Professor Huang was honestly an extremely helpful professor. Granted, his accent made it hard to understand him sometimes, but he really did put a lot of effort into ensuring that his students had a good grasp on the class materials. He assigned weekly homeworks and quizzes online which counted for 15% of our grade. Towards the end of the class he informed us that, since he recognized how hard we were working, he would give us all 100% in all the homeworks and quizzes. He also gave everyone who got above a 90% in the final exam at least an A-, regardless of their midterm and lab grades. He is one of the few professors I have met who truly want their students to succeed. He provided us with the exact topics we would get in both midterms and told us beforehand that the final exam would consist of several repeat questions from the lecture slides and the previous midterms. As long as you went to lecture and paid attention to his hints about the exams, it's pretty easy to pass this class.

Professor Huan was a solid professor. The class was mostly run by the TA's however and my TA's were both great.

For my quarter there was a lab a week for 10 weeks. The first two weeks were online and just mostly about using python for data analysis. The rest of the labs were in-person, and were very enjoyable.

This class had 7 graded formal reports.

I thought that the grading of the reports were generally very fair. The reports didn't need to be very long either, anywhere from 3-5 pages was a good length. Depending on your TA the grading could be either good or bad, but for my case it was good.

The reports are due by the end of the quarter. My advice would be to do 1 report a week though. If you let the reports pile up then you will be struggling to complete them at the end of the quarter which may impact final exam studying.

Some of the labs that were done include the photoelectric effect, building radios, measuring the e/m ratio, and superconductivity. The labs were engaging and fun.

The only major complaint I had was with the lab manual. Some of the labs were structured very clearly, however some, if not most, were structured in a confusing manner. I found myself having to ask the TA's a lot of questions to clarify what to actually do in the labs. Also, it was kind of hard to understand Huan in the zoom sessions, mostly due to his mic quality.

Overall Huan was a good professor and structured this lab class fairly. I would take Huan again.

Dude has a very harsh accent and isn't engaging at all. Nice guy but a crappy professor. Midterm averages were very low, which I believe was because he wasn't an effective communicator. Lectures had bad attendance. I wouldnt recommend this guy but wouldn't say it was insanely difficult material. I just was uninspired by the guy. Not worth the tuition dollars to hear him lecture.

Absolutely not. I saw the reviews saying that it wouldn't be as bad as it seemed, but it was quite literally the trenches. When I fought tooth and nail for a 5A spot in September when seats were gone in minutes, I told myself maybe this professor wouldn't be bad. Fast forward in December, I think he was the worst professor I've ever had here actually.

Pros
- He ends up giving full credit to everyone for homework and quizzes (a combined total of 10% of your grade! everything else depends on lab and his terrible exams!)

Cons
- His lectures are unclear. Don't bother going to them (I went every time, and I still didn't retain information)
- On BOTH midterms, he messed up on one of the problems (mind you, there's literally only 4 questions worth 25 points each) and changed the instructions HALFWAY through the exam. On the first midterm, he ended up curving 2/3s of that question, but on the second midterm, he did not. Granted, averages for midterm 2 were better (82) compared to midterm 1 (around 67), but then he decided to give us that final
- I'm telling you this man is not real because he is a pathological liar. If you hear the words "river problem" or "banked curve", just be aware he will not stay true to what he says will be on the exam. - He gave diagrams on the Week 10 slides as "what we'll see on the final", but we quite literally did not see 50% of them on the final. Like yes, they had the same topic, but they were the most random problems ever that had no correlation to the examples he told us to study.
- He says his tests are easy, but they never match with the homework or the examples he shows in class or the old exams he posts from previous quarters aside from 1-2 problems
- He teaches momentum during Week 8 (when the Physics Department literally says "skip Momentum") and combines it with energy concepts, so be warned
- He basically has a bell curve distribution for the class, so you're technically competing against other people for your grade (there's cutoffs, but these are based on rank)

The only saving grace of this class was the TA and LA. Save yourself from this class and if you are forced to take him because there's no more 5A spots, I wish you the best of luck.

Going into this class with 0 background in physics throughout high school, I was terrified by the reviews that I saw on bruinwalk for the professor. My fears only got worse on the first day of class when he gave us a talk about how we shouldn’t expect to get As in this class because he centers his grades around a B average as per the department. Given his accent, it was a little difficult to understand him at times. However by no means do I think that’s any of an excuse to put blame on him as a professor and his teaching credibility. He tries his best to work around his accent and he’s self aware of the potential difficulties that it may cause students. I stopped going to lectures after week 1 and self studied the material based off of his homework (which was incredibly helpful as it was challenging, at least for me) and his slides. His exams were usually somewhat similar to the past exams that he provides for all students, and while there’s a bit of a time crunch, many of the exam problems are not difficult in terms of the overall process in solving them. I would find myself shocked looking at his answer keys for old exams and realizing that I had overcomplicated the problem and that the real answer was way simpler. Regardless of whether or not this professor has high ratings, physics 5A is such a difficult class to get so if this professor is what you’re left with just take it. My advice is to really UNDERSTAND the logic behind the problems and not just memorize the steps on how to do it. On exams he will make slight changes to homework problems and sometimes old exam problems and you have to understand how that changes the way you solve it. Best of luck!

