Professor Zocchi has a heavy accent, making it difficult to understand what he's saying, and his notes aren't very clear either. Difficult to follow along to his lectures.

So the reviews for this class are super outdated, but during Spring 2020 Zocchi's class was unorganized to say the least. He gave us barely any time for the midterms, even after NUMEROUS emails asking him to accommodate people during a tough time. The worst part was he wouldn't even respond to the emails which left much of the class in confusion (it also lead to 25% of the class dropping by week 10)

Midterm averages were also super low, midterm 1 was like a 68% and midterm 2 was about a 58%. He doesn't curve the tests but uses his own wack grading scale (I think??) where >80 is an A, 65-80 is a B, and so on. I'm not entirely sure if that's accurate because when I emailed him to confirm he ghosted me :/ I think the final average may have been higher cause most people I know scored much higher than previous midterms. But he also gave us 48 hours (finally!) for this test.

His lectures were reaaaaally hard to learn from, he has a very thick accent and just covers a bunch of examples like a machine. He definitely knows his material, but I couldn't really get anything from the lectures and stopped attending by like Week 2. I just grinded the material from the textbook and worked through the homework and prayed I'd get lucky on the midterms/finals.

Overall, if this is your first physics class since high school (like me), I would NOT recommend as I definitely feel like I have a half-ass command of the knowledge compared to my friends who took 1A with other professors. If you do have a strong physics foundation, I would still hesitantly recommend cause you're probably gonna have to rely on previous knowledge and do a bit of reading to do well in the class.

Professor Zocchi wasn’t necessarily the best, but the course is pretty manageable if you have access to solutions from previous quarters (which I didn’t have personally). The HW is not straight from a textbook, so you can’t look up the solutions apart from possibly incorrect answers off Chegg. If you know the HW in detail, then the midterm is not so bad. It helps tremendously having old exams since some elements may be unchanged. The final exam was fairly similar to the provided practice problems, so make sure to know them by heart as well as all the homework if you have sufficient time.

Selling a collection of past exams with full midterm solutions and the practice final, homework solutions, and highly organized course materials including lecture notes and grade distributions. *************

Zocchi's 105A is like what you would expect for a university physics class.
His lectures are clear and he's really a nice guy. The key of this class is the formulation of Lagrangian, and that's something you have to do a lot of practice on. Homework problems are hard and really needs some time, but they are really helpful for me to know the course materials. Sometimes there are some problems that requires a bunch of calculation, but they will not appear on the tests.
Tests are somewhat difficult. They mainly focus on the ideas and concepts, so once you've figured out what you should do, the calculation would not torture you. And tests are curved so seems like we will be alright.

Zocchi is eh okay. He's very smart and knows quantum like the back of his hand, but that is pretty standard for all physics professors at UCLA. He is very nice. A few times this quarter students thought their mics were muted and he did not have it in his heart to tell them to shut up while they were blabbering. Even once someone was talking crap about him and he did not say "hey your mic is not muted". I felt bad for him sometimes. His lectures are very difficult to follow along with, and the exams are not too ridiculous, but we are all studying physics at a top tier institution, what do you expect?

He does assign a lot of homework from the textbook for 115B in our experience this quarter, sometimes I would begin assignments and I would be working on them all day and still not finish. Unnecessarily long and complicated integrals, but do your best to understand the idea behind the problems. Studying the book is a good way to do great in his class as the lectures get quite messy.

Another thing I should mention is that he creates his own grading schematic. Greater than 80% in an A, greater than 60% is a B, greater than 50% is a C, and anything lower than 50% is failing. So the class is not curved in that other students' scores do not affect yours.

Lastly, I hate to say it, but I do not think Zocchi honestly cared about how we felt and our learning. I am not trying to bad mouth him, but it seemed like he never truly was concerned for us during COVID when everything has become 10x more difficult in life and on top of that, we have to learn QM online with limited help. He never inquired about what he could do differently, while many other professors have a link where we could give tips on their teaching.

