Professor

Chi-Yun Hsu

AD
4.1
Overall Ratings
Based on 58 Users
Easiness 3.0 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Workload 3.4 / 5 How light the workload is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Clarity 3.9 / 5 How clear the professor is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Helpfulness 4.3 / 5 How helpful the professor is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

Reviews (58)

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MATH 31B
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
March 23, 2021
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A-

Hsu is a sweet professor who is always prepared for lecture. She makes a worksheet for every lecture and posts answers to them which is pretty helpful. Prof Hsu sometimes skips over steps while doing practice problems.

The tests were not too hard (our first midterm class avg was like a 98). If you understood the homework you'll get a good grade. There were no tricky questions/word problems. However, the material of the class gets significantly harder right after Midterm 1.

There's homework every other week and on the weeks you don't have homework you have a n easy 2 question quiz. Some of the homework problems were really tedious.

Overall, I think her class / grading is pretty fair!!!

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MATH 31B
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
March 22, 2021
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A

This class is hard, doesn't really matter who your professor is. Professor Hsu does her best to put all the concepts the dept. makes students learn for this class so sometimes it feels like a lot of content, but its out of her control.

Exams are kind of challenging, takes some time to complete but make sure you score well on her quizzes and don't mess up on homework, you should be okay on exams.

At times, homework gets really heavy, but if you pay attention to them and use them as practice, the concepts are really helpful for the really hard questions on her final and midterms.

I honestly think I could have had a worse experience but Professor Hsu is pretty nice and will answer all your questions in OH's, which she is really helpful in and are often pretty quiet, so use them to your advantage!!

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1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31B
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
March 26, 2021
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A

I think prof Hsu is a great professor! The homeworks, book examples, and lecture worksheets were all very helpful for the two midterms and final. She is not the type of prof to put super difficult material you've never seen before on the exams. I didn't love the true/false and multiple choice on the exams, but some were easy points. Also if you're taking this online she always posted her office hour recordings and pdfs and I really appreciated it because she went over hw problems in OH.

Also, I didn't always understand the material just based off her lectures , so I would recommend using YouTube, specifically professor Leonard, patrickJMT, and organic chemistry tutor. These YouTube channels really helped me to master the material

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31B
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
March 20, 2021
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A

Do take this class if you really want to learn! Professor Hsu is amazing; she really has an extensive knowledge base for this course and manipulates this knowledge in the most intelligent of ways. It may be a little hard to keep up at first because the methods she uses to solve problems challenges us to think outside of the box but it is so worth it and eye-opening if you are into learning how to learn. Also-- she is very helpful during class and will pause to answer any questions in chat! HW is long in length but necessary to understand the material; as long as you complete the corresponding problems to the lecture before the next lecture, you should be on track in general and prepared for the quizzes. Exams are reasonable, I would just recommend having a qualitative and quantitative understanding since there are T/F and MC questions in addition to those that involve calculation.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Dec. 28, 2019
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A

Hsu is a great professor and a nice person, and she really cares about her students. Her lectures are organized, and she gives out worksheets for lectures, which are really helpful. She is good at explaining concepts and theorem clearly. Her tests are not so hard. Even though there are a couple of tricky problems in tests, she does not put a large amount of points on them. Therefore those tricky problems will not prevent people from getting an A as long as they do well in those normal problems. Generally speaking, Prof. Hsu is the kind of professor that I will choose to take further courses with.

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1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Jan. 1, 2020
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A

Professor Hsu is one of the most brilliant math professors I have ever been taught by. Her lectures are incredibly organized, and she gives out these comprehensive sheets every class that effectively summarizes the topic covered in that class. Her homework questions are very simple to do if one revises their class notes and reads that section from the textbook. The homework also helps you gain a better grasp of the different types of sums that can be asked from that section. Her midterms had pretty standard math sums of similar difficulty to that of the homework. She, however, asks a bunch of True or False questions in her midterm and final which are very technical in nature and are worth a lot of points (so remember to learn your theorems and understand your concepts well). Her midterms are definitely lengthy but are pretty possible to finish as long as you don't get stuck on something for too long. Her final, however, was considerably much easier and much more lenient time-wise. Her office hours are extremely helpful only if you have questions that need to be answered and she is very helpful in answering doubts and clearing concepts. She is very approachable and makes an effort to remember your names.
Tip: Something that really helped me with the homework for this class is forming an intimate study group of 2 or more people with whom you discuss the homework on Thursday (as every homework assignment is due on Friday). It helps ensure that you have all the right answers if you were not able to make it to office hours and ensures you finish the homework a day early instead of rushing to finish it later. Homework is worth a good portion of your grade, and it is very easy to mess up so be careful.

