Hey everyone!

Well, I found Math 1A03 (Calculus) to be my easiest course in first year. I think the reason is because a lot of the material covered in...

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Originally Posted by Inferno

Lmao, the exam was BRUTAL! Possibly the worst exam I've wrote in my entire life.
So much harder than the midterms.

Oh Jesus, I'm so glad I'm not the only one! I studied like a madmen, and I don't think I passed...

I hope they bellc urve it. >_<

Math 1A03 is an introductory first-year calculus course that covers differentiation and basic integration. The first-half of the course is strictly review, learning about derivatives, limits, and curvesketching, topics that you should have covered in Grade 12 Calc. The second-half is devoted purely to integrals, where you learn the different techniques (substitution, by parts, trig, partial fractions) as well as the various applications (area, volume, average value, work).

As a word of advice for the Life Sciences people, consider taking 1LS3 instead of 1A03. It covers more or less the same topics, but it goes at a slower pace, and is easier as well (class averages of high 70s versus mid 60s). As well, the textbook is definitely needed for this course, as you need to do the practice problems in order to be successful.

Keeping up in this course is vital to one's success. The topics usually build upon one another, and you need to do the supporting problems everyday to keep up with the material.

The instructor that I had was Dr. Lozinski. He was the course coordinator. I found him to be crystal clear in explaining concepts, although he was very dull at times. I usually wanted to sleep during Calc. He however, does post all his notes on ELM, which is a good plus. Tutorials are useless, as I had a useless TA. Go to the Math Help Centre if you ever need help in math, which is located in the basement of Hamilton Hall.

Course breakdown includes 2 midterms, a diagnostic test, online assignments plus the exam. The diagnostic test was worth 2%, and you get the 2% if you just complete it. Sweet, eh? The online assignments are worth 10%, and are released weekly. These assignments are found on WebAssign, and a good tool to reinforce what you've learned. There are multiple attempts allowed as well. Easy mark booster.

The midterms were all written answers, composed of 10 questions and are 1.5 hours in length. Most questions found on the midterm were representative of the practice problems found in the textbook. The last question on the midterm was one of those 'think outside of the box' questions, and is very challenging.
Class average fluctuated in the 60s. Worth 20% each.

There was no problem in getting a decent mark in the course before the final, if you kept up with the work, and did decent on the midterms. But the final is where it all falls apart.

My biggest gripe for this course is the final exam. Worth 48%, 20 questions, and 3 hours to do so. Seems easy enough, considering the midterms were pretty fair in my mind, right? WRONG. Holy, the content of the final seemed to come out of nowhere. The questions on the final were much HARDER than what I was expecting and were of no comparison to the midterm. Everyone I talked to after the exam were like 'WTF'. I also expected the exam to be slightly easier than the midterms, as 1/4 of my class failed the second one. I guess not. I'm really disappointed at how the instructors handled the exam.

Math 1A03 is a decent course. Not a huge workload, and I like doing math lol. Not as easy as people say it is.
Midterms are representative of what you'd expect from the textbook, final is NOT. So, watch out for that.

Inferno, just a small correction, the midterms were 1.5 hours long. ^^

Originally Posted by lawleypop

Inferno, just a small correction, the midterms were 1.5 hours long. ^^

Edited, thanks! My memory is getting a bit fuzzy.

I'll omit the introductory bit, since other members have covered that rather well, and go right to my experience with the course.

If you're in Life Science and you just want to take a math to fulfill your course requirements, do not take this course, take 1LS3. If you are genuinely interested in math and want to follow up with 1AA3, then this is a great course for you.

The first part of the course was simple (and rather boring) review. Note, however, that very little time is spent on techniques of differentiation relative to the 1LS3 course. You should be very familiar with differentiation for this class, since you'll be expected to use it in various techniques of integration. The majority of the course, however, was new material, which is where I think this year's course differed from previous year's courses as we had a different course co-ordinator.

I found that the key in this course was reviewing the material for the past few lectures daily - not too much was necessary, depending on how you learn. I'm not a big fan of actually writing everything out, and if you can keep up with the material, you should be able to just spend 10-15 minutes a day reviewing the practice problems in your head.

The midterms were straight-forward. If you keep up with the work, you should have no problem with them. The averages on the midterms were in the mid-60s, so the course marks were relatively similar to other first-year courses I took. Even if you do absolutely nothing (like I made the mistake of doing) the midterms shouldn't be too bad. Each midterm was 1.5 hours long, and had 10 questions split up into parts.

Personally, I found the final to be much easier (and more interesting) than the midterms. This is probably because I didn't actually follow the regime I described above until afterthe midterms. There were a couple of tricky questions, but most of those were just worth 3 marks (out of a possible 100). The final was 3 hours long, and had 20-odd questions split up into parts. I actually finished the final early - something I didn't do for the midterms.

