Professor Morales is the hardest professor I have ever taken at UCLA. I enjoyed physics until I took his class. Lectures are basically pointless because he has notes online. I hated the weekly quizzes even though they were based on homework problems. His grading is 10% hw, 10% quizzes, 20% each midterm, 40% final. Take Morales if you want. I definitely won't ever take his class again.

His lectures sucked. They were really dry and most of what he wrote on the board was equations full of symbols. He rarely did examples. What I do love about him though, is that he's straightforward. I got an A in the class, mainly because I knew what to expect and what to study. The homework is rediculously hard, but the questions on tests are significantly easier. For the final, he gave us a sheet listing the concepts covered in each question. Know how to set up different kinds of questions and you should be ok. I studied maybe 10 hours combined for both midterms and the final, but each homework took at least 1 hour and a half. He's not an great teacher, but the class is nice. He's probably better than other Physics 1A teachers, so I'd suggest taking him.

Morales really cares about student learning. He frequently responds on the class website and gives additional notes and hw solutions. What i didnt like about the class was the vector notations and variables he used when solving problems. It makes everything complicated and confusing. Throughout the class he kept saying there was no curve so everyone really panicked but in the end there is one so don't worry.

Professor Morales was a great professor. Not excellent, but did not disappoint. He is very nice and encouraging in teaching physics. However, he focused a lot on applications while spending insufficient amount of time on the basics.

The class was challenging even though I had received a 5 on the AP Physics test. I could imagine that it was either extremely time consuming or difficult for those who never taken physics before Physics 1A.

I felt like he rushed the last topics (rotation) a lot - he could have completed dynamics and kinematics quicker to save some time for the harder topics (rotation, energy, relativity)

Morales loves to teach physics based on vectors and analytical terms (symbols, no numbers). That helped me use my calculator less and truely understand what I was doing. Physics isnt just plugging in numbers into equations; it is understand concepts and application.

Office hours are open to discussion about physics; take use of the time to ask him anything. However, if you ask him a question, he can go on for 30 minutes about it and show you ALL the ways to solve the problem from different approaches.

Otherwise, exams are fair, and Morales is a lenient grader. Quizzes are straight out of the HW sets. Homeworks are only 10 problems each set, but take at least 2 hours to complete. I had to refer to the solutions manual for a lot of them, becuase only the most difficult problems in the book were assigned.

The final was much more simple than I thought. I studied at least 25 hours for it, but the questions were relatively simple.

I recommend him; he is very clear in getting across the concepts.