BEST PROFESSOR I HAVE HAD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. PERIOD. (u better take him)

Samani was an excellent professor and I loved taking this class with him. There are quizzes roughly every week instead of midterms, discussion worksheets, and a final. The discussion worksheets are based off showing up and putting something down on the page, so that's easy. The discussion section I also found to be helpful for the quizzes. The quizzes were very fair and were based off the material covered in lecture as well as the textbook. By the way, Samani wrote his own textbook for this course, which I found to be extremely clear and very helpful. The final exam was pretty difficult, but I thought it was fair overall. My advice would be to really understand the notes he writes, and to make sure you're able to do the practice quizzes he assigns. If you're able to comfortably do the practice quizzes, you will ace the actual quizzes. Also Samani's grading scale is super generous. Overall Samani is a great lecturer and I would totally recommend him.

Professor Samani is an amazing educator. He explains math and its applications to physics very well and clearly puts in a lot of effort to make sure his students succeed. You'll have weekly readings from his course notes that will basically explain all of the "theory" and then lecture will be focused on applying the math to examples in physics. There are no problem sets; only optional practice quizzes to help you prepare for weekly quizzes. Even though they're optional, I highly recommend doing a few before the quizzes. Discussion is required - you have to do weekly worksheets in assigned groups and are graded on effort/some completion.

I took it alongside Math 33B and there was a lot of overlapping content, but if you're considering a similar schedule make sure to check the professor because different professors emphasize different topics. This class mainly covered Taylor series, linear algebra (linear independence, eigenvectors), ordinary differential equations and dynamical systems, and Fourier series/transforms.

Probably the best physics class I have taken here so far. Samani is a great lecturer and always makes lectures engaging. He wrote his own mini-textbook for this class and it is amazing for building intuition. His tests and problem sets are pretty hard, but the grading scale is generous. 10/10 would take again.

Samani is a really good lecturer and teacher. His lectures are interesting and he stays on topic in class. He also wrote his own lecture notes for this class which replaced the need for a textbook. His notes are actually pretty short, but very concise and basically everything you need to know for the tests. With that said, his tests are still pretty hard. Great professor overall.

First major gripe: Monday's pre-recorded lectures, which are scheduled for 50 minutes on MyUCLA, would sometimes last TWO AND A HALF HOURS; the first week he put in the effort to edit it and condense it down, but then he just gave up and uploaded them at ridiculously long length.

Quizzes: instead of midterms and such, we had weekly timed quizzes on gradescope. Having one every week got overwhelming at times, and they were quite challenging themselves. Difficulty was similar to 5A tests I had with Prof Tung.

Overall not a bad class. These were my only real struggles. A is definitely doable. Samani is a good lecturer and nice person.

You. Yes, you. I've been you, scrolling frantically through Bruinwalk because high school physics didn't go too well, and we just wanted a reprieve from the subject for a while. Alas, the MCAT exists.

But, I digress. You will be in the best hands, if you choose to take 5B with Samani. He is responsive to student feedback, he genuinely enjoys the material he teaches, and he does *everything* in his power to make sure his students succeed, whether that means offering extra credit opportunities galore, responding to emails in a timely manner, or providing specific study strategies to thrive in the course. Some of the Bruinwalk reviews of past definitely frightened me, but he is one of my favorite professors to date, and this is coming from someone who used to be petrified of physics. You will not regret taking this class with him, I assure you.

TAKE PHYSICS 5A WITH SAMANI! I guarantee you that this will be the one of the best classes you will take, and that Samani will probably be one of the best professors you will ever have.

Samani is very straightforward, gives plenty of examples, and explains topics very thoroughly. As someone who did not take Physics (let alone AP Physics) in high school, Samani did an excellent job at creating an environment in which I can succeed.

The exams are pretty tough, but its because they are meant to gauge whether or not you are LEARNING the material, not MEMORIZING it. The midterms and the final will depict scenarios that are not addressed in lecture, but will build off of the topics and concepts addressed during lecture.

Discussion sections are actually quite helpful, and the worksheets drive you to think of different physical scenarios. (Shoutout to Teresa for being such a great TA)

The labs also do a good job at reinforcing lecture, including how to appropriately use equations to solve for unknown quantities.

Overall, a great (but difficult) class with an awesome professor. 10/10 would recommend. Yuh.

I'm conflicted about this class with Samani. I really enjoy physics so I did not put much effort into the class and still did fine, but I'm not sure I really enjoy the way everything is set up. I liked the group tests for the review purpose, but I absolutely hated that I scored higher on my individual portions and my group basically just relied on me to do the test, thus everyone gets a grade bump except for the people that did really well. Mastering physics was not helpful for homework, honestly just chegg the answers and save yourself the time. I think Samani does a really good job at making the concepts accessible to everyone, but I really miss the mathematical sense and rigor to physics the way he teaches lacks. I feel like I didn't really learn much new or gain some great understanding from the way he teaches, but just relied on my background. In regards to his tests, I do not think they were killer hard: they were fair but we are all used to being babied in other LS classes. They require you to know what is going on and don't leave a ton of room for complete guesswork, but reward you immensely for the process and place little value on getting the actual answer so so long as you vaguely know what to do you will get a large amount of partial credit. I think he provides a lot of opportunities for practice and extra problems. Overall I think he is easy and more than fair, but he takes a lot of the joy and fun out of it by removing the portions that make physics really logical. (we legit never even saw vector brackets like pls samani bring back some of the math)

I thought this class was great! Prof Samani was very accomodating throughout the quarter, and he made his policies very clear from the start. Although I disagree with them (ex. no equation sheet), he was clear from the first day, so people shouldn't be upset about it on the very the last day of class. To be honest, us LS majors couldn't give a rat's ass about physics and learning these equations, but they aren't even that bad to memorize. At most, it was just a minor inconvenience for the final exam if you did not study. As a professor, Samani was great at explaining tricky concepts. He took constant feedback about what the class wanted to do for the quizzes, and he was pretty considerate about student's needs. I switched out of Lancaster's 5B into Samani's 5B and my god was it the best decision I ever made. You can't go wrong with this prof.

You definitely need to work hard in this class to understand the concepts. Instead of a Monday lecture, we have 24-hr timed weekly quizzes over the content we learned. No midterms at all! No homework! I really appreciated this approach as I thought it was way less stressful. The quizzes themselves were pretty straightforward. If you pay attention to his lectures, he pretty much goes over examples that are very similar to the ones of the quizzes. He gives an optional practice packet of questions every week, but I didn't find them helpful while studying. The best thing to do to prepare for the quizzes and finals is to look over the discussion worksheets and the examples he goes over in class.

One thing I wish Samani did differently though was the way he structured his content videos. Instead of Monday lecture, we would have the weekly quizzes. Samani would post a pretty lengthy content video that goes over all of the content for the week, and he spends class time on Wed and Fri talking about specific example questions relating to that week's content. I really liked this format because we got to see what kind of questions he would ask us. However, the content videos would often be 2hrs long, which sucked. Again, the lack of an equation sheet sucked, but it was at most just a minor inconvenience.

Most of the people complaining in these reviews either didn't show up to class, didn't watch his content videos, or just didn't know how to study for his quizzes. Newsflash: Physics is tough! A prof can only do so much for your grade, and there is a very small minority that will use the lack of an equation sheet to justify why they couldn't do well throughout the entire course. His lectuers are more than sufficient to be prepared for the quizzes, which I felt were pretty straightforward. Great class, and if I had to take it again, I would take it with Samani.