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.

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!!

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.

Honestly, Zocchi was a tough professor to have for this class. It would be difficult to follow along during lectures partly due to his accent and partly due to his tangential way of teaching. I would try to review with his notes that he posts on BruinLearn but just found it difficult to follow. Ultimately, the textbook was a lot more helpful than going to lecture. The homeworks are pretty helpful. The midterm I felt was reasonable but the final was incredibly dense and pretty difficult. Mostly everyone who took this class felt pretty bad about the final and felt like lecture was not pretty helpful.

Advice: READ THE TEXTBOOK

Unfortunately, I found myself having a difficult time following along with the lectures due to his accent and delivery of the material. Sometimes, I tried to drown out the professor’s voice just so I could try to follow along by looking at the chalk-board. He’s receptive to questions and asks the class if they can follow along, but I was not able to comfortably collect my thoughts to get clarity (which is also partly on me for sure). Because of this I found the textbook and simply doing the hw to be more effective for learning the content than attending lectures for me.

The midterm was rather straightforward but the final was more challenging and the density of certain topics on the exam threw me off.

Overall advice: prof is hard to understand so read the textbook, feel free to ask questions in class, do at least a few problems outside of the hw set

Restating Griffith's book for the most part.

YESSS!!! Loved this class. I always come out of Zocchi's courses with a new lease on physics. Thank you!!