This class is awful. I'm required to take it to complete my physics series, and it's hands down the worst class I've ever taken. For it only being a two unit class, I spent at least 10 hours a week doing the lab reports (which are due every week). The grading scheme for this class is insane. It's graded on a strict bell curve, and you're only compared to the 20 or so kids in your lab section. My section was about 80% international students so I was screwed for the entire quarter. I also had an awful TA who had no idea what was going on in the class and could barely speak english so that didn't help either. If you don't procrastinate on doing the reports it won't be as awful, but plan on spending more time for this class than a normal two unit class.

Everything said before me is true; this class absolutely blows. Every engineering major has to suck it up and take this course, which is horrible, but there are some pros. First, there’s no new material, and the labs are really easy, even fun at times. You’ll become a pro at Excel! However, it still sucks. Curving a 20 person class is horrible, and the lab reports take an excruciating amount of time. Points are deducted seemingly at random! However, they’re not random, as they’re almost all for good reason, even if they’re nitpicky, such as not centering an image completely. However, they’re good tips for making really nice lab reports by the time you’re done. I wrote 75 pages for my reports for this class (single spaced), with the last lab coming in at 20 pages, and almost every one coming in at 10+ pages. I hope you like formatting really easy, tedious work in a beautiful manner!

As for my personal experience, this class wasn't THAT bad. I mean, sure the reports sucked, but they're not difficult, they're just time consuming. Plus, I really liked my TA. He was pretty cool, and would basically just tell us what to do in labs whenever we got stuck. He just seemed like a cool dude, and luckily, I was in one of his favorite groups, so he seemed to go a little easier on grading with my group (or my group just tried really hard). Did I really learn something? No, not really, but lab classes are supposed to be applications of material you already learned, so I had no problem with that. Plus, as long as you read the text before hand, the labs are really quick, probably an hour tops (the last labs take the full 3 hours though). So yeah, it sucks considering it's 2 units and you put so much work into it, but like a lot of classes at UCLA, it's very TA dependent. So just hope you get a good TA, that's really it. Is my perspective skewed because I got an A+ in the class? Yes, absolutely. But all of these reviews are skewed accordingly. So take everything with a grain of salt, and listen to all of these really long reviews from people who really want to give a full impression, like me! Thanks!

TIPS FOR SUCCESS!
Go to office hours and become friends with your TA. Grading is subjective, and if your TA likes you, then sometimes they let some of these small things slip by, which is good, because these small points differentiate your grade from your classmates’. Take this class at an absolute horrible time, either really late at night or at an odd quarter. Basically, think of the section that won’t have all of the try hards. Also, only take this class with one of your friends so that you can compare lab reports and have someone to do the horrible labs with, but don’t have too many friends because you want the curve to be in your favor (OR stack the class with your slacker friends lol). It’s also a lot easier to do this class in the summer when you have less commitments, and even though there’s a three day deadline for each lab report, I always finished in one or two days, and there was almost always an extension. TLDR suck up to your TA so they grade you nicely and hope you get a lab full of students who don’t care and will have their points deducted. Best of luck! Sorry you have to go through this! Also, I don’t know if this is right or not, but get a TA with the most sections. That way, you won’t be competing against 20 people, but 40 or 60 people. It’s a lot easier to do well when you have more people to bump you up in percentile. I’m not sure if this affects the overall grading distribution, but try anything that works in your favor!

4AL made my quarter miserable. The labs are usually simple but frustrating, and the lab reports take FOREVER. The labs have been changed from past years so that you start off with a simple homework assignment, and a new element of the lab report is added each week until you write a hellish full lab report in week 10. We also had to write a random research report for the second lab.

You start the quarter by spending ~5-10 hours writing a lab, and ramp it up every week until you spend 20 hours on a 5,000+ word lab report. The lab manual isn't clear about what you're supposed to write either. The grading is completely arbitrary.

