Its not an insanely hard course but its definitely work intensive. The other comment about this course said it was pretty much easy, i could see ways in which its easy but i wouldnt say its a easy pass lol you must practice alot and unless you are a math genius itll take effort. Overall i would say it combines the harder aspects of calculus 2 and 3 (thankfully not alot of trigonometric substitution) and is overall harder than both calc 2 and 3. might be different for others tho - if you enjoyed and did well in power series for calc 2 partial fraction decomposition, integration by parts ; double / triple integrals then maybe this course will be very easy for you. For me it was more difficult than calculus 2 and calculus 3 but not by alot.

It continues from where uvic calculus 3 stops, with basic line integrals -> work/circulation/flux calculations using single parametrized integral and then using double integrals with greens theorem; surface integrals and then finally covering stokes/divergence theorems. thats about it for calculus portion. (this takes about 1.25 months to complete) The ODE portion covers first and higher order homogenous / nonhomogenous solving methods (integration factor, substitution methods, variation of parameters, undetermined coefficients, characteristic solution of higher order ode; powerseries expansion and finally fourier series.

Prof was very lovely lady, took questions often in lecture and tried her best to explain what was going on, but personally sometimes she (and other uvic calculus professors) went just a little too fast for me to understand what was being conveyed so i could only focus on mechanically writing down the problems. An example of this is when we went over the component test it looked like a mismatch of partial derivatives to compare with one another and i got very flustered in class -> later i discovered it was simply came from the definition of the curl vector (del x F) and is just confirming Clairaut’s Theorem (equality of mixed partials - as talked about in calc3); once that clicked the whole idea made sense and instead of dread i had a satisfied understanding. Thus the professor posting all ...read more

Firstly, for exams make sure to follow exactly what your professor says will be good to study. our prof said to study lecture notes + tutorial + assignments. I messed up my first exam because i spent much more time doing the optional suggested problems from text book.. they are helpful but if you only payed attention to tutorial problems + lecture notes its almost guaranteed you will achieve at least a 80. secondly, If you are like me, you put things off until the last second. for exam 1 (coverage of the vector calculus portion -> almost entirely integrals) the materials is very chill and understandable .. right up until the last two sections where you must use spherical/cylindrical coordinates to parametrize surfaces and use that + many new surface integral methods to solve problems.. i...read more

While I found the course to be fairly easy, it definitely covered a lot of stuff, which sometimes felt a bit overwhelming and like we were rushing through concepts. The overwhelm was helped by the fact that we really didn't cover anything in great detail, although it would have been nice to get more of a background on some of the concepts. This term the overall grade was comprised of 12 tutorial assignments, 4 R assignments, 2 midterms, and a final. I found the tutorial assignments to be perfectly sufficient for understanding the material, and the R assignments were often good refreshers on material covered a few weeks earlier. The questions on the exams were exactly like those on tutorial assignments, so I felt that the midterms and final were very fair.

The course covered probabilities/properties of probability, random variables, various continuous and discrete probability distributions, and hypothesis testing, among other things. I had previously used some of the material in other courses, just taking certain facts for granted, so it was nice to get a bit of an idea where those things came from. I'm sure at least some of the material will be useful in future courses, given that it has already been used in courses I've taken in the past.

Dr. Yu often didn't go into much more detail than what was in the notes during lectures, and often seemed to not know how to answer questions about the material, but she usually got the point across with the examples. She did frequently make small errors, and then she would get kind of flustered and need to take a moment to recompose herself, which I sometimes felt detracted from my ability to follow the lecture. She was very organized in terms of actually running the course though.

Do the tutorial assignments before going to the tutorial. That way you'll know if you don't understand something and need to ask your TA for help with something specific when you walk in. And, if your TA allows it, always check your answers before submitting the assignment.