TLDR: If you enjoy physics and want to completely understand the different concepts in the class, I'd highly recommend Corbin. If you do not care too much about the subject and just want to get it over with as a requirement for your major, you're better off taking a professor who just uses formulas and asks direct questions in tests.

Corbin is an amazing lecturer with clear and engaging lectures. Attending office hours is tremendously useful as he covers a lot of examples. There is a lot of homework worth a total of 10% of your grade.

I'd recommend making a cheat sheet for every chapter, using it to do homework questions using variables and not numbers, and then plugging in the numbers to check if your answer is right. This is what I did and felt like it gave me good practice.

The quizzes were of moderate difficulty and you can get away with one poor quiz. The final, however, was a different beast with tough questions. I fell short of time but the curve carried me to an A.

Corbin is a fantastic lecturer. He is extremely clear, funny, and all-around informative and engaging. I really like him as a lecturer.
He doesn't like to answer homework questions in Office Hours or anything which is a little unhelpful.
His tests and quizzes are hard, but not impossible. In my experience, for *most* (not all) of our quiz questions, he did an adjacent problem in lecture.
The curve is very very generous. I averaged an 80% on the quizzes and got a 42% on the final, but managed to get an A in the class.
My largest word of advice is to do the homework on a weekly schedule. Do one chapter a week because you're going to have the worst time Week 10 if you save it all to the end!

Super nice professor (and person)! His lectures are super clear and funny, and help me a lot understand the concepts of some abstract materials such as magnetism and relativity. He doesn't have mandatory homework, but it's always a good idea to try to practice as much as you can. Problems on the textbook are not that helpful. One reason is that those usually involve numbers, but Corbin only uses letter variables in his exams. GO TO HIS OFFICE HOURS!!! I've never heard a professor who has as much as FOUR WHOLE HOURS for office hour per week except him! It's a golden opportunity to reinforce the materials on the lecture, and have more practice, with some fun personal stories of him as a small boost. I had my lunch time overlapped with his office hours, but I still went to his office hours often, at a cost of not having lunch, as I thought it helped me a lot. Midterms are tough, and the time is tight. NEVER DO THE FIRST PROBLEM FIRST. For the 4 midterms I had for him for both 1b and 1c, the first problem was always the most comprehensive one, and I always lost points for not fully understanding the problem. Though it may not always be the case, a better strategy is to look at each problem first before you work on them. Choose the easiest one first, and leave the more challenging ones after. Again, SUPER NICE PROFESSOR AND PERSON!

Lectures aren't recorded, and you absolutely need to come to lecture for Corbin. Like other reviews have said, the tests are insanely hard, but I was able to do pretty well on them without really knowing the concepts. Some tips:
- 100% use previous exams - he often reuses types of questions and this helps a lot when exams are such a time crunch and there are only 3 questions. Search "bruintestbank lintree" in Google or find a student who has access to UPE/HKN test banks
- before starting the test, read all of the questions first. This will help budget your time and start on the easiest question first
- put an answer for everything and don't be a completionist. The graders are extremely generous with partial credit and you should maximize partial credit rather than maximizing getting questions 100% correct. For questions with integrals, you will get most of the points if you just leave it as an integral and don't solve it, which is often the play when tests are so time-sensitive and the math is the hard part

Corbin puts all his homework due at the end of the quarter, but don't start it at the last moment. You can probably find the answer key to the textbook online if you really need it.

This was the hardest class I have taken so far. I studied really hard to just get a C. I left every lecture even more confused.

When I enrolled in Physics1A with Corbin, I didn't even know about Bruinwalk at the time. God damn, I wish I did because this quarter was not a fun experience. When people say his tests are hard, THEY MEAN IT. His tests have no numbers in them; they're all with variables, but the setups are really hard a lot of the time.

I think a lot of people on Bruinwalk say that Corbin is an excellent lecturer, and I would say that he's a good lecturer, but no matter how good he is at explaining things, you won't be ready for his tests unless you do a stupid amount of studying. You might be thinking, "oh I'll be able to learn the material more", but no, please it's not worth it. I HIGHLY recommend taking a different professor sorry Corbin :)

