I took this class when it was online so it may have been different, but here is the outline for how Professor Samani ran Physics 5B.

No midterms or finals- HOWEVER, there were weekly quizzes (noncumulative, but is helpful to know previous stuff) that he gave us 1.5 hours for.
They were honestly a bit difficult, but as long as you attend his lectures and do the worksheet, it should be fine. He said himself that he wanted students to feel challenged, but was still able to get it in the end, which he succeeded since that was exactly how I felt. There is also partial credit. I honestly loved this system of constant review, and it was less stressful during midterms and final seasons

no lectures-HOWEVER, he would post a recorded lecture that covers the whole week's material at the beginning of the week. They are on average 2 hours long, but is actually shorter if you speed up the parts where he writes. Instead of lecture, he would hold sessions where he showed us practice problems. These were very helpful for understanding the material and the quizzes, and THEY WERE SUPER INTERESTING.

Everything is recorded and posted so very flexible
We can start the quizzes whenever we want in a 24 hour period, but there is a 90 min time limit,

Overall, Professor Samani was amazing, he really cares about student learning, and is a wonderful lecturer. I honestly enjoyed this class quite a bit because of him, despite not liking Physics in general. Take him if you want to learn!

Samani is a great lecturer and he is clearly passionate about what he teaches. The format of the class was we had 1 long lecture video for the entire week posted on Monday, with live problem-solving sessions on Wednesday and Friday. Instead of a midterm and final, we had weekly quizzes. The quizzes were moderately difficult, and we had adequate time to complete them. I liked the quizzes overall since they were a bit lower stakes than a big exam.

My gripes with the class:
Some of the labs are not fun and very frustrating, but that's out of Samani's control. Hopefully it's only because we had to do the experiments at home.
We had a final group project that was worth 30% of our grade, but it had no clear guidelines/expectations. I thought it was gonna be pretty chill, but I felt the grading was quite harsh and there were no justifications given for why points were taken off. It dropped my grade more than 5% and almost screwed me over.

Samani is a great teacher and passionate but his quizzes/final were a lot more difficult than what he taught. I always found myself to be confident with what he lectured but the quizzes did not reflect what we were taught- they were always obscure algebraic derivations rather than physics problems. This course definitely took the majority of my time due to the weekly quizzes and don't even get me started on my STACK of flashcards of equations we had to memorize for the final. He was not accomodating at all honestly and expected life science students to make physics their whole life. If he adjusted his exams to reflect lecture material perhaps I'd be more positive but I won't lie this course was super stressful.

Ok so I don't know if this is still the case, but when I took the class Winter 2019, the tests were really hard and he gave extra credit, but I heard that might have changed.

Overall, I actually really enjoyed Samani's class. I was really intimidated by Physics as a subject before (I had taken it as a freshman in high school and did not do amazingly then and then had been intimidated since). He is a really good lecturer and a nice person. I used to go to office hours when I could and he would go through examples and answer any questions students had.

I'm going to break down the class as best I can:

Lecture: He lectures basically the whole time and pauses for times for students to do clickers and discuss their thoughts, but writes down important things to remember like definitions and equations. He has slides but he mainly uses them for clickers (participation). The content of lectures tend to be conceptual and he does examples.

Discussion: Required, you are assigned a team of two other people in your discussion and you work with them in some discussions and can do extra credit practice exams with them. You also work with them on the two midterms for the team portion, which is the same as the individual portion and if you do better on the team portion he counts it, if you don't, he will replace it with your individual section score so it can only help you.

Exams: Difficult and conceptual, but fair. To prepare for the exams I would do practice and I was consistent about doing all of the practice exam problems from the homework every week. You do have to memorize equations, but there aren't that many for the whole course and he writes them down in lecture on the board.

Homework: A lot of homework. MasteringPhysics online were the only ones you actually needed to get correct. The discussion worksheet usually was whatever you didn't finish in class and was graded on completion and effort. The individual practice exams were also basically just old practice exam problems that were hard but were graded on completion and effort. I found it worth it to try as best I could on the individual practice exams so that I knew what to expect for the actual exams (very similar in type of problems). Doing it all is a huge time commitment though, I will say.

