The reviews for Professor Palmer do not give him justice. He is an excellent professor and I would recommend anybody take him for Math 33b. To start, his lectures do not go very fast and he does example problems, so if you struggle with math he is your guy. The homework is 5-6 problems from the textbook per week, very easy. He posts his detailed typed lecture notes onto bruinwalk so if you did not understand how to do something in lecture you can read them there.

In terms of exams, he is very fair and easy. There are no trick questions; everything is similar to homework. He posts a practice test and practice problems as well which are very similar to the actual test. His grading scheme is generous as well, so if you do bad on one exam you can recover and still receive an A in the class.

On top of all of this, Professor Palmer gives you 5 percent extra credit on your final grade if you complete a basic coding project. As a math major who has taken a decent amount of both upper divs and lower div math (this is my last lower div), I can say I have never had a professor give this much extra credit. He honestly did not have to give any extra credit, everything was completely fair and easy without it.

The reviews on this sub (as I am writing this review he has a 2.0), are just frankly ridiculous. Do not judge this man, he does his best to students and you can tell he cares. He answers emails, questions, and teaches you applications in coding and math. Great Professor would take again.

I found Palmer to be very helpful in explaining topics, and often it was easier to understand him than the textbook (especially for Chapter 10). I went to OH and he does a decent job at explaining questions I had and making sure I understand. He talks kind of slow in class but it's not a big deal for me. The exams were VERY fair, literally the average for Midterm 2 was 38/40. He allows a 1 page front-back handwritten cheatsheet and calculator for every exam so honestly the exams were fairly easy. Most of the problems on the exam are problems we have typically encountered in class, just with different numbers. He also offers extra credit (computing the math problems using Google Colab), and the extra credit opportunities were also very fair and easy--unless you don't have any coding background, but the syntax is fairly easy to pick up once you finish the first Computing Homework. I would take a class with him again.

I would recommend Professor Palmer for Math 33B. His lectures are clear, although the pace feels slightly slow at times. Furthermore, he is helpful and approachable whenever I ask him questions after class. There are 6 homework questions per week, including 1 question that is slightly more challenging, but he only grades 2/6 of them. Best of all, he gives 5% extra credit for completing 3 optional computational homework assignments, mostly on solving ODEs and plotting solution curves using Python. Exams are fair, although the Final was rather tough, which caught most of us by surprise given how easy Midterm 2 was.

The final grade distribution was insane. You needed over a 100% to receive an A+.

Prof Palmer is not the best lecturer, his pacing is a bit weird and it was hard for me to get the main points as he would spend a lot of time going through complicated examples rather than stress the main ideas of the topic. Fortunately the textbook + Youtube helped with any confusion. Lectures were not recorded but as long as you keep up with the appropriate section in the textbook, you should be fine. The final was harder than the midterms and took a lot of us by surprise (the mean was 76%). To be prepared for all outcomes, I highly recommend doing the extra credit, which is three computational homeworks that in total can add 5% to your overall grade (!)

So I actually had Palmer for 171 and he was an absolute nightmare. Almost as bad as Tianqi Wu. His lectures are very unpaced as he will tend to breeze past important information and then go off on a useless tangent almost every other class. His homework is difficult (he is rude to those who ask questions on it) and very convoluted when the tests end up being nothing like homework. Midterm 1 is easy, so you should make sure you get 100% on that. Midterm 2 is nothing like midterm one in terms of difficulty or types of questions. The final was extremely difficult and nothing like midterm 1 or 2. I had a PhD tutor for the final, and he often was confused about how unclear the instructions on the homework and exam/final prac questions were. He gave the previous quarter an 8% extra credit assignment but for some reason, we did not get that option...

TLDR; Convoluted and pedantic professor that is rude, awkward, and looks like a creep

Prof Palmer goes very slow, in fact, a bit too slow. He is also not confident and the lectures became nap time. The tests were ok, the homework were a good representation of test material, but it was a boring class, so I just studied off the textbook.