Helpful?

3 2 Please log in to provide feedback.
March 29, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: C

I'll try to give a review without bursting out in anger and get all biased haha.
Her teaching style is really not for everyone. Honestly from what I have heard and seen from the students who took 31B with her was that you either understand what she is teaching or you don't. For me, I struggled HARD, and I had to teach myself the course all on my own. After the monstrosity of midterm 1 I stopped going to lectures (don't worry they were bruincasted). Her exams can be unpredictable and sometimes you won't even have enough time to do all of the problems. How she teaches the class may be very difficult to adapt to because she heavily focuses on the concepts and derivations of formulas and whatnot, instead of calculations. From the lectures I actually went to, she expects students to easily understand the lesson content and that may be why some students became frustrated with her because she sometimes does not slow down or fully explain what she is writing.
My best advice to truly do well in her class: after lecture, start doing the assigned homework problems so that you don't fall behind. on the textbook, go through what the textbook teaches you (to help you solidify the material) and then do the homework problems.
In my opinion, the TAs teach you better and give you more ways to do problems that will actually help you understand. I believe that a lot of people started to trust their TAs more than Hsu herself.
In a sense, Hsu does care for her students. She encourages students to go to her office hours if they were confused with the lecture material. She'll ask for feedback on the exams and she tries to adjust the exam material that fits the general strengths of her students. I believe that this quarter was the first time she has taught 31B, so I am sure she will adjust her course.
31B was all new material to me and I just did not like how she taught the class, but her method works for others. If you plan to take Professor Hsu in the future, I wish you luck.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
Dec. 23, 2019
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A+

I took this class fall quarter of my freshman year. It was 4 days a week at 8 am, a freaking nightmare. Anyway, Dr. Hsu was a good professor and I understood the material taught in class. However, maybe that was due to the fact that I had already covered most of the topics of this course in high school with top grades, but couldn't transfer credits so couldn't skip the class (I am international). Her midterms weren't too hard, but very long. You have to go very fast or you won't finish them. Instead, I had plenty of time on the final. Also, the problems on the tests were usually not the hardest kinds that we did in class. For example, for volumes of revolution, instead of having area between curves rotated around a random axis y or x = k, we only had to compute the volume of the sphere around whatever axis we wanted. That was very nice. Homework is not heavy, but sometimes she assigns super hard problems that not even the TAs can do on the spot. To solve those, go to office hours, they are super helpful and she gives out homework solutions. Homework is graded, so that's basically free points. no participation grade for this class. The TA Erza Thompson is super boring. Overall, my experience with this professor was good, also because of my grade. Consequently, I chose her again for Math 31B.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
Dec. 24, 2019
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: B

