanted) but even with that I was only able to get B's on the midterm. 1 question can really screw you up! I also usually spent the whole day on the midterm (excluding breaks and all it probably took around 4 hours to complete). Biggest advice on the midterms is to make sure you study even though it is a 24 hour period and open note. However, the final was definitely easier than the midterm considering I got a 98% on it and the same format goes for the final. Just make sure to also study for this one even though its 24 hours! He also ended up lowering the cut offs for the course which was really nice because I was at a borderline A- which he bumped up to an A. He seems a bit cold when he responds but he gets straight to the point. Email him if you have questions because he usually responds within minutes! Overall, take this teacher if you want an easy to follow class that as long as you put in the effort is not a hard A.
Grade distribution: 10% quizzes, 15% homework, 22.5% each midterm, 30% final
Quizzes:
There are three quizzes. Quizzes were mostly conceptual like many people said, so make sure you are firm on the conceptual aspects. But also make sure you can do the calculations. The averages were 88%, 74%, and 80% for quiz 1, 2, and 3.
Homework (5% correctness, 10% completeness, 1 pt for each problem, 6 pt for correctness for each hw):
There is one homework each week (so 10 hw's) with 20-30 problems. Sometimes there were less than 20 problems, but most of the time it was 20 to a little over 30 problems. Homeworks are totally manageable, but hard to finish in one day. They were due every Friday. He also picks three random problems for each hw and uses those to give you the grade for correctness. Recommend going to OH if you're stuck on a problem since some problems are more conceptual. He drops the two lowest hw scores at the end.
Midterm 1 (50 pts):
I personally did badly on this one, but it was due to my own mistakes. The average for midterm 1 was 87%, with a median of 90%. It was mostly about vectors and we hadn't touched the multivariable part yet, so most people did well. (104/200 people got A's)
Midterm 2 (50 pts):
This midterm was harder than the final (hardest out of the three tests). Both midterms were designed to take 50 minutes, but I and most students definitely took way more than that (like several hours). For me personally, limits were where I got most points off, so make sure you are solid on your limits and practice some difficult ones too. Also, make sure to state EVERYTHING. I got points off for not stating why a function is continuous (the question didn't explicitly ask that). The average was 76% with a median of 79%, so you can tell that it was the hardest.
Final (75 pts):
If I remember correctly, Filipazzi mentioned how some students emailed him saying how difficult midterm 2 was, so he took that into consideration. Idk if it's because of that, but the final wasn't as hard as expected. But make sure you know the conditions for applying certain methods. For example, many people didn't realize that the condition for using the chain rule definition of directional derivatives was that the function had to be differentiable at that point. Most people did well in the final. (121/201 people got an A) The average was 89% with a median of 92%.
Tests overall:
Tests were not unreasonably hard (it was a reasonable difficulty, but definitely not easy), but one con was that it took me several hours to do each test when it was designed to take less time.
Lectures:
Attendance is not mandatory, and it's recorded. He uses many examples and different versions of those can show up on tests, so make sure you understand each example. He asks students if they have a question and kindly explains, so don't be afraid to ask questions.
Discussion:
Discussion attendance rates were really low, and for me personally, it helped just a little but not that much. Attendance is not mandatory and it's also recorded.
Helpfulness:
Professor Filipazzi is very helpful and tries to answer everyone's questions in an easy way. After the first midterm, I emailed him saying how I was having a hard time in the class and that I don't know how to study, and he offered to have a personal meeting to address the problems that I was concerned about. I thought that was very nice of him. I did much better on the next two tests.
OVERALL:
I would take a class with him again because even though the material was hard, he tries his best to explain in an easy way and I can see that he cares about his students. I was expecting a B+ (88.38%) but it got rounded to an A-, so I'm really grateful for that.
Don't slack off if you did well on the first midterm otherwise the second midterm's gonna bite you in the butt. I only managed to scraped an A because Filipazzi had mercy and perhaps rounded up. My advice for this class would be to SHOW ALL WORK because I had a lot of points taken off for not showing enough work or not giving sufficient justification despite having correct answers.
The professor was pretty helpful and responds to emails. However, his classes are structured in a way that's quite hard for you to follow. Sometimes he talks about 1/2 of a section, sometimes 1/3, sometimes 1 whole section, or sometimes he would talk about 4/5 and give you the rest to read by yourself. Also, he does not have a clear rubric for the homework and quizzes. All he says is "show enough work". What is enough? What I've experienced is that doing something might be completely okay for the homework, but on the exams, they will give you ZERO POINTS because they say you didn't show enough work. The rubrics are VERY VAGUE.
Other fun fact, when the professor makes a mistake in class, he would send an email with almost cryptic code trying to explain the case, which makes you even more confused lol.
Also, the class has a lot of homework compared to other lectures with other professors. On average, I would say we had about 5-10 more questions EACH WEEK (and FYI, each question would sometimes take up a whole page or more so don't think 5-10 questions are trivial). Also, all the other professors were dropping a lowest quiz for this quarter but for some reason Filipazzi just decided not to do that...
To my CONFUSION, he had like a 4.5+ rating on Bruinwalk before. Anyways, this class is not very enjoyable and Filipazzi definitely does not deserve all the super high ratings he's gotten in the past.
This professor graded his exams extremely unfairly. He showed no mercy on midterm 2 which killed the grades of the majority of the class. All these good reviews you see on here are of students who are ultra math tryhards. If you are an ultra math tryhard then you will do great. If you consider yourself an average or barely above average math student like me, you will not get an A in this class. You will get a B if you are lucky. Steer clear of this professor if you value your sanity.
