The 170E taught by the vice undergrad dept chair is definitely a unique experience to me. He skipped some material such as conditional pdf and expectations and said this will not cause any problem when we take 170S. He is a nice instructor who gave fair midterms and hard final(26-page long), and we indeed learn stuff from him. Unfortunately he does not teach the sequel. Not only I but also many of my friends began to miss him after finding those who actually give lectures for the sequel of 170E did a way less fantastic job than him.

For 266A, professor Roper is a great teacher and eager to help students, and he is generally clear on courses materials. He can be occasional late in class, but I find that understandable since he can be occupied by his daughter at times. The only con is that he seems never prepare for classes, and can sometimes confuse himself in some proofs (also higher possibility of typos in notes). The tests are fair for a graduate course, and I believe he curved a lot to give out more A’s.

TLDR: Roper graded much harsher than expected for a lower division math course and he is not very transparent about grading. Typically, you see an average of B or maybe B+, but he intentionally set his at a B- following the math department guidelines. Alot of work for a class that you still might get a B+- in. Don't recommend, if you can take Marsden she is much better, don't take Roper.

His class goes something like: flipped classroom, so you get to watch around 4 lecture videos averaging like 35 minutes of watch time before each class(He does post the notes for these videos and typically for me reading through them was perfectly fine for understanding the days lecture/worksheet), and then for each class you would get a worksheet, and he would go review some topics learned through the video, and then go through as much of the worksheet. He hosts quizzes every week that are pass/fail, if you get above a 75% or around that score you would get full credit for that quiz, and you needed to get 8 passes out of 9 quizzes to get full 24% of your grade. His lectures are ok, they aren't usually very insightful. If you do go, you will see he tries to get participation out of as many people as possible by asking menial questions, and having like quick finger polls in class about the worksheet, and more. He also grills most of the class for only showing up for quizzes, with around 10 students showing up just for quizzes, but the vast difference between quiz days and non quiz days was very evident on the value of his lecture that most people took( and maybe that his lecture was at 9am in Bunche)
His homework was posted after every lecture, and was on Pearson. If you have ever used Pearson for math or physics you might know how dumb that site is for homework purposes. Even though he was posting homework after every lecture, Each set would have an average of 10 questions, albeit some of the times they didn't take much actual work and maybe like 20 minutes to complete the homework, some sets were extremely tedious and taking just brute force/equation plug and chug took upwards of an hour and a half.
In return for having to watch the flipped class room lecture videos, he removed discussion sections, and instead he chose to have optional 1-1( usually 3 people could sign up for one time slot of thirty minutes) office hour meetings with the TAs during the time that there would be discussion, Our TAs were wonderful. Both were helpful in explaining homework and the content gone over in class. I personally couldn't bother them with the Midterm or the final because I think the way Roper has them, they do more work overall than a typical discussion section would be( but thats just me).

His exams are stupid hard, with our midterm having an median of 25, and 4 points above and below being upper and lower quartiles. This in itself was not a great sign since his grading scheme made it so if you "failed" the midterm, the final would come and cover the 22% that the midterm made up. However, basically 75% of the class got below 70% on the midterm given that distribution which in itself is a terrible average for a lower division math course. (What is this, an honor course?) ( And note my class had around 140 people taking the class, which means this 75% is 105 students.) His grading for this exam was also not made clear after the fact. He didn't curve, but instead chose to grade by mastery of questions, grading questions individually, and then perhaps weighting based off difficulty in the class, but this "mastery" grade was not shown to anyone, and was told to the students who went up him during office hours and specifically asked. This made knowing how well you were doing in the class difficult/ impossible. The final was a similar deal, He achieved a BARELY higher mean/median of 64.59/66.5 with a std of 19 out of 106. He also this time sent a message about the grading scheme 2 weeks after the final was taken( well into summer break). And this message was not taken well even while being sent 2 weeks into breaks, many students on Piazza expressed some confusion, and outrage against the transparency and harsh grading. He states that his grading scheme is a "mastery based" grading scheme which consisted of grading each question as I wrote above. But, if you think about this, there is no mastery being tested, losing one or two or three points on a question to not explicitly writing an equation, or not doing the math right, isn't a failure to master the content its just a simple mistake. I did one of the questions on the final and got 3/10 points. It was for a second order differential equation. I did it an alternate way, but did my math wrong and lost all my points through not going the way he intended, and on top of that getting my math wrong lead to the wrong answer of course losing me points. But surely I did my method right, but he doesn't care to grade you enough partial. So from his grading scheme I "failed to master" this section of the content, yet my methods were all right. This question specifically was one which we had to spend hours on homework bashing through the 15 questions given on Pearson, and yet one mistake on my part led to a failure of mastery in his eyes. Absolute bull.
Now my stats were that I did every homework completely except for 1(which I forgot) and got a 29/42 on the midterm and a 75/106 on the final, and got 9 passes for the quizzes, and that got me a B. There have been people sharing stats on piazza, who got much higher scores and barely got higher grades than me, one such example, a student got a 34/42, and 93/106, and only 7 passes on quizzes got a B+ both raw and final( tough luck, I think that 8 passes might have gotten you an A).
All these numbers and Roper, for his final trick, curved the average to a B-, which means that were dependent on a curve were given some shitty curve to a B-. I didn't feel this curve, and it didn't feel like a curve at all. There was no 20% increase in the average for me it felt like maybe 4 %

Oml this class. Never have I ever expected that I would get above the median score for BOTH the midterm and the final (57% vs 67% and 63% vs 68% respectively) to receive a C+ in the class, below the median grade of a B-. I truly don’t understand it, instead of curving like a normal professor he decides to invent a grading scheme where he decides your score based on mastery of certain questions on the final, he didn’t even tell us about this grading scheme until AFTER the final. Grading for mastery would be fine, only if the questions were normal and the grading made sense. For example, for a question on the final we were given a differential equation that we were expected to solve then write the answer in the form y(x)=… I use the proper technique to integrate this problem, I integrate everything correctly, but because I didn’t isolate the y, I only earned 6.5/10 points, which according to him doesn’t show mastery, despite doing the integration correctly. Because I did was not perform the ALGEBRA of isolating the y correctly, this question did not count towards my mastery when calculating my final grade. It’s actually ridiculous. Pls don’t take this class if u care about your gpa, I’ve taken hard classes where the median grades are also a B- (ochem) and I’ve gotten an A in both Math 32A and 33A, I know this isn’t how a class should be. So much work and effort for nothing. Please choose a different professor to take Math 33B with.