Even though she teaches the subject well, I wouldn’t say her style is for everyone. She focuses on the conceptual aspect of math and tries to explain where the formulas come from. She expects students to be somewhat capable of intuitively understanding math. Her exams and midterms are generally according to this too. The problems are designed to evaluate wether or not you really understand the topic and that you don’t just plug numbers into a formula. She always asks true/false questions aimed to test students’ conceptual understanding which are worth around 12-16 points and generally tricky and not that easy. So if you really enjoy math and like to understand it on a deeper level I really recommend taking her class. However as someone who gets stressed out by math and would rather just get it over with, I found her class challenging. Personally, I didn’t have a strong math foundation and I always hated math so if you are like me and just have to take 31A for your major, just pick a more chill professor. But even though this class was hard for me, I really improved my mathematical knowledge a lot and I was really surprised to see how much I learned in 10 weeks. Of course the pace is quite fast and she assigns 3 homework assignments each week (uploads them after each lecture) so you have to stay on top of your work which is actually not a bad thing but I would say the workload was a bit much. The homework is collected every week (you can also upload it to CCLE you don’t need to turn it in physically) and some “grader” grades it (4 questions are chosen randomly and graded, 3 points each, and 3 more points for completion, the average of your homework grades make up 15% of your final grade) There are two midterms and a final exam. Depending on your scores the calculation of your final grade is either 35% midterm1, 35% midterm2, 35% final 15%hw or 35% midterm that you scored higher (lower one gets dropped) 50% final 15% hw. She doesn’t curve her exams and she tries to keep the class average around 70). Below 70 fails. Lastly, about Prof, Hsu, she really cares about students and she tries hard to explain well. She is very helpful in her office hours and solves homework questions so I recommend going there if you ever get stuck. She puts the effort to remember the names of the students who go to office hours and she is a sweet person. She also cares a lot about student feedback and tries to take the surveys she makes students fill out after the first midterm into account. For example she said people told that she skipped some steps in problem solving (which she didn’t, even I could understand how she did the calculations with my bad math foundation) and she immediately changed the way she solved questions she detailed the explanations. On the first midterm T/F questions were around. 30 points and people complained about that so on the final and the second midterm they were 16 and 12. Overall, Prof, Hsu is a nice professor and she teaches well (she was out of town for a week and we got other 31A profs for substitutes and she was way better and clear than both them), I recommend her if you like and get math, or need good explanations and extra help.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
Dec. 20, 2019
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A-

Dr. Hsu is a great teacher. She knows her things and teaches well and is extremely helpful. She provides Assignments in each and every Class which has the Theory and Questions on the Topic she will be teaching in that specific Class. Homework Questions are easy and doable. However, neither of them will prepare you for her Exams especially the True and False Questions which have an unnecessarily high percentage of marks. For Math 31A (Fall 2019), she tested us on Sections 6.3 and 6.4 which were not tested in other Math 31A Classes which made studying and the Exam more difficult. If you are a person who can do well or even just sail through the Exams, I will highly recommend Dr. Hsu.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31B
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A-
March 23, 2021

Hsu is a sweet professor who is always prepared for lecture. She makes a worksheet for every lecture and posts answers to them which is pretty helpful. Prof Hsu sometimes skips over steps while doing practice problems.

The tests were not too hard (our first midterm class avg was like a 98). If you understood the homework you'll get a good grade. There were no tricky questions/word problems. However, the material of the class gets significantly harder right after Midterm 1.

There's homework every other week and on the weeks you don't have homework you have a n easy 2 question quiz. Some of the homework problems were really tedious.

Overall, I think her class / grading is pretty fair!!!

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31B
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A
March 22, 2021

This class is hard, doesn't really matter who your professor is. Professor Hsu does her best to put all the concepts the dept. makes students learn for this class so sometimes it feels like a lot of content, but its out of her control.

Exams are kind of challenging, takes some time to complete but make sure you score well on her quizzes and don't mess up on homework, you should be okay on exams.

At times, homework gets really heavy, but if you pay attention to them and use them as practice, the concepts are really helpful for the really hard questions on her final and midterms.

I honestly think I could have had a worse experience but Professor Hsu is pretty nice and will answer all your questions in OH's, which she is really helpful in and are often pretty quiet, so use them to your advantage!!

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31B
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A
March 26, 2021

I think prof Hsu is a great professor! The homeworks, book examples, and lecture worksheets were all very helpful for the two midterms and final. She is not the type of prof to put super difficult material you've never seen before on the exams. I didn't love the true/false and multiple choice on the exams, but some were easy points. Also if you're taking this online she always posted her office hour recordings and pdfs and I really appreciated it because she went over hw problems in OH.

