Avoid this professor, take anyone else. In lectures he repeats what the textbook says and talks really slowly. I had to watch recorded lectures in 1.75 X speed to understand. He doesn’t explain how topics connect to each other or why it works. His practice tests don’t reflect what will be on the exam. I studied for hours for each test and still didn’t do well. I asked him what I could do to study better and he told me that if I had actually redone homework problems I would have done better. When I told him that I did fully redo homework problems to study (in an email) he never responded. Before our final he laughed about how easy this test should be but the average was a 62. Don’t take this professor or you will have to spend hours outside of class teaching yourself the entire course.

Do anything you possibly can to avoid Xiong. Everything is self-study and the midterm average is a C. It is not worth the stress.

His lectures are not always super easy to understand, but he records and uploads all lectures and slides to Bruinlearn so class isn't mandatory at all. His midterms were easier than his final, but it was doable. Overall, I thought his class and grading was pretty fair. He curved overall grades at the end.

Haoren was not helpful when it came to understanding content. Most of the material you will have to learn on your own with little to no clarification from Xiong. His lectures often over complicate rather easy concepts, compared to an outside source, such as a YouTube video, might explain the topic. Midterms were nothing similar to the practice and often focus on smaller concepts not focused on in lecture. Both Midterms had a class average barely over 70%, with most people finding the same struggles. However, the work load was not too overwhelming, with about 10 homework problems a week. I would not recommend Xiong as a 31B professor unless you are ready to spend lots of hours teaching yourself.

I would not really recommend taking this class if you didn’t take AP Calc BC in high school. Xiong’s way of teaching doesn’t really help if you don’t already have a background in Calc 2. He hardly does any examples during his lessons and when he does he leaves them unfinished for you to “do them on your own time”. His monotone voice also doesn’t help very much so I would suggest sitting at or near the front if you want any chance of understanding him. His exams are very hard and his exams often have a very low average score. Wouldn’t recommend taking this class.

Honestly this class isn't terrible, you just have to do a lot of legwork. It's pretty hard to understand the professor during lectures because he has a monotone voice and does not explain little things like how he got from step 1 to step 2, which led me to a lot of confusion later on. If you try hard to absorb as much material as you can during lecture and then watch youtube videos on the subject from Steve Crow or The Organic Chemistry Tutor you will be fine. This class is not impossible and the amount of homework given is very reasonable (around 12-15 questions per week or even over a week), just make sure to independently watch videos on the content and do a lot of practice questions to prepare for the exams.

He seems like a nice guy but a bad lecturer. The way he explains material can be confusing and often it takes the TAs explaining it to better understand. Take another professor if you can. His tests are difficult, but he curves so the average is around a B.

Tests were often much more difficult than the practice materials and you will end up mostly teaching yourself the material as his lecture style isnt very effective. He often jumps from topic to topic not fully explaining their interconnection (especially when it really matters).

This was my first math class at UCLA and I’m glad it was. I had a background of Calc BC, however this class had a few more topics I wasn’t exposed to before, and the topics I did know, were an amplified/more advanced version in this class. Our professor was nice, and gave a manageable workload. everything on the exams was covered in class, so it’s important to understand everything he covers. He did spend time going through proofs we don’t need which was interesting, but I didn’t mind. The structure of the class was very great and the TA’s were very supportive, and always returned our homework with marks on our errors. I regret not spending more time reviewing my homework’s errors and practice exams he posted, but alas passing was still manageable. I recommend!

In my opinion, the professor really had no impact on how I performed in this class. While Xiong is really nice and is always open to answering questions from students, there it ultimately not much to be gained by attending lectures, which you realize after attending a few. The lectures are very proof-heavy, which is great if you're interested in that kind of stuff. However, if you're like me and are only taking this class to fulfill a requirement, it doesn't make sense to know those things. 90% of the content in lectures won't be tested, you only need to know how to do the example problems. Lectures are recorded so I stopped attending lectures 3 weeks in, but I was still able to get an A by using online resources (my lord and savior The Organic Chemistry Tutor) and attending discussions/review sessions. Weekly discussion sections weren't mandatory, but I found them to be extremely helpful. My TA Cecelia was amazing and I definitely owe it to her that I was able to do well in this course. I highly recommend attending discussions, office hours, and review sessions organized by the TAs.

In terms of the workload, this class has one of the lightest workloads ever. There are 7 assignments total, each due a week or two apart. Each one has fewer than 10 questions, and problems are gradually assigned over the course of the week (2 or 3 after each lecture) so it's really easy to space them out and manage your time.

The grading scheme is very test-heavy, which is to be expected from most math courses. However, the midterms were not too bad, especially since Xiong provides practice midterms which are very similar in content and difficulty as the actual midterm. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for the final. Though a practice final was provided, the actual final was significantly harder and there were some curveball questions. I recommend doing the practice midterms (time yourself and take them like you would take a real midterm) because they will give you a pretty accurate idea of where you're at.

Honestly, how well you perform in this class is really just based on how good you are at math. You will probably have to teach yourself the entire curriculum, but it was manageable in my experience.