PONCE G
Lectures are incomprehensible, with completely illegible handwriting. Professor makes little effort to communicate with students. Homework is annoyingly lengthy. The only redeeming factor for this professor was a very easy final.
Super nice guy but lectures felt a bit all over the place and he did not explain small but key ideas that really made studying quite difficult. I don't think I learned much from this class even though I went to lecture and did HW but if I had kept up better I could have easily gotten an A because the final was light.
Gustavo Ponce's lectures can be quite hard to follow if you are trying to take notes while listening. I'd recommend just listening during the lecture and taking notes afterward. As long as you can grasp the problems and understand the homework, the midterm and final exam will be easy for you.
Midterms were easy, final was also easy but had no partial credit and very few problems. This causes so much unnecessary stress and puts too much emphasis on answers instead of understanding. Lectures were actually very useful, but only in the last month of class. He is not approachable and definitely does not care much about lower div classes.
Lectures are useless, he uses another's professor's slides, which he learns WHILE teaching. It is better to learn the material through self-studying the slides he posts. CLAS Canvas course is VERY useful, so sign up for that. Two easy midterms online, and a 50% final. Practice final was VERY hard, and not at all representative of the actual final.
Professor Ponce is a horrible lecturer. A heavy accent combined with incomprehensible handwriting makes it impossible to learn in class. The homework assignments are also rather difficult and tedious. The two online midterms and the in-person final were all reasonably easy, but Ponce's sheer teaching inability is impossible to ignore.
went to lecture once. honestly depends on how well your TA prepares you for exams. YH is an actual goat
Professor Ponce is NOT a good lecturer when it comes to this course. I and most others I knew in this course used CLAS, section, and YouTube to learn the content. However, his grading was very fair. He posted lecture material on Canvas, had two do-able online midterms, and though the final was 50% of our final grade it was very straightforward.
Ponce gets a bad rep for his lectures/accent, which is mostly justified. Despite this, he's a very chill professor who's lectures can be worth going to if they are not at 8am. Prepare to mostly self study, however. Homework load isn't too bad (20 q's/week), and if you have just a basic understanding of the material, the tests should be very easy.
8AM lectures were not helpful, so it doesn't matter if you go or not. I learned the entire course content from YouTube. The final was weighed 50%, literally thought I was going to fail because I do not know how to do any of the practice questions he sent. But turns out the questions on the final were just direct computations! Pretty chill overall.
Prof Ponce has a thick accent that can be hard to understand (especially if you are new to linear algebra and its vocab), and his handwriting is sloppy cursive. He gives 20 hw problems a week, however, lectures are often too concept-based or unrelated so you'll find you'll assistance understanding the problem types. The final is 50% of your grade.
Despite the efforts of the TA's and the Math Lab, myself and a lot of my peers struggled very hard in this class. The lecture's are hard to follow and the handwriting is very bad. Broad concepts that are critical for this course are not explained at all, only dense math material. The tests so far are fair, but if you fall behind you're toast.