All in all, Zocchi is not bad. Just do your work to keep up!!

Okay so basically... Zocchi is really bad and I would not recommend taking his class, even coming from someone who received an A for the work this quarter.

Personal grudge first, then the technical stuff later:
Zocchi quickly fell behind in the material early in the quarter, and instead of cutting the irrelevant content (of which there was a fair amount), he held a class twice the length of a regular one, ON A HOLIDAY!
There was no class allowed by UCLA on Presidents' Day, and instead, Zocchi assigned twice the classwork because he failed to cover the relevant content in a timely manner.

Zocchi is a very unclear lecturer who will just run through practice problems for the entirety of the class, without stopping/slowing down to explain why or how things work with physics. The first week made sense and saw about 180 people attending each lecture. Fast forward through the quarter, and you'll see that 39 students, of the total 188 enrolled, dropped the class. Even though 149 people were still technically enrolled, I never saw more than 40 people in the Zoom call by the second half of the quarter. This is because of a class plan that I would also recommend:

If you HAVE to take Zocchi, don't waste your time attending his lectures, but use the time instead to read the textbook equivalent of whatever the lecture's title is (he lists their titles on the syllabus) or work through the content he has listed for each exam.

Zocchi is also just a bit rude and inconsiderate. His frustration with questions grew throughout the quarter, and his reactions were less like a teacher answering questions and more like a Twitch streamer yelling at his chat for not understanding things that take time to learn.

The structure of the class is very simple and reasonable, which was the saving grace of this class (and the only thing that made Zocchi still preferable to Corbin):

20% is completion-based homework assigned on Mastering Physics (he gives a week to do about 2 hours)
20% is the first midterm which was very easy and straightforward in my section
20% is the second midterm which was pretty scary but still manageable for most students
40% is a god-awful final that will bring up things you've never even thought about
- and luckily anything over 80% in the class counts as an A

So the best advice I can offer is: Read the textbook, try to ace the midterms, and do all the homework so that you can cry less while pretending to understand why a square hockey puck and a salad bowl are on the final.

Considering how well you understand the basic formalism of qm determines how well you do in the following chapters, there isn't a better professor than Professor Zocchi to take this class with (he does an excellent job teaching physics 131). He sometimes likes to apply material from later chapters to earlier ones (e.g. using spin as an example in formalism), so it's important to attend every lecture.

He was kind of a funny guy but his lectures focused mostly on theory explanation and were pretty boring. Honestly, you don't really have to go to lecture at all; just teach yourself the equations from the book and make sure you can do the homework.

He is a great professor. His lectures were well organized and his tests were fair.

First midterm was ridiculously easy, especially if you've taken high school mechanics - it was a simple plug and chug test. A lot of people scored 100%. His first midterm is also very similar EVERY year. The second midterm is a bit more tricky and varies every year, but as long as you do the problems in the book you're fine. The final is really long, and there are a bit of little tricky things that take a bit of THINKING to do. The last two questions on the final were very conceptual - one of which required use of geometric series and reasoning with words, and the other one was about an object sliding/oscillating back and forth in a parabolic shaped trajectory.
Lectures are very tough to sit through because Zocchi's accent is hard to understand. He also teaches beyond what is required, proving other stuff OUTSIDE of the textbook. But as long you read the textbook, you're fine.
Discussions are probably not necessary unless you really don't understand the textbook, but the textbook is very clear and the problems in the book come in a wide variety of difficulties to help you understand material.
Overall, to do well in the class, do EVERY problem in the book and look at previous midterms. You don't have to stress about not being able to fully understand some of the material beyond the scope of the class/textbook that Zocchi talks about. You MAY have to recall stuff from Math 31B for the final. If you mastered mechanics at the high school level, you should be able to score 100% on both midterms and pretty high on the final. If you haven't taken high school physics, I suggest taking another teacher because a lot of people will have an advantage, so missing one question is devastating to your grade.