Continuation for Summer 2026

Published: 09-03-2026

Contrary to last summer, this was probably the worst semester I have ever taken at UTSC. I think it was just a stroke of bad luck because all my closest friends I normally talked to in these courses were on co-op, and the experienced was worsened by the fact that most of the courses this semester I also personally disliked. Ontop of that, these courses together resulted in endless weekly assessments with no room for any breaks. I also had possible the worst final exam schedule I will ever have with 3 finals at the start of the exam season all within the span of 36 hours. I am relieved that it is over though, because that means now that these courses are done, the future semesters may have some better courses.

MATB42 | Multivariable Calculus - D

Opening this up with a similar course as last summer, I took this course with Tatiana Pilehrood and this was definitely one of the worst courses I have ever taken. I really did not enjoy multivariable calculus 1 and this course was no different in that regard. However, there was one thing that made this course so much worse. The content was actaully difficult, it focused a lot more on the integral side of things and a lot on shapes in 3d. Just like multivariable 1, there were a massive number of formulas we had to remember, but this time, nothing felt intuitive. I got lost ever since they introducted orientation of lines because it just got more and more confusing. Nothing was explained in big detail and every lecture was just introducting new formulas to play with. Because of this, I opted to just study this course with our prof’s lecture notes rather then attending any lectures, also because they were at 9am unfortunately.

Trying to studying for a course you aren’t interested is already hard, but studying for a harder course you aren’t interested in is impossible. Luckily the asynchronous assessments in this course were fairly easy, and the grading scheme was similar to Tatiana’s multivariable one with the addition of quizzes. The quizzes however were all fairly easy as well, except for the last one which I was not prepared for. However, to balance this out, she made the midterm and final incredible hard. I was definitely not ready for what the midterm did to me, and this was the same for the final. I am confident that she ended up curving the final grade for everyone as I managed to finish this course with an A-. So happy to be done with calculus.

CSCB63 | Design and Analysis of Data Structures - C

The dreaded DSA course that every computer science major is forced to endure. I took this course with Javane Rostampoor a relatively new prof, but of the few lectures I attended she seemed fairly nice. Her teaching style was just incredibly average though, just a slideshow and speaking. I enjoyed this course a decent amount but only at the beginning. Things were slow and concepts were explained fairly clearly, things were just simple. I could get away with putting my focus elsewhere especially because I already had prior knowledge of this course.

But that was until the last third of this course. Out of nowhere, the course content becomes incredibly hard, with the introduction of amortized and expected analysis with new data structures I’ve never seen like a fibonacci heap and hash tables. This content was certainly not easy and very difficult, but for some reason, it seems like the course is structured to cram all this difficult content in the last 4 weeks and waste a bunch of time on the easy content in the first 8. At this point I stopped attending lectures, but it seems like for data structures like the fibonacci heap and hash table, our prof ran out of time to properly teach them in class, so she ended up posting recordings of lectures with slide decks in a course that normally does not record lectures. I could only assume she didn’t teach this content in class. This made it feel like the content in the last 4 weeks was triple the amount of content in the first 8 weeks. I unfortunately didn’t realize this much until it was a week before finals so the cramming experience was horrible.

The difficulty of each assessment in this course was entirely inconsistent, we had weekly quizzes that amounted to a flat +5% bonus mark ontop of the final grade (wtf?). You would expect these to be hard, but they were 10minute quizzes that you could do with logic. By the end of the semester, I was using the inclass tutorial time prior to the actual quiz to study for it, and I would get consistent 100%s on them. They were probably the easiest assessments I have ever written. The two midterms as well were incredibly easy, I was able to get high 90s on both of them without much work. However the assignments were kind of diabolical, they were always much more difficult then any questions we had ever seen and the coding questions usually required a lot of time for no reason. What was a major annoyance as well was that they forced everyone to submit solutions written in latex. All this made me spend way more time on assignments then I would’ve liked. Especially the last assignment felt like it was designed to curve down the class. But since everything was fairly easy to score high on, our class feared what would be on the final, especially with the last 4 weeks of content. Unfortunately, what we feared became a reality, the final was absurdly hard, but seems like I did okay and good enough on prior content as I was able to end with an A+ (thank you bonus marks), still terrible course though.

