First off, I believe this was the first class West ever taught as she does research (I think?) and is not yet a true professor, so we were her guinea pig class. Yayyyyy. I went into this class with some experience from taking AP Physics 1 and AP Physics C in high school (A in both classes although I got 2's on both AP tests). I sat in lecture (online Zoom) a few times but ended up skipping most because they were slow and I was uninterested in watching West derive equations. I felt I new the class material well enough because I was able to learn whatever I was missing through the (on average) weekly assigned problems on Kudu. Because we used Kudu, there was no textbook needed for this class. However, while the Kudu homework problems were at a difficulty of my high school physics tests, the two Midterms and Final were almost at a difficulty level of the AP tests. Hence I did not do very well lol. The professor was nice but unwilling to explicitly tell us she'd make the class easier due to the protests and Covid-19, so many students (including me) felt very stressed and disliked her due to her unsympathetic responses to us. I ended up going into the final with what I believed was a C or C- with no curve. Ended up working 15+ hours on the 24 hour final in a desperate attempt to pass the class. When I got my final exam grade back, without a curve I believe it pushed me up to a C+ about .5 percent away from a B-. But lucky for me, West curved this class so I ended with a final grade of a B. Many people in their moment of stress going into the final decided to drop this class or switch to pass/no pass, but I did not because I stubbornly did not care and was ready to take the L. Please don't worry if you have this professor. While Physics 1A is a hard class regardless of professor, and there are definitely professors easier than West, by no means does she make this class impossible. I'd say overall this class was average in difficulty in my experience. (For reference, I'm a mechanical engineering major, had to take the 20 series chem. Now THOSE were hard for me haha).

Most of the class was spent going over formulas and how to derive them. I found this pretty useless because our "textbook" was decent at explaining this. I felt the class would have been better if she dedicated more time to doing relevant examples instead of focusing on the formulas. Our textbook was on Kudu. There were between 15 and 20 questions assigned each week and you have two attempts for the multiple choice and four for the fill-in questions. Some of the questions were quite challenging. The study materials she gave for the midterms and final were nothing like the actual tests. The midterm consisted of between 4 and 7 questions each with multiple parts. They were supposedly able to be completed in around 2 hours, but that was not the case for most of the class. Most students spent more than 5 hours or more on the exams. The exams were pretty challenging, and were almost nothing like the problems we had done in class or for homework. The only thing that I found helpful was the discussion. Most of the time, he would do examples to questions similar to things you would find on the tests. Now for the final. This one of the craziest experiences that I've had in a class. With the protests going on, most professors decided to opt for a no harm final or provide some other form of accommodation for the class. Dr. West's decision was to change the weight of the final by 10% depending on how you performed (final was worth more if you did better than on the midterms). Even after several emails from not only the students, but the Academic Senate as well the department chair, she would not budge on her decision. This was very frustrating, especially after all my other professors had put their students well being as the priority. The only reason she did this was because she felt we hadn't shown her that we knew the material, which doesn't even make any sense. She also began voicing her opinions about the protests, and almost criticized students who wanted to participate in the protests, which I thought was out of line. I know this class is meant to be hard, but the situations that arose could have been handled in a much better manner.

People are pissed that she is not being lenient. But this policy is largely handed down by the department. By all means, go give the department an earful, but a new postdoc can't really go against the department.

Exams were fine. There was a low average, but there's a curve. Homework was on Kudu, which is some stupid online thing, and pretty easy. Content was boring af, but I don't think anyone is taking this class just for the fun of it.