How to pass MATH 1113 (Precalculus) at UGA

It isn’t designed as a weeder, but it works like one, and the reason is the format. The course is flipped, hybrid and run through ALEKS, and that combination punishes passive learning. Walk in expecting an ordinary lecture course and you’ll be behind within three weeks.

What MATH 1113 covers

MATH 1113 is a 3-credit precalculus course covering:

• Functions and their properties (domain, range, transformations, composition, inverse)
• Polynomial and rational functions
• Exponential and logarithmic functions
• Trigonometric functions and identities
• Analytic trigonometry (solving equations, sum and difference identities)
• Systems of equations (introductory)
• Conic sections (in some sections)

The textbook is Precalculus by Julie Miller and Donna Gerkin (McGraw Hill), in a UGA edition that includes ALEKS 360 access. MATH 1113 is the prerequisite or corequisite for MATH 2200, MATH 2250, CHEM 1211, and most physics, statistics and quantitative business prerequisites. A poor grade here holds up chemistry, calculus, economics and engineering tracks, and making it up usually costs a full semester.

Why the format catches students off guard

Most MATH 1113 sections at UGA use a flipped, hybrid format:

• You watch pre-class videos and complete a worksheet before every class meeting
• Class time goes to problem-solving, group work and discussion, not lecture
• Homework is delivered through ALEKS, which uses adaptive questioning
• Quizzes (in-class and take-home) supplement the homework
• “Basic skills tests” verify that you’ve mastered prerequisite skills

That format works very well for students who do the pre-class work and treat class as practice. It works badly for students who study the way they did in high school, listening in lecture and cramming before exams. There is no lecture to sit back in.

So the grades split. Students who adapt to the flipped model often earn A’s, and students who don’t end up in the C-D-F range.

Why students struggle

Skipping the pre-class videos and worksheets means you arrive unable to do the in-class problems, and the homework assumes you could. By week four you can’t catch up without starting over.

ALEKS finds your weak topics and drills you on them. It feels punishing, and it is the system working as designed. Students who try to game it by guessing or skipping rarely pass the assessments underneath.

High school precalculus leaves gaps. If you took it but never fully learned logarithms, function transformations or unit-circle trig, MATH 1113 will find them, usually mid-semester, when they’re hardest to fix.

Trigonometry trips up more students than anything else in the course. In many sections the unit circle, identities and analytic trig come late in the semester, when everyone is tired of exams, and students who haven’t memorized the unit circle come apart on the trig test.

Word problems test whether you can translate. ALEKS and the exams both ask you to turn words into equations. A student who can solve a cleanly stated equation but freezes on a word problem usually has a translation gap, not an algebra gap.

The exam structure

Most MATH 1113 sections look like this:

• 3 to 4 unit exams (often called “tests”)
• A cumulative final, often heavily weighted
• ALEKS homework worth a real share of the grade
• In-class quizzes and take-home quizzes
• Basic skills tests (pass/fail mastery checks)
• Pre-class assignments (small but additive)

On the cumulative final, a student who held a B all semester can earn an A by mastering the cumulative review, and a student who limped along at a C can finish with a B.

If your algebra or trig isn’t where MATH 1113 needs it to be, that’s the gap I help UGA students close. Book a MATH 1113 Diagnostic →

How to study for it

1. Do the pre-class work the day before, not the morning of. Watching the videos at full speed at 8:55 AM isn’t studying. The whole course is built on that pre-class work, so give it a fixed block in your week and protect it.

2. Use ALEKS as a diagnostic, not a chore. When ALEKS marks a topic “needs work,” it’s telling you something. Instead of grinding through it resentfully, work out what you don’t understand and fix the skill underneath. That’s what the ALEKS knowledge check is for.

3. Memorize the unit circle in the first week of the trig unit, not the night before the exam. If you can give sin, cos and tan for every multiple of π/6 and π/4 in under 30 seconds, you’ve removed the biggest single source of trig errors on UGA’s exams. It takes a week, and it pays off for the rest of your math career.

4. Keep a “common errors” list as you go. Every time you miss something on ALEKS or a quiz, write down the error and the correct method on one tracking sheet, and read it before every exam. Most exam mistakes are repeats of ones you’ve already made.

5. Practice word problems separately from skill problems. Skill problems test mechanics; word problems test translation. An hour on skill problems and none on word problems leaves a word-problem-shaped hole in your exam score.

What to do if you’re already behind

If you’re past week six and your grade is sliding:

• Run the numbers. Most syllabi make recovery possible with a strong cumulative final, but you need to know the exact threshold before you decide whether to push on or withdraw.
• Work out whether the problem is precalculus or what comes before it. If it’s the foundation (algebra, factoring, exponents), working harder on the current material won’t help. You have to go back and fill it in.
• Decide between a W and grinding through. If you withdraw, plan the retake right away, because losing MATH 1113 delays everything after it. The withdrawal deadline at UGA is roughly two weeks after the semester midpoint.
• If you stay, get diagnostic help soon. The longer a foundation gap sits there, the more new material gets built on top of it wrong.

How MATH 1113 connects to your scholarship

MATH 1113 is on the approved STEM weighted course directory for HOPE and Zell Miller. A B, C or D earns an extra 0.5 in the calculated HOPE GPA, so a B counts as 3.5, a C as 2.5 and a D as 1.5. For a student trying to keep Zell Miller or win it back, that helps. The HOPE and Zell Miller GPA guide has the full mechanics, and if you’ve already lost the scholarship, the Zell Miller recovery guide goes through the math in detail.

When to get help

A few hours of diagnostic-first tutoring can change how MATH 1113 goes, because most of the trouble is in the foundation rather than the current topic. Once a tutor finds where your foundation broke (factoring? exponent rules? function notation? trig?), you stop grinding through the wrong material.

That kind of diagnostic work is what I specialize in. I test where the gap is and build from there, not from wherever the syllabus happens to be. For MATH 1113 students that usually means 2 to 4 sessions of foundation repair, then weekly support through the rest of the semester.