<p>Oh, hehe...have fun in Engin 100/101...I heard those those are just dandy...</p>
<p>Don't really feel like reading all the posts before, so I'll tell you what I think even if it's redundant.
The worst GSIs are in the lower level math classes (Math 115-216). They flat out suck. My first one was the harshest grader ever. I couldn't understand a word my second GSI ever said. He didn't even write legibly.
I loved my chem lab GSIs. They know what their doing and they are nice. Most can speak english.
My great books gsis were cool too. they were both very approachable.</p>
<p>Most GSIs in my experience have been good, but you can always go to another GSI for help/ switch sections if things don't work out. I would ask around for which profs are reccomended for certain classes if there are classes in which multiple profs teach the class. Econ 101 comes to mind as well as Psych 111 --> two classes than can harder due to profs teaching style/ exam structure</p>
<p>ratemyprofessors.com</p>
<p>For Calc classes, do the Applied Honors sequence. Math 156, 255. The classes are definitely graded easier. I got an A in 156 and A- in 255.</p>
<p>Get Daihai He for Applied Honors Calc II!</p>
<p>If you do Math 215, which i would highly advise against, get Stephen Debacker. He is probably my second or third best professor so far (after Masato Koreeda and maybe HD Cameron). Debacker is tough, but his curves are leneint, and he really knows what he is doing.</p>
<p>If you're in engineering you might have an easier time. I talked to some EE juniors in March and they told me that a lot of classes get a bad reputation because of the LSA kids taking them. I lol'ed.</p>
<p>Engineering kids like to think they're soooo much smarter than all LSA kids. Hmphers. I'll give them that they're smarter than most...but not all, not all.</p>
<p>Christine, what did you think of 295/296? Are you continuing on with 395/396? DeBecker will be the prof for 295 this fall - any opinions about him?
(My apologies for diverting the thread, your understanding is appreciated)</p>
<p>295/296 is good if you want to do math, but you have to actually, really and truly be good, I suppose. About half the class drops 295 and then another half of the class drops 296. I'm continuing with 395, although Conrad teaching kind of scares me... DeBacker is known to be good, but tough...and Dilksy had him and is probably better qualified to answer this question.</p>
<p>I had Debacker for math 295/296, and along with math 395/396 from Conrad, and they were probably the four best courses I've taken at Michigan. Math 296 was the first class I actually needed to take notes in regularly (most other classes get less than 5 pages of notes taken sporadically throughout the year). About half the kids dropped after 295 (we were told that a B+ was a nice way of saying you probably shouldn't consider continuing the sequence), and then only the really serious people were left. Two people dropped after 296 (one of which was a compsci person;she said she wanted to do more practical things, but we really think she wasn't handling having to actually work for a class that well. She came to Michigan because she didn't think the Ivies offered her enough money. The other one was my friend from HS who I was dual enrolling with, who ended up getting a full ride to Caltech), and one dropped sometime in the middle of 395/396.</p>
<p>The class is extremely rewarding, but also very difficult. Weekly problem sets usually take at least 8 hours, and that's with cooperative effort on some things. Everything is done in complete rigor and done the "right way" from the start, which is very helpful for later on in math. Though about 5/6 of the kids taking the sequence are honors math majors, there are still some who go on to do other things like physics or economics with an extremely strong math background.</p>
<p>That's great information. My son is signed up for 295 - and is scared to death. We are in a very small school with no math clubs, competitions, etc., so he really doesn't know where he stacks up, but after taking AP Calc AB, he is sure he loves math. He did get an 800 on his math SAT, but this is a whole new ball game. I guess he'll just have to see when he gets there.</p>
<p>He's trying to find out what might be helpful summer prep for this coures.</p>
<p>295 is a lot different from high school math, so most kids start off not knowing that much. After the first day of class, one of my friends (ended up staying the whole way through) went up to my professor and said "was I supposed to understand any of that?", just because he had never seen any of the math notation before.</p>
<p>SAT math is really not any kind of indicator of mathematical ability whatsoever. I think I got a 740 each time I took it, just because I'd always miss two by going through too fast or misreading a question.</p>
<p>If your son has only taken Calc AB, one thing he should probably look over is all the topics covered by Calc BC but not Calc AB (definitely integration, especially the riemann definition where you do the integral as a limit of rectangular approximations, taylor expansions, not sure what else there is). In Calc AB/BC, you just learn what the rules of calculus are (this is what the intermediate value theorem says, this is what Rolle's theorem is, etc). In math 295, essentially you go through and start with basic axioms, then go through and prove everything you're just told about in standard introductory calculus. It's definitely much easier (and possibly expected) that you know the theorems before you try and prove them.</p>
<p>Also, another good thing for preparation would be some kind of mathematical thinking book (I don't know if it has a better technical name, the book I used was just called "Introduction to Advanced Mathematical Thinking", and it was the name of the course as well). Basically something to help introduce some of the concepts of higher level math that never really get covered in lower levels (bijection/injective/surjective, logical quantifiers, dealing with logical statements, a general idea of how to do proofs, etc).</p>
<p>Wow. I looked at Math 295's course page and a few of the homeworks, and while I can remember doing a lot of that stuff in high school, I remember absolutely nothing.</p>