u/Pretend-Dragonfly-60

figured i might as well make a post since a lot of people take computational linear algebra and i just saw a yik yak post about it

there's really three things you need to know if you're taking it with her:

1. DO NOT USE A LLM TO DO YOUR MATLAB ASSIGNMENTS

2. DO NOT USE A LLM TO DO YOUR MATLAB ASSIGNMENTS

3. DO NOT USE A LLM TO DO YOUR MATLAB ASSIGNMENTS

hi everyone, i saw the guy asking for advice earlier regarding professor malay ghosh's STA4321 course next fall deleted their post. i wanna repost my answer cuz i think it could be useful for some people. for context, I took it last fall. I left a 1/5 on his RMP even though I got an A. feel free to ask me anything

i had only taken some high school stats going in and took some mathematics courses at UF (calc 3, diff eq, computational linear algebra). the single most important prereq is calc 3 but there's also a good amount of algebra. you need to know sums (for discrete random variables) and integrals (for continuous random variables) like the back of your hand

general thoughts:

1. his lectures are GARBAGE. they're so dry/boring. barely ANYONE shows up. he offers little insight beyond what's in the textbook
2. he claims to "take attendance" (5% of your grade) - idk how he does it and i didn't risk it so i still showed up to class
3. there's NO mandatory homework. however, the weekly quizzes are based on the optional problem sets he gives you. if you do the problem sets and understand how to solve the problems you'll have no problem on the quizzes.
4. the average on the quizzes was LOW. he doesn't drop a single quiz. a lot of people cheat on the quizzes. the guy is 82 years old and can't catch anyone. the girls next to me always took a picture of the quiz immediately and uploaded them to GPT. i think we had 10 quizzes worth 2% each
5. the textbook is mediocre. it has what you need to know but it's not exactly well-written. you can find a pdf for free online as well as a solution manual.
6. the exams were fair. most of the problems were based on the problem sets. he gives extra credit. we had 3 exams worth 25% each. some of the problems are quite different from the problem sets - you'll need to deduce some results and prove lemmas. when i say "prove" i don't mean in a strict mathematical sense like you would do in an actual math course like real analysis. as long as your algebra checks out your fine
7. he allowed us to bring one sheet (double-sided) to the first exam, two sheets to the second exam, and three sheets to the third exam. there's a lot of stuff he doesn't expect you to derive from scratch. make sure to put it on your formula sheet. i would just go through the textbook + notes and put all the key results on my sheets.

in summary, the guy sucks but his class is definitely passable. i was able to get an A in a nightmare semester where i really didn't have much time to devote to this course. his grading scale is somewhat generous - even if you don't get an A it's super hard to fail

now for my advice for learning the STA4321 material:

1. there will be a lot of jargon at the beginning. don't feel like you need to memorize it all immediately. you'll learn through application. when he talks about the axioms of probability - that's what you really need to drill into your head. everything you'll learn in that course reduces back to those axioms. make sure you understand them INTUITIVELY. don't just brute memorize the formal definitions
2. you need to understand the distinction between discrete and continuous random variables intuitively as well. then you need to learn the grammar for each (summations for discrete and integrals for continuous). again, you'll learn the necessary properties through actually solving problems. the algebra for this course isn't hard.
3. the course will feel like a "drive-by" of a bunch of different categories of random variables. don't miss the forest for the trees or be intimidated by the multiplicity. focus on the invariants (return over and over again to the axioms). if you do it right, you'll quickly feel that all of probability is playing the same game over and over again. that is 100% true in this course with a few other things you'll have to learn (moment-generating functions and such). always look at things from a birds-eye view. he'll drop some gems during lectures which you'll catch if you're paying attention (for example when he says the normal distribution is the limit of the poisson distribution)
4. if anything, probability is a lot like high school geometry. the proofs aren't about doing pages of algebra (usually). it's about manipulating arithmetic expressions elegantly until you get the formulations you want. it's quite beautiful, really. don't lose sight of it no matter how dry the lectures are
5. stay motivated. i was taking modern physics and p-chem for the biosciences last fall and in the spring i took inference (STA4322, the sequel, which is beautiful in its own right), thermal physics 1, and analytical chem. i have no idea what major you are but probability theory is foundational to pretty much all of the sciences. through this course you'll hopefully start seeing the world in a new light

The library in my town doesn't have a single work of Dostoevsky. Not a single one! At least it has six rows of James Patterson slop...

I miss Library West already 😞