Personally never went to lectures and studied off of the textbook. If you understand the textbook content and practice exams well, you'll do fine. Weekly homework and discussion homework, but the discussion homework is gone over during discussion. Previous midterms/finals are very similar to what's given (but with a twist that can change the answer to the question). There are three grading schemes, one being considering both midterms, considering only one midterm, and considering just the final. This means that theoretically if you got a 100 on the homework and discussion, and you failed both midterms, you would just need a 90 on the final to get an A.

the class is very abstract and its important to conceptually understand the topics. The professor is really bad , and is all over the place. The homeworks are pretty chill tho which I like. Overall good class, and sets u up for future linear algebra based classes.

His midterms were very conceptual rather than computational. The homework was super reasonable and discussions weren’t mandatory, but you do have to turn in an worksheet

Very confusing lectures and midterms were too long for 50 mins

Ocal is decent at teaching the material and makes himself available and is a generally a compromising person. His exams aren't curved, but they're fair (averages in the 70s, I believe). Don't believe the low BruinWalk ratings, he deserves better for sure. I think he's been making a consistent effort to improve his teaching since the online Covid era.

Make sure to read the textbook, and if you don't go to lecture, watch his recordings. Many of the exam questions are ripped straight from the textbook, so it'd help to familiarize yourself with both the homework problems and other non-homework problems in the book.

Lectures: The lectures themselves were decently well organized and you can tell the professor enjoys teaching and learning this content. However, the content is a little confusing to learn by itself. There is some confusing vocab ("orthonormal" vs "orthogonal"?) and it's hard to understand how concepts work without doing the homework.

Definitely recommend doing the homework, the recommended problems (if you have time), and reading through the textbook to really understand these concepts.

Midterm 1 was difficult, and most people didn't do well as it was based on recommended problems rather than the homework. Midterm 2 was much more fair and doable based on homework alone. Final was very plug-and-chug, as long as you knew the concepts it just took a lot of computation to get to the final answer. Nothing too hard or unexpected conceptually.

During this quarter, you could choose to drop 1 midterm.

Props to the professor for responding to feedback and adjusting his midterm/teaching style after the first midterm.

Pablo is ok, he doesn't teach lectures too well but somewhat understandable. If you have no other classes to take then take this

Somewhat easy class, if you can keep on eye on homework and prep test, you'll get a

I self-studied almost all the content for this course. There were recordings but it was difficult to figure out what was on the board and what Pablo was saying. The good thing about him is that his exams had the same format as questions in the textbooks (and sometimes there were exact same questions).