Professor Campbell was a good physics teacher. He did his best to explain mechanics, and I believe he did his tests in a fair way (particularly since I did well). He gave out extremely hard tests, where the average might be a 40%. If you knew the material, or had this knack for mechanics, then you could easily get an A. I consistently scored above the average, but not outstanding, and I did well.
I feel like his lectures weren't particularly good, as he tried to explain all of the topics in 10 weeks, but ultimately it comes down to you either learning the material on your own as well as you can or having a knack or physics.

Easily the worst class I've ever taken. Unfortunately this class is required to get through Engineering. I learned a decent amount of excel, but that is the extent of this class' value. The labs take 15-20 hours a week and are incredibly tedious and repetitive.
The fact that the class is curved in your section is also extremely frustrating. You can get all 95's and get a B+ and there is nothing you can do about it.
This class is not worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take, in addition to all the time it will take away from your other more relevant classes.

Campbell's whole vibe with this class is "I'm trying to screw you over any way I can" - The other reviews say it all; each lab is a test of how well you can intuitively guess what Campbell is looking for because his instructions are vague and unclear. And even if you do the best job anyone has ever done on a lab report, he'll find a way to subtract ten points for "imprecise wording." Work really hard to get in the top third and you'll get an A, but expect to lose your mind a little along the way. This class really ought to be changed - in the grading scheme if nothing else

I got an A+ in this class. Still, I believe this class should be seriously redesigned by the physics department.

-Workload is extremely heavy, as the last 2 reports may require 3000 words each.
-The guidelines provided by the professor are unclear and disorganized. That is, you have to rely on your TA to a large extent since they are the only ones who can decrypt the professor's enigmatic wordings in the lab manual.
-The grading scheme is ridiculous. There's no point of curving in a 15-student section.
-Your TA can be really strict in grading. My TA insisted us to adhere to some unnecessary criteria (e.g. "every lab report should be double-column and shorter than 5 pages"), otherwise our grades would be significantly reduced.

Here are some suggestions:
-Use LaTeX, which formats your reports nicely and gives clean layouts.
-Use Python/Matlab/some other more efficient tools to automate data analysis, since dragging those excel boxes can be painful.
-Start early. Don't wait until the night before due date to begin writing. Do the data analysis 1-3 days right after you finish your labs.

The harsh grading scheme makes it impossible to obtain any useful information from this class. The labs will often be marked down for minor faults to create an artificial curve. This class deserves an award, because it is the only class at UCLA where I came in with a strong appreciation of physics and left hating the subject. Furthermore, this lab does not teach skills that would be useful in a real lab. I will commend my Lab Assistant, as I thought he did the best he could considering the awful structure of this class. Overall, a thoroughly terrible experience that no student should be forced to endure.

Everything you've heard about this class is true.

Honestly this class sucks. If you aren't really interested in physics and are just taking this for your major, try not to take this class with courses that actually matter to you (if possible), because 4AL will really bog you down with its time-consuming lab reports.

For an idea of what the class is like, you are basically stuck in a room with your lab partner and 20 other students for up to 3 hours a week trying to collect data according to the lab manual instructions. For writing the lab reports, the calculations are time-consuming but not hard (use excel), however analysis and actually understanding what half the equations you are using come from is not easy. Luckily, you don't have to really understand the physics to get a good grade but just reading through the manual and trying to understand where you're supposed to start with your abstracts/conclusions is a pain (or at least it was for me.)

If you want to do well in this class, you should probably read the lab manual before class (especially for the later labs) so you can finish the lab as quickly as possible, since the later labs are actually quite long and you will run out of time if you have to spend most of the time figuring out what to do. I didn't follow this advice and suffered from not being able to collect all of the required data, you can still get an A like this but it requires some really good report writing skills and adds lots of unneeded stress.

The grading depends on your TA; from my experience you can lose a lot of points for formatting or style, so ask your TA what they want and learn from your mistakes early on. It also helps to look at sample reports online (DON'T COPY THEM) just to see what the standard is for a high grade and the general approach you should use for the longer, full reports.