bruinwalk keeps failing me. tung was HORRIBLE this quarter. i would not recommend this class one bit.

Either something big changed after the pandemic or the old reviews are bait. Granted, this class is packed with material and is part of the notorious 1 series. He tries to cover most of it, and goes a lot in depth behind the derivations of formulas/principles you'll use. However, he often rushes material in the last few minutes of lecture. The discussion worksheets have little relevancy to the material covered in the most recent lectures. (The TAs don't even know what has and has not been covered during disc. sections). The exams are nothing like what Kudu problems are, despite him encouraging students to study off those questions. I wish there were more practice questions he would cover in class instead of the theory.

Tung changed the exams from kudu to paper and pencil right before a few days of the first midterm. I did all the kudu homework problems, however, like the others have said, the kudu homework questions are not good preparation for the exams at all. I took Physics 1B with Corbin and got a better grade in that class than in this one. Even though I felt comfortable with the material covered in class and the lectures were fun, the exams were downright horrible. It does not help that they account for 80% of the grade (20% for each midterm and 40% for final). Avoid this class if you care about your GPA.

TLDR: if you want a really high-quality, interesting physics class, and a professor who truly cares, but you don’t mind getting a lower grade, take this class.

I got As and A-‘s in the other physics 1 series classes, so I was pretty surprised to receive this grade. In general, Nathan Tung is very kind and cares deeply about student learning. His lectures are beyond entertaining, and I don’t even like physics that much. However, I felt this class was not very forgiving. None of the midterms were dropped, the TAs were not helpful at all, and the questions on the exams felt sort of unpredictable. However, there was a chance to get 3% extra credit which was nice. Furthermore, I cannot emphasize what a wonderful lecturer and kind professor Tung was. Overall, I enjoyed this class the most out of all my physics classes, despite getting the worst grade in it. (He did tell us in the beginning that he would try to keep the class average gpa pretty low as the physics department was requiring it, which kind of sucks.)

I specifically took this class to avoid taking Simpson during A sesh, and all I can say is that it was probably not worth it. I'm not sure whether he's different during the summer, but this class was very strange. First of all, Tung decided to cancel one of our classes and just tack on an extra 25 minutes to other classes because he was teaching at a CC. I'm like 90% sure this is not in fact legal, as class should occur at the designated time on the syllabus as well as on myucla.

In addition, lecture was almost completely useless. He spent maybe a week on complex numbers, which was interesting but not on the exam, which sucks during a summer class when you only have 6 weeks to learn material that is difficult to master in 10 weeks. He rarely went over problems, and when he did, they were usually very rudimentary. The textbook he uses sucks, and it barely explains anything. I taught myself almost entirely from the University Physics textbook.

Apparently, during the regular school year, if you complete over 65% of the homework you get extra credit. This was not the case for us as extra credit was extra work and graded on completion. I had better exam scores than extra credit scores, so it did not help me at all. Also, he completely did not understand the questions that I asked about the homework. Sometimes I had a conceptual question, and he would just solve the problem. The one time I genuinely needed help solving the problem, he didn't solve it, despite saying it wasn't a topic he was putting on the exam.

He randomly decided not to put AC circuits on the final, which I didn't really find fair for students who were the best at that specific topic. As far as the exams, multiple choice exams do not belong in math/physics, in my opinion, as it allows for rampant cheating since there is no proctoring in online classes. I get that it's easier to grade, but it meant getting zero credit for small mistakes.

Lastly, I'm not sure what exactly happened, but a lot of people complained about the way he curved grades. I think he ended up curving more at the end because too many people complained. He also deleted the canvas site almost immediately after the end of class.

Overall, I would not recommend taking this class over the summer with Tung.

this class was so hard. For summer it was an online 6 week class, with homework assignments and weekly kudu quizzes and an online final at the end (because of the hurricane quizzes 2 and 3, and 4 and 5 ended up being combined). Lectures were streamed on YouTube live and Tung is more focused on derivations than showing how to solve problems (although to be fair this has been my experience with all the UCLA physics profs I've had). The kudu quizzes were so hard not necessarily because the questions themselves were super hard but because they were a time crunch (I suspect to prevent people from cheating), so if you made a mistake in one of the questions you would not have a lot of time to go back and redo it. The final was also difficult and nothing like the kudu homework assignments or quiz questions. Class got up curved pretty heavily at the end, and Tung still had his policy of 65% required homework and anything extra is extra credit though so I can't complain too much. if you like physics you should be fine

I enjoyed Tung's lectures. Material is definitely difficult, but if you are attentive in lecture and keep up with all of the practice problems it isn't too bad.

For Summer, it was all online and Tung streamed his lectures on YouTube, which I liked. For me personally, the material of this course was pretty interesting, probably because I'm EE. But it was also because his lectures were clear and his teaching style was very engaging for me. We had weekly Quizzes which were generally easy, if you watched the lectures and did practice/HW problems. Most of the HW was easy. The final exam was fair as well. It was like watching a streamer everyday, he has an intro video and everything.

Tung definitely is an engaging professor- he does a lot of cool demos in class, which I really enjoyed. He is also helpful- he answers questions during the 5 minute break/the end of class and is more than willing to help during his virtual office hours. Overall, I liked him, but the class is VERY content dense and moves extremely fast. Knowing what to focus on when studying for tests is a challenge, so staying on top of the kudu readings is key. He also offers ~3% extra credit for answering online questions in class and for doing more than the required amount of hw.

TLDR: Don't take the class, waste of time take a class with a bad prof and teach yourself since you will have to teach yourself in this class too

just don't that's my opinion. I came from horrible physics professors ie Freiman etc and yet he managed to be worse. He thinks he is a god at lecturing and because of that he justifies giving exams which are actually hell. For example the final and second midterm weren't evenly spaced out on the material at all. Like bro? For a cumulative final I expect the content to be spread out.

He is a mid lecturer at best. He goes way too much time going into derivations of formulas and teaches us barely any skills on learning how to solve a single physics problem. Don't worry though you can derive a formula though!! His discussion worksheets were irrelevant to the course where the TA's would be like "yea idk why he gave you this"

Don't even get me started on Kudu. This man straight up goes "my lectures accompany Kudu and Kudu accompanies my lectures" so now I have to read a terrible textbook ifykyk and deal with his derivation heavy lectures. At least with bad lecturers, you can teach yourself from the book. But nope not with this class!

The practice problems from Kudu and the discussion worksheets are nothing like the exams. But don't worry he won't give you a practice test because "Kudu is practice enough"

This man is the definition of ego issues too. He should not be a prof