I have the exceedingly unpopular following opinion: Corbin is great!
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However, before I even go into why I hold such a radical opinion, some important concessions to the majority:
• If you don't have physics experience going into this class (AP Physics 1 is what I had), you will with a high certainty be in a tremendous amount of pain. This holds for any Physics 1A professor, since it's quite a conceptual leap for a single quarter, but like, Corbin isn't the most beginner-friendly.
• Even if you do have physics experience, if you didn't enjoy that physics experience or didn't grasp it that well, you may, again, enjoy taking the class with another professor more.
• Corbin's tests *are* quite hard. Corbin *does,* however, highly curve. If seeing a final exam average of just over 40% stresses you out beyond belief, that's very understandable; this may not be the course for you. If you recognize Corbin recognizes the tests almost always fail to exceed a 70% average, and thus curves (in the good way) highly, and you're OK with this grading scheme, then you'll do just fine here.
• Corbin is not very accommodating. We initially were online and thus the class was recorded, but after about two lectures in person he claimed the recording wasn't working and stopped moving the camera to follow what he was writing on the chalk board. His mic also died a record number of times during lecture, something I've never seen elsewhere. He either has a curse with technology or has cursed technology, but whatever it is he'd rather you show up in person and likely won't negotiate.
• The homework (Mastering Physics) is often pretty painfully long and complicated (HIGHLY recommend doing it with a friend or friends), but well prepares you for exams. I couldn't make it to office hours, but he won't go over homework there (likely due to the problems' drawn out natures), instead focusing on concept discussion.
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If that hasn't turned you away, let's talk about the good side of this mischievous man! First and foremost, Corbin's been around for a while, so he knows what he's doing. He has his lectures pretty well curated; he always knows what he's talking about and lectures on the fly, solving physics problems in depth but skipping a bunch of mathematical steps. It's at a reasonable enough pace to write down everything he does, although you will likely have to look back over notes to fully understand what he wrote (and fill in the missing mathematical pieces). This style leaves time for more examples and clarifying discussion. Sometimes the math gets a little bit challenging, bringing in concepts from calculus that you may not have (fully) learned yet; these mostly don't come up in homework and exams, but are good to try and understand if possible. But generally I'd say he lectures well and gives ample examples to discuss the topics he's covering. You'll see that exams often have problems very similar to examples given in class.
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And why I enjoyed the class most: on top of clearly knowing what he's talking about, Corbin has a fun time lecturing! Every once in a while he'll throw in a fun, short story about when he was younger, or make a joke that wrestles a smile out of your sleep-deprived soul struggling to recover from whatever bad decisions kept you up the night prior. He sometimes wears entertaining t-shirts and has no trouble really letting you know how he feels. I'm sure if you get him in a fully in-person quarter, you'll have entertaining physics demonstrations, too (we only heard stories). Some fun quotes from him I wrote down over the quarter include "each of you is right in your own interesting way"; (in addressing a common misconception) "total absolute pure sheer unadulterated bullshit"; and "[My wife] is always trying to tell me 'I'm not dignified' in lecture. Like what the hell does that mean??"
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I'd say Corbin is an endearing a**hole; I love this, but it's not everyone's piece of cake.
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The short and quick of it is if you want a fun time, but not necessarily an easy time, and you've enjoyed physics in the past, take the class. If you have a lot of calculus experience, that helps too. If anything in my review or someone else's review terrifies you, that's also perfectly reasonable; probably avoid Corbin.

This class is extremely difficult. I felt defeated after submitting my final exam, as well some of the quizzes. However, I was able to get an A, so the curve must have been generous. I think the following factors contributed to my eventual success in the course:

- I attended the lectures live, and I watched the lecture recordings later on to reinforce the material.
- I made it a goal to be able to be able to solve most of the examples / derive most of the formulas from lecture. This prevented me from flipping through my lecture notes and tricking myself into thinking that I knew the content.
- Near the end of the quarter, I attended a couple of office hour sessions. I found these to be moderately helpful in reviewing some of the core concepts.

The man really does live up to his reputation. I personally found this class to be really, really difficult. The practice problems he assigns as (unchecked and ungraded) homework do not reflect the difficulty of exam problems at all. You either know the material on an intuitive level or the exam will whack you. The only consolation is that the exam whacks a good 80% of your peers too, so the overall curve is surprisingly kind (I got a 21/90 raw score on my second midterm and still got a B in the class. Hold that).
His lectures are hit or miss for me. He is very engaging, but I wish he had used the giant projection screens in the lecture hall rather than writing on the blackboard (my vision is doodoo and it was difficult to see what he was doing sometimes with more complicated work, even when sitting near the front of the hall). He also uses minimal premade lecture notes, so his lectures can be difficult to follow sometimes, but YMMV. It's often not clear what he is leading into until halfway through that topic's discussion, which can be jarring. I will fully admit that this was partly my fault for not reading along in the textbook until Week 8 or so, but I've never had to do that in 1A or 1B either.
Corbin emphasizes development and familiarity with "first principles" of whatever topic is currently being covered. He doesn't allow cheat sheets or notes during exams for this reason, and expects you to derive expressions for physical phenomena from basic ideas rather than writing down a memorized or recorded formula (this is why his exam problems usually look so convoluted). Usually, this boils down to a few equations or qualitative rules about what you're studying, so if you can get familiar with those for each topic and your intuition for physics is strong, you're pretty well set for exams. FYI: he will probably tell you that the final is going to be relatively "straightforward". He really does mean it. On my final, two of the questions were almost directly lifted from work we wrote down as notes during class and were almost simple as a result.
THE BEST ADVICE I CAN GIVE TO PREPARE FOR HIS EXAMS IS TO LOOK AT PROBLEMS DONE IN CLASS and then considering how he could make the problem even nastier (what if this quantity that we take to be constant isn't a constant? what if this quantity we assume is zero is not actually zero? etc.). This sounds super masochistic, but I promise that this is the best (and possibly the only real way) to prepare for his problems without having access to past exams.

tl;dr hard class with an even harder instructor. If you can, enroll in 1C with a different instructor, and go to Corbin's lectures to learn the material in great depth.

Personally, I did not enjoy Corbin's class. Everyone told me to take him if I wanted a challenging class where I would really learn Physics. However, that was not my experience. His lectures were interesting and not terribly difficult to follow, but I feel like they did not teach me physics. He often blew over the algebra parts of solving, and he was not receptive of questions. His tests are ridiculous and even though he ends up curving the class a bunch in the end, I personally feel that it is not a good learning environment. There's no homework technically due in class and although the book problems are helpful to do, nothing can prepare you for his crazy tests. The final however is a lot better than both midterms, and even though I was below average on both midterms, I got a B in class and I believe it's because the final was much more straight forward and you actually had time to think and work through the problems. Overall though, I wish I had not taken his class and I would not recommend anyone else take it either.