Huang was a good professor. Coming into the class, I was super nervous because I was told his tests were super difficult and that his grading scheme was exam-heavy.

The tests were not that bad, but the grading scheme was definitely exam-heavy! It is imperative that you do well!

The grading distribution was as follows:

10% Homework and Quiz (he winds up giving everyone that attempts these 100%, regardless of correctness)

30% Midterms 1/2

45% final exam

15% labs

The tests were somewhat like the practice finals/midterms and a cheat sheet was allowed for both the midterm and final. As long as you put in an adequate amount of effort (I suggest reading the textbook and taking notes), you will do well! You definitely get out what you put into this class. The questions on the test will not be exactly the same as what is provided on the practice exams, but will be similar enough to allow you to apply the concepts to alternatively-structured problems!

Huang, regardless of past reviews, is a great professor! He truly cares about student learning and his accent, while thick, is not the reason for student’s inability to do well! Put in a solid amount of effort and his class will go fine! He was super nice and even would crack jokes during lecture! Demonstrations were fun too! Overall, he was one of the better teachers I’ve had at UCLA!

I was initially afraid of this class based on previous reviews, but he is actually a professor I would gladly take again.

His exam review gave us a general idea of what sorts of topics and types of problems would be covered, and he made it very clear that we might see new types of problems and be expected to figure out how to solve those, and I never felt like these new problems were very different than what he taught. As long as you thoroughly understand the material and why each problem is solved in the way it is, you'll be fine.

As for lectures, I will admit it can get hard to understand his accent at times, and sometimes it feels like he just doesn't know the words to communicate what he wants to say. So, he does end up leaving problems half-solved or unsolved in lecture, but you can easily find similar problems on Youtube with explanations (I recommend Michel van Biezen).

He ended up giving everyone 100% on the homework and quizzes, but I would definitely do the homeworks, as they were good practice for the exams. Also, he curves the class such that at least 30% get an A-, but he never curves anyone down if more than 30% has an A-.

Overall, this class shouldn't be too difficult if you set aside the proper time and effort to understand the content and do as many practice problems as possible (he provides past exams that are pretty similar to the exams he gives). He genuinely cares about his students' success and understanding of the material and is very approachable with any questions you have.

Oh my god I hated this class with Huang. While I found the concepts really interesting, I still barely passed the class because THIS MAN CAN NOT TEACH. He would just put equations up and say here's the equation and not walk us through what they meant. He would also have practice problems on the slides and then just click to the next slide where the answer would be LIKE HELLO can you walk us through the processes please. Also, he's so hard to understand!!!! I have an Asian mom with an accent but I still struggled to understand him which is saying something. I had to sit really close to him to be able to hear him because if the back of the lecture hall there was absolutely no chance even though he has a mic.

OH MY GOD and the test!!! He would always say that he wasn't going to throw curve balls at us but then test us on crazy variations of the concepts!! His tests were sooooooo much harder than the other professors that quarter (Tung and Bauer). If you can take the class with someone else DO IT.

Use Professor Huang's lectures as a list of what to study that takes him 50 min to say, not as a way to learn. Because of this, I stopped showing up to lectures in Week 3 as I found they were actually WORSE for my learning because he tends to severely downplay how difficult the concepts are / their difficulty on exams. He gives out a list of exam topics a week before the midterm via email (if they haven't been sent out via email just watch the previous week's lectures on 2x speed they are NOT WORTH WATCHING). Again, DO NOT TRUST PROF HUANG because he says the exams will be easy. THEY ARE NOT EASY. However, his lists of exam topics are reliable. I recommend PhysicsNinja because a lot of the more difficult PhysicsNinja examples were what appeared on exams...like...exactly...I almost wonder if he gets his problems from PhysicsNinja. The previous midterms are 50/50 representative of exams, just take them with a grain of salt. Make sure your cheat sheet is decked out because the way to do well on exams is copy pasting from your cheat sheet.

Huang was not a great teacher. You can read the other reviews to see the breakdown of the class, but he's not a great teacher. He doesn't teach the material, he just REVIEWS it, so if you don't have a background in physics, you're basically fucked. He will go over problems in class that are very simple and not that in depth about the topics, but his exams combine multiple different topics into one problem that is virtually impossible. Good luck if you have him.