STAB52 | Introduction to Probability - C

This prof is infamous for this course as Kathleen is with MATA37, but I took this course with Sotirios Damouras. I already had a lot of my friends take this course in prior semesters so I heard all about this course’s notoriety. Weekly quizzes are easy, but one of the midterms or final will completely obliterate the entire class. That fear loomed above all of us all the way until the final exam (because the one that obliterated the class was the final). Its funny because last summer, the first midterm was curved by 20%, the fall after, the second midterm was like a 40 or 50 average and now it was the final, its like it was consecutive. But I think I would’ve prefered the first midterm being the hardest, as then we get it over with early. Every assessment we wrote this time had the potential to completely destroy us, and I wish that feeling was gone a bit earlier.

As for the content itself, some of it was actually fairly interesting, I was most invested in the joint probability content as it felt incredibly intuitive. I was able to score very well on both the first and the second midterm. The weekly quizzes this time were also in-person rather then online like previous courses. To make up for that, they were only 15min and very easy. They also got us to use a platform for user-generated stats problems with a 5% mark incentive that was pretty much a free 100%. However like CSCB63, the last 4 weeks of content was very difficult for me. And on the day of the final, I was running on 3 hours of sleep, awake for 12 hours (since I had a different final in the morning and this final was in this night), and struggling to understand the last weeks of content. This culminated to a disasterous final leaving me with a final grade of A- (which I will gladly take) and for once in the personally known history of this course there was no curve. Guess it was enjoyable, but the final experiences with this course really brought the course down many levels

MATC01 | Groups and Symmetry - A

The only saving grace of this semester. Going in, I was hoping for a 3.7 as this was supposed to be my rematch with Kathleen Smith, but immediately I got absolutely destroyed. The course content was very interesting, this was really the only course that studying for was actaully enjoyable at times. Group theory is pretty sick, and I was really suprised by the amount of applications it has to things I never would’ve expected. For example, one of these connections would be group theory and the rubik’s cube, I can’t even to begin to understand how they link because we didn’t cover it in class, but the link exists and I think that’s pretty cool. Lectures were great as always, but at times it really did get tiring to be taking notes all the time. Kathleen really does a good job of giving intuition and motivation for all her concepts she introduces.

However there is one thing that really sucks about Kathleen which is the conclusion I came to after finishing up this course. Although she teaches well, the amount of effort you have to put in to survive this course does not reflect in the grade you get. I swear I put my best foot forward for this course, doing extra exercises like I’d never done before, and I still got a 75 on the first quiz. With quizzes being the only assessment outside of testing and the project (which I was also worried about) this was very demotivating. I thought, not the end of the world and when the second quiz came back, I got a 63. At this point, I was seriously considering dropping the course. It felt like no matter how much I tried this course was just too difficult for me.

Thankfully, it seemed that the quizzes were just the worst offenders in terms of difficulty, as when the midterm rolled around, I found it incredibly easy, and scored an 89 which pretty much brought me back in the game, and the quiz after, I managed to get a high 80 as well. Things were really starting to look up for this course, and there really was no caveat, it really was just up from that point.

The project rolled around and it was probably one of the most enjoyable math-related assignments I’d ever done. I had a ressearch project investigating the connection between group theory and music theory, another topic that I was always interseted in. All of a sudden, I had an excuse to learn some more music theory while learning about some math that I had enjoyed. This project was definitely one of if not, my favourite at UTSC, and clearly Kathleen enjoyed it as well, because I somehow achieved a 96 on this project. It was really awesome making a presentation for a setting where every listener was already invested in the content being presented. We all had a nice conversation even after the presentation about my topic and it was a really great time. There are more details about this project relating to the technicalities in the yapping post previously.

The final ended up being fairly fun and easy as well. I managed to do very well on it, and I am very happy with how this course turned out as I ended with an A, which would be my revenge 4.0 against Kathleen. It felt like all my work towards this course had been worth it. However the reason why this course is not an S to me is because of the pressure around this course. Of all the courses this semester, this course easily took up the most of my time and unlike all the other courses, this courses classes were unskippable due to Kathleen’s teaching style. Even though it took up the most of my time, I struggled to see results and I really felt completely demotivated at certain points of this course, although I am happy I did not drop this course and stuck it through, I respectfully don’t think I will be taking another core math course with Kathleen again (even though she is a great prof), I got my rematch in already after all.

Conclusion

Just relieved this semester is over and happy that it wasn’t all bad with MATC01 saving it for me. But I wonder if I would’ve given it an S in a semester where other courses didn’t sour that course. Looking forward to my next semester in winter though as all my friends will be back from co-op and things might turn out to be pretty fun again 😼.