Overall, Thomas is a good prof. He is always willing to help students working out their problems. And his midterms seemed to be hard but actually doable if you truly learned something. The only thing that he needs to improve is his logic when lecturing. He likes to jump to a brand new concept without any notification. But I do recommend his course.

One of the other reviews was really detailed, so I won't go too much into specifics. Professor Dumitrescu's lectures were very conceptual, so we spent a lot more time doing derivations and big-picture understanding rather than examples (though he did several for circuits). He has a very sophisticated vocabulary and way of speaking, so it sounds even more big brain.

The textbook readings are helpful. I didn't really do the readings, and found out the hard way that I should probably do them: the first midterm had a lot of material that wasn't covered in detail in the lectures but were in the readings, and for the second midterm I saw that some of the harder problems had similar concepts from the examples in the textbook. Also, the homework amount and difficulty was very fair, and somewhat helpful for understanding and exams (the discussion sections were more helpful for me).

I think overall I enjoyed Professor Dumitrescu's class. Physics isn't usually my strong suit, and my grade has definitely been boosted by the COVID-19 situation (I was expecting a B), but his class is definitely doable if you put in the work.

I will preface this review by saying that COVID-19 really messed up both students' ambitions and professors' grading schemes, and Dumitrescu's Winter 2020 class was no exception. Originally set out with a grading scheme of 12% HW, 3% clicker Q's, 20% & 20% for 2 midterms, and 45% final, the grading scheme for this class took a fat 180 as a result of extraordinary circumstances brought about by COVID-19. Our grades were thus calculated with the following grading scale: 20% HW, 25% Midterm 1, 25% Midterm 2, 25% Final, 4% participation, and 1% for a practice upload to Gradescope in preparation for our final (basically a free 1%). The class was set out to be curved at around a B/B- average, but Dumitrescu's new grading scheme mentioned that the "extraordinary circumstances would be considered when calculating final grades" or something like that, so we all probably got boosted tbh.

Dumitrescu is without a doubt a great professor. He constantly updates CCLE with readings that we should complete before lecture, extra material (not for exams), practice exams, and his lecture notes (posted at the end of every week, although hard to decipher so weren't much use to me). His lectures always contained demos that evoked your typical "oohs" and "ahhs" from science, and personally, I was so surface-level intrigued by them that I actually never connected them back to the material we were learning. Oops. Anyways, his lecture style was very typical of a math/physics professor at UCLA, meaning he goes pretty damn fast, is highly intelligible of the subject, but may be confusing at times because of the fact that he presents material in a pretty "big-brain" manner. I appreciated that he was concept heavy but also showed actual examples in class. He also spends like 10 min of the beginning of each lecture to recap the main points of the previous lecture. Since our lectures were 2 hours T/R, he also gave us 5 min breaks at the halfway mark. Beware though that lecture still happens after midterm days (first half MT, second half lecture). Draining indeed.

At first, I got caught off guard and thought I wasn't smart enough for this class, but then I started reading the book before lecture and realized that a lot of what he lectured was pretty much the book, and the examples he tells you to look over on CCLE that are in the book are very similar to the ones he shows you in lecture. I will thus emphasize that if you have never seen E&M in your life that reading the book before lecture is absolutely critical to make the most out of your lecture time. Otherwise, you'll end up copying random crap down for 2 hours, and Dumitrescu's quick pace really makes this a reality.

Lectures were supplemented by Kudu questions that acted as our low-budget clicker questions, so you'll need some sort of device during lecture to get participation credit. We had anywhere from 3 - 8ish questions each lecture, and they were for the most part very conceptual. I'm not actually sure if they were graded on correctness or completion, because we had 2 tries to get them right. HW was assigned through Mastering Physics, so no getting away with that access code. 3 tries before you lost credit, which is on the lower side, and a few multiple choice questions sprinkled here and there where you would start losing points after the first wrong answer. 10 questions a week, due Sunday, lowest score dropped. Pretty fair imo, just start them early or you'll end up spending your entire Sunday on them like I did.

Dumitrescu's midterms were very very fair. He lets you use one notecard (both sides) for each exam, and the final allowed 2. I felt like for both midterms I put a good amount of BS on the pages and still managed to get some nice credit on those problems. They were definitely doable though as long as you drilled the homework and spent time mastering a lot of the techniques in the HW problems, but I honestly overloaded myself this quarter and put in no where as much effort as I should've, so I ended up getting C's on both midterms (more or less the average). Midterms comprised of a multiple choice section with 3 questions worth 5 points each, along with 3 open-ended questions that were 30 points each. The MC very closely replicated the clicker questions, so review all of those before each exam. Discussion honestly wasn't that much help for exams, and I stopped going after week 3, but questions and solutions are posted on CCLE anyways for you to review.