Also, I didn't always understand the material just based off her lectures , so I would recommend using YouTube, specifically professor Leonard, patrickJMT, and organic chemistry tutor. These YouTube channels really helped me to master the material

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31B
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Winter 2021
Grade: A
March 20, 2021

Do take this class if you really want to learn! Professor Hsu is amazing; she really has an extensive knowledge base for this course and manipulates this knowledge in the most intelligent of ways. It may be a little hard to keep up at first because the methods she uses to solve problems challenges us to think outside of the box but it is so worth it and eye-opening if you are into learning how to learn. Also-- she is very helpful during class and will pause to answer any questions in chat! HW is long in length but necessary to understand the material; as long as you complete the corresponding problems to the lecture before the next lecture, you should be on track in general and prepared for the quizzes. Exams are reasonable, I would just recommend having a qualitative and quantitative understanding since there are T/F and MC questions in addition to those that involve calculation.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31A
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A
Dec. 28, 2019

Hsu is a great professor and a nice person, and she really cares about her students. Her lectures are organized, and she gives out worksheets for lectures, which are really helpful. She is good at explaining concepts and theorem clearly. Her tests are not so hard. Even though there are a couple of tricky problems in tests, she does not put a large amount of points on them. Therefore those tricky problems will not prevent people from getting an A as long as they do well in those normal problems. Generally speaking, Prof. Hsu is the kind of professor that I will choose to take further courses with.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31A
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A
Jan. 1, 2020

Professor Hsu is one of the most brilliant math professors I have ever been taught by. Her lectures are incredibly organized, and she gives out these comprehensive sheets every class that effectively summarizes the topic covered in that class. Her homework questions are very simple to do if one revises their class notes and reads that section from the textbook. The homework also helps you gain a better grasp of the different types of sums that can be asked from that section. Her midterms had pretty standard math sums of similar difficulty to that of the homework. She, however, asks a bunch of True or False questions in her midterm and final which are very technical in nature and are worth a lot of points (so remember to learn your theorems and understand your concepts well). Her midterms are definitely lengthy but are pretty possible to finish as long as you don't get stuck on something for too long. Her final, however, was considerably much easier and much more lenient time-wise. Her office hours are extremely helpful only if you have questions that need to be answered and she is very helpful in answering doubts and clearing concepts. She is very approachable and makes an effort to remember your names.
Tip: Something that really helped me with the homework for this class is forming an intimate study group of 2 or more people with whom you discuss the homework on Thursday (as every homework assignment is due on Friday). It helps ensure that you have all the right answers if you were not able to make it to office hours and ensures you finish the homework a day early instead of rushing to finish it later. Homework is worth a good portion of your grade, and it is very easy to mess up so be careful.

Helpful?

3 2 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31B
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: C
March 29, 2020

I'll try to give a review without bursting out in anger and get all biased haha.
Her teaching style is really not for everyone. Honestly from what I have heard and seen from the students who took 31B with her was that you either understand what she is teaching or you don't. For me, I struggled HARD, and I had to teach myself the course all on my own. After the monstrosity of midterm 1 I stopped going to lectures (don't worry they were bruincasted). Her exams can be unpredictable and sometimes you won't even have enough time to do all of the problems. How she teaches the class may be very difficult to adapt to because she heavily focuses on the concepts and derivations of formulas and whatnot, instead of calculations. From the lectures I actually went to, she expects students to easily understand the lesson content and that may be why some students became frustrated with her because she sometimes does not slow down or fully explain what she is writing.
My best advice to truly do well in her class: after lecture, start doing the assigned homework problems so that you don't fall behind. on the textbook, go through what the textbook teaches you (to help you solidify the material) and then do the homework problems.
In my opinion, the TAs teach you better and give you more ways to do problems that will actually help you understand. I believe that a lot of people started to trust their TAs more than Hsu herself.
In a sense, Hsu does care for her students. She encourages students to go to her office hours if they were confused with the lecture material. She'll ask for feedback on the exams and she tries to adjust the exam material that fits the general strengths of her students. I believe that this quarter was the first time she has taught 31B, so I am sure she will adjust her course.
31B was all new material to me and I just did not like how she taught the class, but her method works for others. If you plan to take Professor Hsu in the future, I wish you luck.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31A
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A+
Dec. 23, 2019

