Obituary: MAT137

Calculus with Proofs – referred to colloquially as MAT137 – occupied a special place in many UofT STEM students’ hearts, wasting space that could have housed more important matters such as dignity and self-respect. It is, thus, with our sincerest congratulations, that we announce the death of the University of Toronto’s most hated course.

With its final term being Summer 2025-26, MAT137 has tormented students for over 10 years on the St. George campus. This year, with a C+ course average and a drop-out rate of 28% (not including failed students), students’ hopes and dreams of attaining their desired BASc degrees were crushed. Because of this, UofT has retired the course and welcomed MAT148/149 in order to split the pressure of the full-year course, with the added bonus of torturing students with two classes instead of one!

Over the course’s run, drained students trudged their way to the McLennan Physical Laboratories three times a week to attend mind-numbing lectures, spent countless hours on impossible problem sets, sat through awkward tutorial sections and pulled their hair out over unreasonable mid-terms and exams. Rat experiments would have been more humane.

While 4 hours a week seems reasonable to the untrained eye, the lecture and tutorial contents could never have prepared students for the MAT137 problem sets. Averaging approximately 6 hours per question, the next hardest thing about the course was making time for anything else. STEM students report spending more time with their problem set partners than their romantic partners, although some peers doubt the latter exist. Even ‘simple’ assignments such as computation quizzes took students up to 3 hours, and had no room for errors on pain of completely restarting the task. Little did students know, the true error was enrolling in the course itself.

While the 2025-26 syllabus reads: “We understand that sometimes things happen … That is why we have a generous grading scheme…” The only students who agreed were high when they read it. For example, when the fire alarm activated during a mid-term, students affected only got a single point bonus (for reference, the lowest scored question earned students 2 points) while others were able to look up answers during the break and had no consequences. A devil’s advocate might suggest that the inflicted pain and suffering was unintentional, but it was painfully clear that the University of Toronto decided they had it out for their students when they scheduled the MAT137 and PHY152 final exams to be on the same day despite being corequisites for several degrees.

However, it is worth noting that although pre-class quizzes were about as useful as the Myhal elevators, the late Professor Alfonso Gracia-Saz deserves a sincere thanks, as he brought joy to many unfortunate souls by way of being the first (and hopefully not last) professor to say ‘kinky’ in an official course video. The MAT137 YouTube account almost made the class worth taking. One can only hope it will be re-used in following years to preserve the remaining sanity of future students.

In the end, the only things MAT137 left its victims were mental illness, a fear of the word ‘epsilon,’ and the reassurance that no upper-year course could possibly be worse. Good riddance!—and to all those on Piazza who asked if they could get >100% in midterms, you were  part of the problem.