[lizbeth]

Course material: calculus - continuing differentiation from high school and integration. In fall 2014, this was the same course as Math 1A03, same midterms, assignments, everything.

Professor: Dr. Ruipeng Shen is a goof prof, easy to understand. He has a noticeable accent, but it's not too hard to understand; sometimes it's funny though.

Textbook: probably not worth the money; I didn't buy it; sites likes Patrick JMT, Tarrou's Chalk, Khan Academy and Dr. Shen's lecture notes are sufficient. The link is ms.mcmaster.ca/~rpshen/1ZA3/ I'm not sure how long the link will work, but it's there. There are also practice questions and practice exams on the actual course website. ms.mcmaster.ca/childsa/1za3.html

Assignments: Online assignments are good practice for the exam, so do them even though they are not worth much. About half of the assignments are Maple labs; the rest are problems sets. Since Maple is available on campus computer labs, there is no need to buy it though.

Exams: Two midterms and a final; you need to memorize all your formulas. It's all multiple choice, but there are no surprises; everything is covered in class. There is also Maple code on the exams. Especially on the midterms, there is no time to waste (about 20 questions in 75 minutes) so do lots of practice problems to make sure you know exactly what you are doing. The Khan Academy has a lot of practice questions, so if you didn't get the textbook, you can do those.

I took 1ZA3 with Dr. Tran. His notes were pretty good but I found his english hard to understand so I ended up going to Dr. Child's lectures instead. He's okay, but I find him unnecessarily sarcastic and he tends to only demonstrate the hardest possible questions.

I'm not that great at math (80% in calculus in highschool), so my experience in this course was mostly negative.

It's true that you basically need to memorize all the formulas you come across in this course, especially trig identities. On midterms and exams they tend to stuff plenty of "tricks" into each question. That is, you need to recognize the alphabet soup you're staring at is really a trig identity, and if you don't see it you're probably screwed for that question. A sizable chunk of the questions are like this, and it was a source of deep frustration for me when exams came around and I realized there were no shortcuts: you just have to memorize everything.

All evaluations are multiple choice, including online assignments and labs. Thankfully, we have 3 attempts per question for the online assigments. They are somewhat more difficult than the midterms and exams, and each assignment took me ~2-3 hours to complete.

On that note, if you're not super good at math like me, be sure to do well on all the online assignments!!!! They aren't too difficult to perfect because you have infinite time, 3 chances per question, and you have wolfram alpha/maple to help you out. In my case, a few questions from these assignments made the difference between pass/fail, since the midterms and exams were especially brutal.