Everyone on BruinWalk complains about Sharmila as a horrible professor, but in reality, she is not bad at all. She is always in a good mood during lecture and is easily accessible. She provides a study guide and several practice exams for both the midterm and finals. The coding is difficult, but doable. She has an engineer's brain so sometimes the lecture is confusing, but if you read the textbook sections prior, it will be easy. She assigns the least amount of homework and really cares about her students. Overall, the class material is not that difficult if you study the book and ask questions. I am glad I took this course with Venugopal and signed up with her for next quarter as well.

Venugopal is not nearly as bad as people would like to mention on bruin walk. Her class is easy and straightforward, and sometimes she does start to over complicate simple topics, but that in no way makes her a bad professor. She genuinely cares for her students and is a nice person.
Tips for doing well: Work in groups for the labs, as they are probably harder than the actual course material (but not actually that hard, TA's and LA's help, so it is more than manageable). Homework is graded for correctness, so make sure you actually go through it and think while you do the questions. I found that reading the textbook was actually pretty helpful as it is simple to understand. Her lectures are pretty much out of the book, so showing up to class and reading the book will make it quite hard to do poorly in the class.

Professor Venugopal cannot explain concepts to save her life. You would almost be better off not going to class because all of her lectures are so convoluted and will often leave you confused over the simplest concepts. This class ruined my passion for science because of how painful the lectures were. I also ended up with a terrible TA, if you get Ning Wang as your TA, you can count on never knowing what is going on in lab. She is by far the worst TA I have ever had. Overall, this class was horrible and I don't understand how UCLA lets this professor keep teaching here.

People always say bad things about Venugopal but she is honestly a pretty cool professor. I will admit she can be a bit confusing at times but if you follow along and pay attention then her lectures make sense. Also, if you took AP Calc AB (like I did) then you should have a pretty easy time in this class because a lot of material covered in AB is in this class in my opinion. Overall, for 30A i would say if you have to take her then it will definitely not be as bad as all the reviews say she is.

overall yes, but the class could have been set up differently to better prepare you for ls30a. highly recommend to take instead of math3a

This class was pretty good I feel like I learned an adequate amount. The professor itself is very sweet and tries her best to get her point across to all her student whether through her TA's or in her office hours. If you have previous calculus experience then this class should not be too difficult for you.

People love to hate on Sharmila but she is a great professor in my opinion. She is difficult to understand but she knows this and makes her tests so much easier in comparison to Garfinkel, Jukka and other professors who teach this class. I have friends who took the class with these professors and struggled. Sharmila only tests on the most basic topics. I never read the textbook once: just pay attention in class and do the homework and you will easily get an A. She is super funny and understanding also. The only bad thing about this class is the labs. The coding is so poorly taught (my TA literally didn't speak English so there's that). Luckily our test on the coding didn't get counted but otherwise I am not sure I would've gotten an A. This class would rock if it didn't have coding. It was miserable for everyone to do the labs each week and I am dreading them in 30B. TAKE SHARMILA! Seriously ignore the reviews on here. I had a conversation with someone in Garfinkel and showed them our tests and they were dumbfounded at how easy they were compared to the other professors. Our final was the content that Garfinkel's class had on their MIDTERM. We didn't even start any material until week 2. She spent the whole first week talking about herself and we didn't have homework until week 3.. It was honestly an easy class but you do have to put in some work since she is a little tough to understand sometimes. She knows this though and makes her tests easy because of it!

Soroush the TA taught more than she ever did. She explained the concepts very convultedly because she thinks like an engineer and talks like one - the math she explained well enough when talking about stability and equilibrium but talking about population concepts and simple things were so much harder.

Don't go to her office hours. Most useless thing ever.

You don't need to go to class besides clicker participation. She is nice and tries her best but she just makes the topics more confusing. I skipped class occasionally and learned mostly from reading the textbook and still did well.

Dr. Venugopal is a very kind and caring woman, but she just isn't that great of a teacher. The concepts in LS30A are not that difficult to understand, but her lectures often just made things more confusing. It's probably best to just read the textbook for this class and use that as your primary source of knowledge. Also, the coding labs got extremely difficult towards the end of the quarter and I dreaded doing them every week. The midterm and final for this class were actually pretty easy, and as long as you do the practice tests posted on CCLE and go over the homework problems she assigns, you should be able to do fine. Her lecture slides can also be pretty helpful to look over when studying, so doing well in the class shouldn't really be a problem because the material isn't really too hard to understand.