The course load and level of understanding expected of students are ridiculous for a LOWER DIVISION math GE.

Every week consisted of three 10-15 question courses from Pearson that weren't reflective of the course content whatsoever because the professor doesn't teach based on the textbook. The problems given were also tedious and time-consuming for no particular reason, and the professor simply stated that he had "no control." We had a weekly quiz that despite the fact we only needed a 75% to score a 100% were extremely stressful and time-consuming to study for prior to class due to the harshness of grading and question complexity. The professor even said himself he wouldn't give us quiz-level questions on the exams because they were out of scope. To add on top of that we had 30 minute sometimes even close to 50 minute videos to watch before EVERY SINGLE LECTURE, and to thoroughly understand and take notes on the content, you obviously have to spend so much more time. Worksheets were given during class, and those were what helped me the most, but the caveat is that no solutions are posted and he doesn't even complete the worksheet during class. He skips questions or doesn't even finish. Overall, I believe this course is structured in a way that neglects the fact students are balancing two or more other equally difficult courses, and cannot dedicate every second of their free time to mastering the content.

While exams contained a mixture of questions with formats we'd seen before and harder conceptual problems, the way they were graded were so unnecessarily harsh that making 1 simple algebraical mistake would land you at a 6/10 or even 4/10 depending on where that mistake was made. This led to exam averages of 57% and a 62% respectively, which is ridiculous again, because this is a lower division math course. Furthermore exams were curved based on our "personal mastery" of the course topics which basically meant your grade was scaled based on how many questions you showed "complete mastery" over.

Students taking these classes simply do not have the bandwidth to cover the content expected of them, and my greatest advice is to wait until another professor who isn't Roper teaches the course. You will understand the content just the same and walk away with a grade that reflects the effort you put in.

This class was the most difficult lower div math course I've taken, I've never had such a hard time navigating a math class. His flipped classroom structure was horrible, he would post like 4-5 30 minute videos as pre-study for each lecture which would end up being super disorganized and unhelpful since he didn't spend very much time doing examples in these problems, and focused way too much on concepts. He also talked super slow in these videos I would have to play them at 1.75x or 2x speed. He never fully explained how he was going to manage the midterm and final grades (because the average was D/F range for both), but I feel as if the grade I received was harsher than the one I deserved since I felt like this class required so much work and little reward.

Professor is very kind. Flipped classroom structure is a little weird but for those who watch the lecture videos, supplement there learning with class attendance and practice it is not hard to do well. The workload was fine for reference here is what a typical week look like

3 Content Videos to Watch (MWF) each which may have subvideos but the total runtime of videos per week never exceeded 2 hours (it got longer towards the end for more complex topics). I watch them on 2x speed he goes a little slow

The exams were reflective of material taught throughout the quarter and the professor is very nice during office hours.

I do agree he should have been more transparent with the grading scheme.

Overall I feel like the class was pretty interesting. The professor did a flipped class so I ended up just watching the videos he posted, which were helpful but a little unstructured. The professor is nice and explains the concepts well, he feels average among the math professors I had classes with. Only downside would be having three pearson assignments a week.

The professor was nice, but his exams and grading were terrible. He refused to give more than a vague "explanation" for how he would calculate final grades; he only posted a breakdown of his grading after releasing final grades and seeing dozens of complaints on Piazza (and perhaps on this page, too). I feel betrayed by Professor Roper. He was being quite passive-aggressive towards students on Piazza, but I personally attended almost every lecture and spent more time on this class than on all 3 of my other math classes this quarter—combined. That was an exaggeration, but I earned an A in 32B, 33A, and 61 with relatively zero work or stress this quarter. I can't believe I spent so much time on a class, only to be let down by a professor who doesn't understand how important grades are to some students like me.

I do enjoy his handwriting. Also, he once mentioned that he performed experiments on a tank of zebra fish until they all died. Just some food for thought.

i made a bruinwalk account just to leave this review:

this class had the worst workload out of all the MATH3XA/B classes ive taken, and the assessments were disgustingly unfair in my opinion. the weekly quizzes did not at ALL reflect the difficulty of the midterm or final. the fact that there was homework attached to every lecture made for an insane workload, especially since the Pearson platform pulls the most inconvenient numerical values for computation out of its ass to the point where it would sometimes take me several hours to do one problem set. add onto this the fact that you had to watch flipped lectures before each in-person lecture (i.e. three times a week), and after week 5 ONE in-person lecture could correspond to THREE thirty-minute+ long videos meant that this class consumed a crazy amount of time for a lower division mathematics course. i went to 2 out of the 3 OHs every single week in order to keep up with the demands of the course, and clearly that wasn't even enough. additionally, the instruction in the course was meticulous but not at all in the right ways – a lot of emphasis was put on theory, when that time could be better used working on worksheets whose problems are actually in-line with the difficulty of the assessments worth 2/3rds of our grade. im not even sure what i could've done differently for this course if i had to take it again, besides not take it at all