The original final was supposed to be cumulative and double the length, and I was honestly prepared to fail it real quick. Instead however, because of COVID-19, Dumitrescu ended up making it like a third midterm that covered the most recent material (circuits, resistors, capacitors) and things earlier in the quarter that we weren't tested on (doppler effect, beats). It was open-note and we had 90 minutes to do it, where the extra 30 was intended for any difficulties with downloading/printing the exam and uploading it onto Gradescope. Not gonna lie, I thought I had that final in the bag going into it, since I studied the hell out of only the few topics he mentioned, but holy crap was it still hard. I think I only got maybe like 3 sub-questions right and BS'ed the crap out of the rest. It was definitely all the concepts we learned but on steroids. One of the questions asked us to do a taylor approximation for one of them. 31B? Hell no. To be fair though he showed a lot of those throughout the quarter, but I still didn't think it would show up on an exam. Needless to say, I took maybe 70 minutes, used like none of my notes, and uploaded it preparing myself for a good C+ final grade. Lo and behold, the God Dumitrescu pulled through, and my GPA lives another day.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this professor, whether or not you have prior experience in physics. He's very fair in his exams and has a good cushion built through HW and participation. The key here is to understand how to study for physics classes, which would be to keep doing practice problems beyond HW so that you not only know concepts, but also how to apply them in almost every scenario. For review, I would highly recommend utilizing AAP tutoring if you can; I wasn't apart of AAP but the homie Spenser pulled through and let me come anyways because literally only 1 other person came. Know your resources folks!!! As for the subject itself, personally, the waves and oscillations crap was all review to me, since I took AP Physics 1 in high school, but the second part with Gauss' law used a little bit of 32B and was kinda hard to grasp at first. Circuit stuff, which was the last part, also should've been review, but wasn't quite so, but it didn't involve any calculus. So yeah, take what you will of this, but shoutout Dumitrescu the G.

Pretty average professor. I personally thought he was super helpful (I was the only one at office hours almost every week lmao), and I really enjoyed the class. But my friends did not. Physics 1B is already difficult, and two hour lectures make it hard to focus and once you're behind, you're BEHIND.

Lectures:
His lectures occasionally have interesting demonstrations sprinkled in, and we use Kudu to count towards participation in class. Overall a decent lecturer and actually tries his best to respond to questions, but hard to follow at times.

Homework:
You can tell he puts in a lot of work to tell us which chapters of the textbook to read + which examples are useful to look at. The HW is on Mastering Physics and takes a few hours to complete. Make sure you don't just BS it but thoroughly understand the concepts.

Midterm/Final:
Our situation was screwed up because of Coronavirus, but he gave us practice midterms and review sheets to prep. The practice midterms weren't very similar to the actual midterm other than the format but are a good test to see where you're lacking conceptual understanding. Tests were definitely challenging; make sure you read the textbook and do the examples he points out; maybe even go above and beyond and do the textbook problems at the end of every chapter.

tldr: good guy, decent lecturer, tests are decently difficult so make sure to actually do the HW and completely understand the concepts. Overall good professor to do this class with, but be expected to grind for a good grade.

The professor was a pretty good lecturer. He kept the lectures engaging with some pretty cool demos. Also his tests were pretty reasonable, with averages around mid C. He does curve the class to a B/B-, so there was a pretty notable curve at the end. I got like 85's on the midterms and probably a B on the final (he never released the actual score) and ended with an A-

The professor clearly knew his stuff and explained concepts somewhat well, though if you zone out you will get lost very quickly. Tests were quite difficult and would have information such as Taylor series that were not present on the homework. The practice midterms that were given out were supposedly on par in difficulty with the real ones but I found them to be much easier, the real ones had problems that made it much more of a time-crunch. Homework was much simpler than the tests.

Dumitrescu is very conceptual and can be hard to follow. I'd recommend reading the textbook and taking notes before lecture so you know what's going on if he jumps around/does an experiment without really explaining it. Midterms are pretty tough- don't think that just because you have a notecard you don't need to spend a long time studying! He goes beyond Mastering Physics material (I redid every single homework problem before the final and still had no idea how to do some of the problems)

Dumi is goat, yes! Goat. Aaaaaaaaaaaah G O A T