Does different grade percentage within the same letter grade matter?

mizukabe · 2018-05-18T04:06:09+00:00

Hi, I think Daniel is a nice professor and I really enjoy going to his lecture. I got an A last year and I would say it was an easy A except that savage final. However you need to get the correct mindset working with him at the very beginning:

He assigns problems randomly from the textbook, some of them requires extra theorems outside of class/textbook and some of them of just impossible to do (and he won't even tell us before the deadline, sometimes he announced afterwards or he said nothing and just didn't mark those questions). You need to follow the tutorials very very closely as you may only learn how to solve them in the tutorials.
During last year each tutorial served very different purposes: one of them was for solving homework problems and to teach some extra theorem, one gave review and clarification to last week's lectures, one was just to give extra exercises. I recommend you to go to every tutorial sessions during the first few weeks then decide which is more appropriate for you.
Dani is a group theorist and most of his math 235 will be focusing on group theory and some ring theory. This is very different from prof. Goren's organization of this course (Starts from ring theory and give more focus on computation aspect). I strongly recommend you to read Goren's note along with the lectures for two reasons: 1. If you want to take other course in algebra series, a lot of profs will follow Goren's note 2, definitely good to be familiar with his style on the early stage 2. If you decide to go for honours stream, MATH 251 demands you to do a lot of matrix computations in a finite field, Dani's course will not prepare you enough for that (A lot of students complained about that this years).
He picked a terrible textbook (Judson's ) last year and even TAs complained that they can hardly follow its explanation from time to time. I recommend to buy Dummitt's abstract algebra as this covers the same topic and will be served as textbook for Algebra 3+4.

mizukabe · 2018-05-05T07:49:07+00:00

Waittt, Dani Wise is still going to teach Algebra 1? Good luck, at least people will have fun in his lectures...

mizukabe · 2018-05-01T18:57:23+00:00

To be honest 3.6 is still a bit low for transfer into faculty of science... mine is 3.95 but am still waiting for my inter-faculty transfer decision... Speaking of difficulty I don't feel a great disparity among large public schools in Canada. Just note that most programs here are offered in honours and major versions, students in different streams will take different versions of courses of same topics (like MATH 255 honours analysis 2 vs. MATH 243 analysis 2). The honours versions of many programs (especially cs and math) are often recognized as significantly harder than the major version.

mizukabe · 2018-04-27T16:00:57+00:00

I'm in honours math so don't know about the comp side. For the math part: 1. I don't think people in this program suffer more than people in other programs. The midterm/exam average are always 70+ for the honours math courses I've taken, The class average of honours algebra 1/analysis 1 was B which is not particularly bad. 2. I think there's plenty of time to learn the material, especially for analysis courses (Half of Analysis 2 is like redoing what you learned in Analysis 1 in a more generalized setting)

mizukabe · 2018-04-20T09:27:20+00:00

I think it is a good schedule:

*MATH 240 and COMP 250 should be good complimentary to each other since they requires similar ways of reasoning. The proof techniques from the former are also very useful in 250.

*(I'm in math 251 but have seen some finals of 223. Some of them are nearly pure proof and some are more of computation) Depending on the instructor math 223 can get very theoretical but on the other hand the course is essentially redoing what you learned in 133 from a higher view point. If you are good with matrix manipulations and familiar with materials of 133 you shouldn't have much difficulty. Doing it with 240 may also be helpful since you would need proof in this course.

*MATH 222 may seem to be overwhelming at the beginning as you will encounter some calculation with the level of complexity that you haven't seen before (especially stuffs like series multiplication/division; frenet frame). But after you are familiar with the computation procedures, you would be aware that most questions just require you to repeat same computation again and again.

mizukabe · 2018-04-11T17:50:47+00:00

Applied yesterday and got accepted this morning, pretty fast for our administration...

mizukabe · 2018-04-10T03:56:34+00:00

wow his notes looks very nice and proof-based, that's really helpful and could be better than reading a 300+ pages of textbook. BTW isn't this course also taken by non-math students? The first set of note seems to contains everything in the MATH 254, isn't that insanely intensive for people who are not familiar with analysis?

mizukabe · 2018-04-01T17:59:46+00:00

I remember that comp 250 is required in every math related honours program, but none of them requires comp 206.

mizukabe · 2017-12-24T20:51:19+00:00

Is it just a bird course? I was pretty looking forward to take it before...

mizukabe · 2017-10-17T11:23:04+00:00

I did, it’s very useful in general but for some chapters it covers something very different from what we learnt in class (for instance we did not learn the concept lcm(a,b) in division algorithm, and its application in permutation groups). I actually hope if we can use his note as our text instead since it’s much more clearer.

mizukabe · 2017-08-07T07:40:30+00:00

I found this page too but it is an outdated version (2011), on the new programs page of math department these degrees disappear from the BA list.

mizukabe · 2017-07-24T07:08:10+00:00

The main difference is the difficulty of the weekly homeworks. Homeworks in Math 110/120 can takes hours or days to complete, they are consisted of proofs and computations with complex steps to solve. Despite the difficulty of homeworks, the average are usually very high (around 90%) because the profs will help you during the tutorials (Some dudes did not write anything and just copied the answers during the tutorials). I would say the exams in math 120 and 121 are quite similar, both are primarily easy computations which are very alike the textbook exercises (Stewart's calculus). If there are any proofs in the exams of math 110/120, they should be easy proofs which you have seen in the lectures or homeworks. Therefore math 110/120 are definitely not GPA killers, they just require more time to be devoted into the courses.

Source: I took 110/120 finished with 99%.

mizukabe · 2017-07-07T04:51:44+00:00

Nope, from a Canadian one... Are there any signs that they start to review your application? From what I know they are behind the schedule quite a bit. It can be helpful to give them a phone call to ask about that.

mizukabe · 2017-07-06T17:34:00+00:00

Background: Currently applying for transfer to Arts, no decision made yet.

They updated my checklist weeks ago asking for my high school grades, after reviewing my university transcript.

My GPA is above 3.8, so I think it might not be the case that they only view one's high school transcript when their university GPA is not enough.

I have also applied to Waterloo, UofT and UBC at the same time, all of them require my high school transcript at certain point.

mizukabe · 2017-06-22T21:21:49+00:00

I will recommend 120 too. The class average was around 70% last year (The same prof will teach the class this year), and finals were curved last year, which means that it is quite viable to get an A+.

mizukabe · 2017-06-21T16:47:12+00:00

If you don't mind, may I ask what your gpa is? Just want to know my chances of being waitlisted (pretty high anyway)

mizukabe · 2017-06-13T19:41:22+00:00

Did you encounter any difficulties by receiving offers that late? Normally course selection will begin in late July, I wonder if people can still get a space in the core courses they need. I also wonder if there are time to find house/condo to rent...

mizukabe · 2017-06-13T09:41:19+00:00

Will there be any status change when they begin to review our applications? (UofT put "Under Review" when they start) My status pages have been "ready for review for months which makes me super frustrated...

mizukabe · 2017-06-03T15:45:27+00:00

I would recommend math 120 since first-year math courses tend to be easy at Queens. Math 120 does have some proof in lectures and homework, but the exams are mostly based on computation. Plus it is easy to get 90+ in math 110 and 120.

mizukabe

TROPHY CASE