Overall, the class was not an enjoyable experience. Sokolich is not a great lecturer as he often rushes through the material and does not care if his students actually understand what he is talking about. He says that the class's material is very dense, therefore, he only covers important concepts in class and expects us to learn about the unimportant stuff from the textbook. Speaking of the textbook, the textbook used for this class is easily the worst textbook I have read in my life. The textbook tries to get in-depth into every single concept and derive every formula in blocks of text, which makes the material a lot more confusing. Sokolich's HW is taken straight from the textbook but slightly modified. There is a solution manual you may find online, but because the textbook is terribly written, most of the solutions lack explanation and even use formulas you will never find in the textbook. Anyways, the HW is not very helpful for succeeding in this class, so you might as well just copy down the solutions and chatGPT everything you don't understand. The TA for this class, Eilam, is the only good thing about the class. He is very knowledgeable about the material and goes out of his way to answer our questions. Going to his OH really helped me a lot. Also, participation grade is a lot in the class. Make sure to do the in-class polls even if you skip class and participate on piazza as much as possible.
In order to get a good grade in this class, you basically just need to get above average on both the midterm and final. Sokolich's exams are pretty much copy and paste from his previous exams. There are some past midterms from a test bank that you can find online, I highly suggest you go over all of them in addition to the ones he provides you on Canvas. Since there are no past finals in the test bank, I suggest you just do the practice final he provides you on Canvas and put down every question on your cheatsheet. For our final, the free response questions are very similar to the ones on the practice final.