Office Hours: Helpful if you have questions on concepts, will go through problems with you like if you're stuck on a MasteringPhysics he'll go through the concepts with you.

Lab: Physics 5AL is basically entirely separate from 5A so honestly you just show up and do the labs and do some easy pre-labs and my group would always finish the post-lab during lab section.

I know people who hated his class / physics but they also never went to lecture or office hours and I think that because I went to office hours and his lecture style works really well for me and I took notes by hand it just helped me a lot. I know this class is really intimidating, but I genuinely learned a lot and think that his grading scheme was really fair because it's so easy to get high scores on all sections aside from his test that he doesn't even need to curve.

I hope this was helpful!

Overall great professor for learning. Is not an easy A(like the other physics classes) but if you come to lecture and understand how to do the weekly quizzes, you'll be fine.

Dr. Samani is one of the most engaging and fun professors I have had. He genuinely tries his best to prioritize long-term learning, hence the lack of a formula sheet. Despite this added difficulty, I appreciate the effort he puts in, and the effort he gets his students to put in. I also like how structured each lecture is, he applies course concepts and walks us through a class-long problem. He has an itinerary for every class, but he also will delay his plans for seemingly as long as needed in order to answer student questions. Overall I am satisfied with my Physics 5B experience, my only regret is not going to office hours enough.

Favorite professor by far at UCLA!

Samani not only brings in real examples to help understand the applicability of the material from the very beginning, but also makes you feel like you are not even learning physics. Attendance is taken through in person reflection sheets, yet I found them so much more engaging than iClicker used for other classes, as they had us working through ideas and actually encouraged discussion with our peers around us. The homework is an automatic 90% through completion, and are the SAME level of difficulty as exam problems - which I found challenging in the very beginning, but appreciative that there were absolutely NO curveballs thrown whatsoever. No online access for a textbook is needed for the homework too (which is a plus), he just releases assignments through BruinLearn.

On the note of not having an equation sheet - it honestly is not that bad, coming from someone who took 5A with an equation sheet. Through lecture, Samani gives tips for memorizing the least information possible and use that information to create a logical system of reasoning to get to almost any equation you need. Also, using active recall by redoing the homework and the practice exams he releases without looking anything up really helped me succeed. Also, by doing so many problems over and over again, you'll find that most of the equations become muscle memory.

Lastly, one piece of advice I would give is to go to office hours! I found that my discussion section wasn't particularly helpful in my understanding of the material. However, once I started going consistently to office hours, I saw how my conceptual understanding of the material improved drastically - which just made it easier when studying and doing homework. (one tip though, try to show up as close to the beginning as possible - his office is super small and fills up quite fast).

I could not recommend him enough, and I honestly really wish he taught other classes just so I can have him as a professor again!

Bro take 5B with Samani and you will actually feel like you got your money's worth coming to UCLA. This guy is the best Professor I've ever had, he might just be one of the best teachers you've come across in your life. Insanely good at teaching really hard concepts and actually finding practical ways to use them in our daily lives, everything made sense, everything was interesting. I also found that because lecture attendance was forced through the reflection sheets, I learned so much more and barely had to study for the final. Also the fact that he makes you discuss questions within lecture with your peers and the mandatory discussion sections makes for a really social experience in an otherwise really STEMmy class, always a bonus to make new friends.

Bottom line: Take Samani
5B and the physics series in general is difficult but Samani makes learning the material very easy to do. His exams are fair. His homework is graded on 90% completion and 10% correction so essentially the lowest you can achieve on a homework assignment is a 90%. He does take attendance for class but the attendance serves as extra credit and you can miss up to three lectures without giving an excuse.

I loved how Dr. Samani taught each lecture and how it was structured. He was always very receptive and wanted to help students. He was a great teacher and was always looking for ways to improve based on student needs. He was a great professor!