Mathematics · Columbia University
Weekly psets, 2 midterms, 1 final. I liked that there were 2 grading schemes: (A) HW 18%, midterms 42%, final 40%; (B) HW 18%, midterm (best of 2) 21%, final 61%. Grading scheme B was a little extreme but if your final went well it really helped, which happened to me luckily and I was able to drop my bad midterm. The homeworks took a while unfortunately, probably around 6-8 hours/week + going to office hours every week.
I know a lot of people who really didn't like Herrero's teaching but I didn't think his class was too bad if you figure out the right way to go about it. For me, it would've been really really hard if I never went to office hours, which most people didn't. Office hours saved me though because he'd always work out the problems we asked about and wasn't even shy about giving away answers. His lectures went a little fast and he packed a lot of material in, but he was always well prepared for them and wrote everything out on the board. The course covered basic Calc II stuff, and you get a lot of practice on it through the homework. The homework took longer than I would've liked but was always good practice for the exams.
Avoid at all costs!!! He places too much on theory, instead of actually teaching the content.
Two midterms, one cumulative final, all on big sheets of paper (open-note, so you can bring one/two double-sided pages of a cheat sheet with whatever you want on it). The final's avg was around 73% ... yeah. Also 9 weekly problem sets, usually one page of like 4-6 problems I think, due on GradeScope. Please don't make the same mistake as me and don't do them with pencil and paper—use a tablet and solve them digitally, this will save you a lot of erasing. The problem sets were sometimes unfair because I remember this one pset would be about something as outlandish as an electrical circuit, inductance, and other things that I've never heard about and our professor never once explained nor even gave us the formula for... he just assumed we knew how to calculate inductance. The professor's grading was nice, he tries to give you all the partial credit you can get. Also in office hours he gave me a cookie. But I do remember struggling long hours every week trying to solve the psets, feeling like I'm losing my marbles, so definitely if you do stick with him, seek out tutors, help from office hours, or go to the Barnard math help room in the "Salmasi Computational Science/Math Collaboration Space".
Didn't know what to expect, never had American calculus classes before. I came because it's a pre-med requirement and stayed for Herrero's personality and because I related to his Latino roots. He's often humorous and friendly. He would occasionally make little jokes and be in a good mood. However, I noticed that after the last change-class-day, half of the class was suddenly gone. A lot of people apparently dropped this section because he teaches wayy too fast. And I agree. He's a very smart guy, so he would breeze through all the material rapidly, maybe answering one or two questions on the way, but this of course made me feel left in the dust. I had to catch up using online resources and the textbook, and to be clear the textbook isn't that helpful with the kinds of math problems he assigns. I'm not an extraordinary genius, but at least pretty good at math, and still the limits and other problems he gave us on the exams were just kinda too hard for me and we barely had examples like them in class to be prepared to solve them on the tests. And as the another review says, he just doesn't teach in a very easily digestible way, especially at his tempo. He thankfully curves, because without it everyone would be in the dumps! I was excited for the content of Calc II because I'm a fan of blackpenredpen on YouTube, but really that's it. I remember taking the make-up final with him…
Not bad. Weekly PSets, 2 midterms, 1 final.
As someone who took AP Calculus BC in high school and finished with a good grade, I can confidently day that Andres was the absolute WORST professor I have ever had during my time at Columbia. He never finished his lessons because he would run out of time, would always email us at night apologizing for mistakes he made during the lecture notes, and would change homework problems the night before they were due because he would ALWAYS make some mistake on them. He is definitely a nice person and will answer any questions you ask him - that is not up to debate. BUT he is absolutely TERRIBLE at teaching. Take literally any other person teaching whatever course he is teaching your semester.
I learned integration, sequences and series, differential equations, and polar coordinates.
too much, a lot but defintely how to study how to do integrals
More complex integrals, series and summations, differential equations, and other things.