Professor Filipazzi was really hard for me. I spent a lot of time every week (10+ hours) trying to finish all of the homework he assigned while understanding the topic. I read all of the assigned textbook sections, and went to his lectures live, but I still struggled a lot during the 24 hour midterms. I guess people were doing really well with it, but I found the questions to be so so difficult and spent all 24 hours on the midterms, to still get a C- on both of my midterms. Luckily, I somehow did well on the final exam so I did way better in the class than I expected, but the class was still super challenging for me. His lectures were actually really clear and his handwriting is nice. For some reason the way he writes his f's translated into my handwriting, so now I write in all print with cursive f's lol. Anyways, he's alright, just a difficult class.
Filipazzi is a great option when taking this course, at least in an online format. I feel like some of his negative ratings are a result of the class just being hard, which is not his fault and can't really be avoided if you don't want to screw yourself over for future classes. His lectures aren't anything innovative but are very concise and helpful. I primarily learned the content from them and only referred to the textbook for particular examples. His homework load is relatively high but is expected in a math course and pertained to the lecture and test material. At least online, I would consider the difficulty level of his exams appropriate for the course material, which is difficult. They were a mix of conceptual and numerical, and I would not expect any free points from plug and chug questions. Overall, Filipazzi is a good choice for this class if you want to get the material under your belt for future classes and come out with a pretty good grade as well. If you really just want an easy A, there may be better choices. Also, his accent is awesome.
Overall: Filipazzi is a great teacher and lecturer who is good at explaining concepts and willing to take the extra time to help his students understand. However, he is not lenient in terms of grading or assignments whatsoever. For example, he wouldn't drop a quiz even though other professors dropped one or even two, he won't take late homework, not even for partial credit, etc. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, he just has expectations and won't budge on them.
Homework: due every Friday, drops 2. Some weeks' homework were significantly longer than others, but I'd say they generally took me about 3-5 hours.
Quizzes: 30 minute time limit and very conceptual. There is very small margin of error in terms of time and mistakes in general since they're only out of 10 points.
Exams: 24 hours, but VERY challenging. Midterms were supposed to take 50 minutes, but most people ended up taking 10+ hours. They are definitely way longer and harder than they need to be, which I have confirmed after seeing what exams are like in Math 32B. Many questions will cover topics learned in class, but with weird exceptions and other topics he did not cover in class. Additionally, the grading is super harsh. All I can say is SHOW ALL YOUR WORK because missing one small thing can make you lose half the points even if your answer is correct.
Taken online. Lectures move very quickly, though they are recorded and well-organized. Filipazzi doesn't use slides, he writes out everything, which I personally found to be quite helpful. In short, a pretty good lecturer. However, the quizzes (30 min) and tests (24hr) were often not at all like what we had done on the homework. To do well on them, you have to have a very good conceptual understanding and not just go through the motions, or you'll end up spending upwards of 15hr on the tests, like I did :/. HW is 20-40 textbook problems a week, usually ~3 very difficult problems, and 15% of the grade. If you get the chance, go for Patrick Hiatt's discussion section, the guy gives great explanations.
Taking this as an online course was really not a problem with this professor. He was very organized along with his TAs as they had everything planned out from the beginning and lecture formats were consistent and easy to follow. They also record everything that goes on and offer plenty of office hours. The professor has a slight accent but it was still easy to understand. The class is structured so that the lectures will cover most of the info and if there is uncertainty for homework problems one can read examples in the textbook. He assigns one homework assignment per week which takes about 2-4 hours to do. Including lectures and discussions, expect 6-10 hours each week dedicated to this class if you want to pass with a good grade. Homework problems come directly from the textbook and most are just good practice for the concepts covered in lectures. Some questions come from the challenge section of the textbook which is pretty hard but manageable if you ask during discussion sections. But don't let those questions discourage you because they usually do not matter for the quizzes, midterms, and final. Homework is checked for completeness as well as correctness but he only picks 3 problems to grade. He also drops 2 of the lowest homework grades at the end of the quarter so its not hard to get a perfect score on homework. Make sure to check your answers with the back of the book or slader so that you don't get docked. There are 3 quizzes total for the quarter and they are timed for 30 minutes but as long as you understand the concepts they are pretty easy. The midterms both had around 4-5 questions and of those questions there were usually 1 or 2 really tricky questions. He gives a 24 hour period to do the midterms (meaning you can spend 24 hours if you wanted) but even with that I was only able to get B's on the midterm. 1 question can really screw you up! I also usually spent the whole day on the midterm (excluding breaks and all it probably took around 4 hours to complete). Biggest advice on the midterms is to make sure you study even though it is a 24 hour period and open note. However, the final was definitely easier than the midterm considering I got a 98% on it and the same format goes for the final. Just make sure to also study for this one even though its 24 hours! He also ended up lowering the cut offs for the course which was really nice because I was at a borderline A- which he bumped up to an A. He seems a bit cold when he responds but he gets straight to the point. Email him if you have questions because he usually responds within minutes! Overall, take this teacher if you want an easy to follow class that as long as you put in the effort is not a hard A.
Based on 39 Users
TOP TAGS
- Tolerates Tardiness (22)
- Useful Textbooks (28)
- Needs Textbook (24)
- Appropriately Priced Materials (18)
- Tough Tests (23)
- Is Podcasted (15)
- Engaging Lectures (22)
- Would Take Again (19)