To the Department of Mathematics at MIT,

We, the students of 18.02A under the instruction of Professor Bush, would like to bring our concerns to your attention and kindly ask you to take relevant actions addressing this matter.

The organization of this course made it very difficult for us to learn effectively. With the IAP portion of this class being fast-paced, students rely on the PSETs being graded as soon as possible and/or posting the PSET solutions at an appropriate time in order to prepare for the examinations (which happen once every two weeks). However, the first two PSETs were graded during the last week of IAP, far after the first exam. Not only were PSETs graded weeks after submission, PSET answer keys were either posted late or did not correspond to the PSET at all. The solutions to the practice exam for the final were also posted very late—around 9p.m. the day before and the final was on 9a.m. the next day; this solution key also contained multiple errors.

Furthermore, Professor Bush recycled questions from the midterm exam during finals week into our PSET and final exam. To provide some context, Professor Bush and the TAs are fully aware that most students found the exam at the end of Fall semester a lot more difficult than previous exams (as indicated by a much lower average score). In addition, the solutions to that midterm were never posted despite many student requests. After a strong performance on the first IAP midterm, Professor Bush made repeated remarks on several occasions that he “will have to make the next test harder;” during his last Office Hours before the exam, instead of providing helpful comments on the PSET (which many student found really difficult and required to pull an all-nighter), he spent a large amount of time stating how the final will be very difficult—“Question 11b in particular”, “has lots of beautiful math”...—in an almost provocative way. It turned out that Question 11 on the final was the exact same question on the midterm during finals week that many students struggled on. The last PSET also recycled a problem from that midterm, and a different problem from this exact PSET also occurred in the final except with a few modifications (as stated in the previous paragraph they posted the incorrect solutions to this PSET). We believe all these actions made the learning process very inefficient and led to high levels of unnecessary stress and lack of sleep. 

Professor Bush also stopped giving the TAs access to PSET solutions some time during the course, which made many of us and the TAs unsure and often confused about what the questions were looking for. TAs have confessed that most graduate Mathematics students did not even know how to approach certain questions from our PSETs, and many of us, having gone to several different Office Hours, sometimes received very different instructions on the same problem. We understand that Professor Bush may have concerns toward TAs giving the answers straight to the students, but from all our other classes, the TAs followed the guidelines even with the answer key and were able to give students clear, concise, and direct comments. Instead of helping us to learn efficiently (which is the objective of PSETS), not providing the answer key to TAs left many students confused, and we often spent a lot more time on them just trying to judge the right answers without understanding the material.

While the concerns stated are mostly addressed to the IAP portion of this course, we believe improvements can be made to the course overall to improve efficiency and our understanding of multivariable calculus. We have the following recommendations for both Professor Bush and future instructors of this class:

• Explain concepts in a more straightforward way and write less (but still complete) notes on the board. Many of us found the notes are written way too fast, which leaves us little to no time to process the material during lecture. Moreover, students found Professor Bush’s notes difficult to interpret and often required secondary sources to fully understand the material.
• Construct PSET questions that achieve learning objectives and challenge the students appropriately. Cross-reference with syllabus and PSETs in 18.02 so that the difficulty and material across the two classes are similar.
• Give TA access to answer keys or clear instructions on how to approach PSET problems to avoid confusion and misleading guidance.
• Grade PSETs in at most a week after submission and post solutions a few days before relevant exams.
• Focus on student questions during Office Hours and answer in detailed and constructive comments with diagrams when possible.

These are our thoughts merely from the students’ perspectives. We understand that the department has much more to consider and balance, and we would be open to any further discussions and suggestions.