Note that both midterms and the final were all written answers. There was no multiple choice - which on hindsight, may have been a tad easier...

I found my instructor, Dr. Lozinski, to be excellent. He was great for me, because I genuinely enjoy learning math - however, if you don't like math you might find him a bit dry. I went to one tutorial throughout the course, as I found my TA to be very boring. Lectures are important, but I didn't find tutorials to be as useful as they were in courses like chemistry 1A03.

Overall, math 1A03 was not quite as easy as the pre-2009 reviews make it seem, but was not particularly difficult either. If you keep up with the concepts, you should have no problem doing well in it.

Hey y'all.
I have decided to upload notes/tests/etc to Megaupload, pertaining to the Fall 2009 session (Lozinski). If the link becomes dead, PM me and I shall re-upload them.

LINK: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9X1Y9B8V

For molecular biology and genetics, do you require 1AO3/1AA3 in higher years or can you make do with 1LS3? What about for biochemistry?

How are Haskell.D and Barto.L, compared to Lozinski?

I've heard a lot of pretty good things about Lozinski, but Barto and Haskell are amazing profs as well.

Math 1A03 was pretty cool. It is not easy and leaves very little room for slacking but if u understand it u will like it. And also thank God for the 90% exams

does anyone know for sure if you didn't do well on the quizzes or the tests before the final exam, but if you do better on the final, is that going to be your final mark weight 90% or 100%? Applied for 1X03 as well? BTW the prof this term is Dr.Lovric, so i dont know if he still uses that alternative marking system. thanks

How is Professor Yang, is this teacher new? I can't find the name on rate my prof or course review
By the way how is the course been last year, I had a 90% average for calculus, do you think i would do well in this course?

Originally Posted by mm99mm

How is Professor Yang, is this teacher new? I can't find the name on rate my prof or course review
By the way how is the course been last year, I had a 90% average for calculus, do you think i would do well in this course?

First, no idea about Dr. Yang. I never heard about him in 1A03 so I think he is new to that course.

Second, your grade from high school depends on how 'hard' your course was. For instance, if it was AP Calculus, then I would say that your chances of doing well is high with a 90% grade. It is difficult to say if you will do well because it depends on how much you have learned in high school and the work ethic you were put through in high school. If you learned integration and learned revolutions to calculate volume, then you should be in good shape. If not, then make sure to attend tutorials and use the math help centre to the fullest.

Best of luck.

Originally had Yang but I switched out cuz his accent was too much for me and he wasn't able to answer questions because he didn't understand the questions and then when he gave a response it usually didn't answer the question... So I got Dr. Childs.

I hated Dr. Childs. He made way too many mistakes on the board. If you're not paying attention and just blindly copying notes you're gonna get wrecked unless you double check what you've written with what's in the textbook. The amount of mistakes he makes in each lecture is unacceptable in my opinion. Childs sometimes would give maybe 1 or 2 more examples that were not in the textbook and these extra examples were usually directed towards how to do your weekly assignment question. Also some of his explanations were "wtf" moments and the way he approached doing some questions were long, tedious and confusing. Also some examples he gave involved guessing and checking. So basically the only upside to Childs was that he would teach you everything you needed to know to do your weekly assignment and that he spoke English.

Assignments were straightforward. You get three attempts per question and you should be getting perfect on every assignment. It doesn't hurt to ask for help if you don't know how to do the questions. You should be doing the textbook questions before doing the assignment though because there are questions in the textbook that are similar. A lot people keep crying saying they don't know how to do the assignment questions and guess answers and then get everything wrong and then I ask if they did the textbook questions and they say "no I don't have time". K sux 2 b u.

The course was pretty easy for me. Most of the stuff was from high school. I don't know why but some people still couldn't take derivatives even after doing it in 4U Functions and Calc and once again here in this course...In general I noticed a lot of people who did regular high school math had trouble. I came from a high school where we had somewhat of an extended math program so we had learned integration and all the techniques in detail already. Generally it's those who didn't do extra math in high school or do AP Calculus that struggled usually later in the course (or those who don't do their homework).

I guess it was a different perspective of math. I noticed that it was normal for guess-and-check or 'estimate' questions to show up. I wasn't used to that coming from a school that taught pure math and approached questions using actual math.

You also get to feel good about yourself because Math 1A03 is the exact same as Math 1ZA3 just different course code. So yes, you're taking engineering level math. And you have the same tests, assignments and exams. You can even do math homework together. Also the class average for each test that is displayed is the average of all 1A03+1ZA3 students together, not just 1A03.

In conclusion: Childs needs get his shit together. Do your homework every weekend and you should be fine.

With regards to assignments and labs, are they done individually? Would you say that questions are easier or harder than test/exam questions? and how was the exam for the course fair? What would be your advice for someone taking this course who isn't as strong in Math?