My First Blog Post

Published: 06-16-2025

Yo! Thanks for checking out my first ever blog post. I hope to be able to fill this page up in the future with multiple blogs and this is just the beginning. I wanna keep this blog fully unedited to respect the authenticity that comes with these blogs, so expect some mistakes here and there.

As I have just finished my first year at UTSC I thought it would be fun to log all my thoughts related to the courses I’ve taken. It’s currently the summer semester and I will make follow ups to update the tier list throughout the years.

For the tier list itself, I’ll just follow the standard tiers S, A, B, C, D (with S being the best obviously)

Lets just get straight into it then!

Sem 1

CSCA08 | Intro to CS - A

I took this course with Irene Huang and it is just a very solid course, there isn’t much to say. It’s a very introductory course to python and CS as a whole and covers a pretty wide variety of topics. The prof was nice, midterms were fair, and the content covered made the course is a pretty free 4.0 if you had any CS experience beforehand. Fairly enjoyable and is my highest mark at the time of writing.

MATA31 | Calc 1 - S

Really the first troller culling course, I remember taking the first midterm and having the results being a class average of 58%. Then the prof Michael (goat) Cavers would call it a satisfactory average. Only after taking the full course would I understand.

(so many people dropped, the average went from like a 58% to 64% 💀)

Apart from that, the course content is giga interesting, unlike any math ever done in high school, the teaching was great, slides were super useful. There were even lecture recordings along with detailed test breakdowns before each one. It was a pretty easy 4.0 given that you invested the time to study and understand what it was that you were doing. Everything about this course was great literally no complaints. Probably my favourite prof so as of today ngl.

SOCA05 | Intro to Sociology - B

This was a breadth course so I wont spend too much time talking about it. But I took this with Bahar Hashemi, the prof was nice, the course content was alright. However there were so many readings (that I never did) which resulted in a lot of memorization. But really what else can you expect from a social sciences course. I found it boring, but interesting once I had completed the course, decently easy 4.0 with enough time investment.

VPSA63 | But why is it art? - C

Screw this course bro 😭, I had like 80% of my mark left unmarked before the CR/NCR date. Ended up CRing course out of fear but I ended with a 4.0, this course tilted me. But the course itself is slightly interesting. Fairly light workload excluding readings, but goddamn this prof bro Adam David Brown needs to step up his marking game.

CSCA67 | Discrete Math - D

Worst course organization I’ve ever seen, worst TAs I’ve ever seen, worst assignments I’ve ever seen. This course sucked so much. The content was so weird, teaching us how to write idiotic proofs in a format we would never use again, barely helpful for MATA31 (counterproductive even). Michael Molloy was fine teacher but the course coordinator Anya Tafliovich had some really questionable choices in the structure. Like to submit a regrade we had to first go to a ta to get approval, mark down the time and date, then send an email to Anya herself to maybe get a chance at a regrade.

But with these TAs man… Every assignment (which was super long for no reason by the way) I had to go for regrades. So people just went to her office hours instead for regrades.

Then I went myself once for a regrade of the exam, and I got crashed out on Anya getting annoyed that people didn’t follow her regrade system 😭. Did not even enjoy a single part of this course, i sold my soul for the 4.0.

Sem 2

CSCA48 | Intro to Computer Science 2 - B

Going into this course I was actually pretty excited to learn C for the first time. My prof was actually great, Rawad Abou Assi was very nice and his lectures were clear and well structured. Course content was alright, but there was some questionable structuring.

Like teaching us the BST data structure before teaching recursion.

Midterms were super weird and it felt like the coordinator Paco or Francisco Estrada was trying to ragebait all of us with this one sentence he kept repeating. If you take this course you will know exactly what I am talking about, I dont want to say what it is again, it brings up bad memories.

Managed to clutch up on the final exam for a sweet sweet 90 😏.

ESSA06 | Intro to Planet Earth - C

Breadth course I gambled on and unfortunately I think I do not like environmental sciences. Welp at least my prof Kirsten Kennedy was alright I guess, but she kinda just yapped, although that might be the fault of the nature of the course. I was just fairly disinterested. There were cheat sheets for each test and all I had to do is slave away at my cheat sheet reviewing everything the day before the test and boom 4.0.

MATA22 | Linear Algebra - B

Parker Glen Adley did not cook with this course structure, my prof Thomas Kielstra did not make the lectures that much better either. He is much better in linear algebra 2 though. The content was fairly interesting and the course was very nice to your GPA. Man the homeworks were so painful, and learning everything was so hard too.

Thomas Kielstra was someone who seemed very passionate about linear algebra, but he ended up going on linear algebra side tangents a lot. This is cool in linear algebra 2 where you understand what hes talking about, but to someone who took a while to understand what a span was this just confuses me more. Oh yeah and he had hieroglyphic handwriting.

Despite all that the tests were fair and I ended up nabbing that 4.0 too. :)

MATA37 | Calc 2 - A

A true nightmare of a course. Will 100% haunt every first year for the rest of their university careers. The reason why it’s ranked so high is because Kathleen Smith has the best teaching out of any prof I’ve had. You can’t skip lectures as there aren’t slides nor recordings, but her teaching is so good that you don’t really want to skip (unless you just hate calculus I guess).

But holy moly she is the GPA muncher, I got obliterated, It also doesn’t help that for me, all the content is new as we only cover calc 1 in high school. Yeah I tried for this course but it brok my 4.0 streak with a 3.0 🗿. Really the best teacher you can get if you don’t care about your gpa though.

That’s it! (For now)

I hope to update this list in the future with changes and new courses as I run it through university. Thanks for taking the time to read this massive first entry. I’ll probably add images as well to visual this tier list.