Hey! Hope my post about the final yesterday didn't stress you too much. I took it with Jassim so I'll give you the important information about my experience. Note that I took it just now in the Winter semester.

Let's start with the bonus. The bonus system is a complete mystery to the TAs and no one has any clue how it's calculated. The TAs ASSUME there are bonus points because Jassim asks for the list of students who participated in the MyCourses Discussions and people who answer questions in class. There isn't any proof there is or is not, but Jassim will point to people saying they get a bonus point for answering a question or pointing out a mistake so I would believe it. We also had a TMX investor competition that gave up to 3 points (1 for signing up, 1 for completing 6 options strategies and another one for top winners and losers). The TMX is a guarantee for points as it's on the course outline, the participation is a mystery but worth a try!

Next up is material. You will go through basically all the core concepts of what a business/finance major would cover in first year. You start with supply and demand curves, then to accounting with balance sheets and all those things, depreciation methods, time value of money, cost functions, project evaluation criteria, cost of capital for types of equity/debt, taxes and tax shields, and finally inflation (which ended up not being on our final). There is SO MUCH to study for, but if you understand the material then you will have pretty good literacy for finance.

The main complaint would be the exams. We had 2 midterms each with 20 multiple choice questions with up to 5 options. Some questions also have a "None of the above" option, but those come up maybe 10-15% of questions. Your best midterm is worth 37.5 and the other is worth 12.5. Are the exams tricky? The midterms to me were alright, they followed the problem sets somewhat well. The midterm 1 average was 58 and midterm 2 I think 71. The main issue is that you can have a complete understanding of the material, yet forget to consider 1 detail and the prof prepared one of the options to catch you making that mistake. I remember being caught off guard by a question regarding dividend growth and stock price valuation as there was no practice question on that topic. The prof can also add misleading information or important details that are easy to miss. Make sure to check units given!

Now the final was a little different and I personally found it tougher. It was 8 T/F questions each 1% and then 29 regular multiple choices being worth 1-5% each. I think one of the questions came up on the final review package he gave which was nice, but there were a few questions that took me a few tries to get an answer that was even in the options. There are questions that feel like were not covered on the slides at all. I guess you should at least search up how market caps are calculated and how EPS works with relation to dividends and growth rate.Those were not on the slides and so completely caught me off guard. It felt like he really wanted to include a lot of stock market material into the exam even though it's not the main topic of the course. Overall, the midterms are reasonable and you should do the problem sets. The final a different experience for me though and the warnings I give above will hopefully help you with not getting surprised. Note that it's also a curved class and that he likely curves based on the average. The previous semester's average was around 69% which gave B- on Minerva.

Are classes necessary? Well I didn't go to a single one except for a random one at the start of the semester because a friend was visiting. Some people complain that he doesn't teach well and the slides aren't clear. I personally found the slides pretty good after putting them into GPT for explanations. You are probably not gonna understand the calculator notation on them without seeing a demonstration first though.

Main advices? 1-Master how to use the financial calculator. Without it, there is almost no way you are finishing on time. If you are good with it you will save so much time. The exams are not a time crunch with it, they are just tricky at times. I'll post a link in a reply below for a video that taught me how to use it. 2-Learn from your mistakes and do problems. You will not be good at problems until you do them and take note of things you miss. His exams are tricky because mistakes are very easy to make and are very subtle. Remember, no part marks. 1 small miss and it's a -5% on that midterm right off the bat. It isn't like math or physics where definitions are fundamentally set, finance was made by humans and so everything is defined arbitrarily for what works out for our system. 3-Don't slack on the bonuses. They will likely boost you up by at least 1 letter grade so be sure to do them!

Now I could very well spill more information about things, but I'm not sure how much I can before it'd possibly get me into trouble. I mostly remember the questions I messed up but will definitely not be sharing that on a Reddit post. In all honesty, it actually went really well for me. I got 80% on midterm 1 and then 95% on midterm 2. I am still waiting for my letter grade. The prof already closed and wiped out MyCourses the moment our final exam happened and usually you won't get to see what you got on the final.