I took this class fall quarter of my freshman year. It was 4 days a week at 8 am, a freaking nightmare. Anyway, Dr. Hsu was a good professor and I understood the material taught in class. However, maybe that was due to the fact that I had already covered most of the topics of this course in high school with top grades, but couldn't transfer credits so couldn't skip the class (I am international). Her midterms weren't too hard, but very long. You have to go very fast or you won't finish them. Instead, I had plenty of time on the final. Also, the problems on the tests were usually not the hardest kinds that we did in class. For example, for volumes of revolution, instead of having area between curves rotated around a random axis y or x = k, we only had to compute the volume of the sphere around whatever axis we wanted. That was very nice. Homework is not heavy, but sometimes she assigns super hard problems that not even the TAs can do on the spot. To solve those, go to office hours, they are super helpful and she gives out homework solutions. Homework is graded, so that's basically free points. no participation grade for this class. The TA Erza Thompson is super boring. Overall, my experience with this professor was good, also because of my grade. Consequently, I chose her again for Math 31B.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31A
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: B
Dec. 24, 2019

Even though she teaches the subject well, I wouldn’t say her style is for everyone. She focuses on the conceptual aspect of math and tries to explain where the formulas come from. She expects students to be somewhat capable of intuitively understanding math. Her exams and midterms are generally according to this too. The problems are designed to evaluate wether or not you really understand the topic and that you don’t just plug numbers into a formula. She always asks true/false questions aimed to test students’ conceptual understanding which are worth around 12-16 points and generally tricky and not that easy. So if you really enjoy math and like to understand it on a deeper level I really recommend taking her class. However as someone who gets stressed out by math and would rather just get it over with, I found her class challenging. Personally, I didn’t have a strong math foundation and I always hated math so if you are like me and just have to take 31A for your major, just pick a more chill professor. But even though this class was hard for me, I really improved my mathematical knowledge a lot and I was really surprised to see how much I learned in 10 weeks. Of course the pace is quite fast and she assigns 3 homework assignments each week (uploads them after each lecture) so you have to stay on top of your work which is actually not a bad thing but I would say the workload was a bit much. The homework is collected every week (you can also upload it to CCLE you don’t need to turn it in physically) and some “grader” grades it (4 questions are chosen randomly and graded, 3 points each, and 3 more points for completion, the average of your homework grades make up 15% of your final grade) There are two midterms and a final exam. Depending on your scores the calculation of your final grade is either 35% midterm1, 35% midterm2, 35% final 15%hw or 35% midterm that you scored higher (lower one gets dropped) 50% final 15% hw. She doesn’t curve her exams and she tries to keep the class average around 70). Below 70 fails. Lastly, about Prof, Hsu, she really cares about students and she tries hard to explain well. She is very helpful in her office hours and solves homework questions so I recommend going there if you ever get stuck. She puts the effort to remember the names of the students who go to office hours and she is a sweet person. She also cares a lot about student feedback and tries to take the surveys she makes students fill out after the first midterm into account. For example she said people told that she skipped some steps in problem solving (which she didn’t, even I could understand how she did the calculations with my bad math foundation) and she immediately changed the way she solved questions she detailed the explanations. On the first midterm T/F questions were around. 30 points and people complained about that so on the final and the second midterm they were 16 and 12. Overall, Prof, Hsu is a nice professor and she teaches well (she was out of town for a week and we got other 31A profs for substitutes and she was way better and clear than both them), I recommend her if you like and get math, or need good explanations and extra help.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
MATH 31A
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A-
Dec. 20, 2019

Dr. Hsu is a great teacher. She knows her things and teaches well and is extremely helpful. She provides Assignments in each and every Class which has the Theory and Questions on the Topic she will be teaching in that specific Class. Homework Questions are easy and doable. However, neither of them will prepare you for her Exams especially the True and False Questions which have an unnecessarily high percentage of marks. For Math 31A (Fall 2019), she tested us on Sections 6.3 and 6.4 which were not tested in other Math 31A Classes which made studying and the Exam more difficult. If you are a person who can do well or even just sail through the Exams, I will highly recommend Dr. Hsu.

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
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