Professor Whitten was one of my favorite professors here at UCLA. He was always enthusiastic, encouraging, and fair. You could tell he wanted his students to succeed. He spent lectures deriving and doing examples (a good mix of the two) with the occasional hands on example. Those were my favorite. He was always so excited, which was wonderful to see in a professor. I hated physics in high school; I thought it was hard and confusing, but professor Whitten really cleared things up for me, and allowed me to succeed. I'd really like to thank him for that. I didn't know him personally, but I could tell he was a nice guy and genuinely cared about all of us. Thank you for a great quarter Professor Whitten.
May you rest in peace.

As mentioned by many other student, his passion for Physics is unparalled to the majority of other instructors on this campus. His tests were borderline easy-fair for many and the final exam displays 7 problems and the best 6 will be scored. While most of his lectures will be Whitten deriving many of these formulas through Calculus, he tries to throw a few relevant examples in there to engage us more. There was only one graduate student who lead all of Whitten's Physics discussions but he did a phenomenal job at making lectures and homework problems seem manageable. Overall, I could not have asked for a better Physics course.

May Whitten rest in peace.

A very nice and awesome professor. Knew how to teach gave great problems for home work. I would say my physics literally improved in his course phy 1A. But unfortunately he is not among us anymore. Hope his soul rests in peace.

This man is very passionate about physics. He's a pretty good professor, but he goes on tangents about some pretty random things. He's not difficult at all, and covers everything without rushing at the end of the quarter, which is nice. I'd say if Corbin is not teaching, Whitten's not a bad second choice.

You can tell from his lectures that this guy is very excited about physics. He is so excited about the subject that he actually laughs when talking about them. Most of what he does in class are derivations (which can be interesting), but there aren't any actual derivations on his exams. His handwriting is very messy, so sitting near the front is almost a necessity if you want to get the most out of lecture. Exams are ridiculously easy (the averages on midterms were above 90%) and were not challenging at all, but the final exam was much more difficult. Overall, if you want a easy physics class and you want to learn but don't necessarily want to be challenged, I would recommend this professor.

Whitten has to be the most passionate teacher I have seen so far. He practically always had a smile on his face especially when he reached a topic he really enjoyed where he would giggle like a little school girl. I highly recommend Whitten if you truely want to learn Physics. If you don't really care and would rather get a better grade, by all means, go and take 1A by Rudnick.

Whitten really know what he is talking about and so do his TA's. My TA was incredibly knowledgable about the material and was quite helpful. Whitten, being the old man that he is, has these very humorous anecdotes at times and is really enjoable. He's like everybody's favorite Grandpa. Which by the way, the picture above must be about 30 years old. Whitten is actually quite aged.

On to what everyone cares about; his tests. The tests are not easy let me tell you that. The midterms consist of 3 problems, each having many parts and it's quite difficult to finish the whole test, let alone do everything right. His Final, is a little more friendly to the time alowed, but is just as difficult as the midterms.

Either way, I recommend taking Whitten's class. But it just might not be as easy as you might want it to be.

I had this guy my first quarter here. Never went to section (TA didn't show up first day!), I showed up to turn in homework and take tests and I got a 95, so I pretty much went off of my 2 years of physics in high school to get me by, so I guess I can't compliment his teaching ability, because I really didn't need any help besides doing the homework. But if I love what I do as much as this guy loves physics, I'll be set.

Bad lecturer! Very boring! I did not learn Physics from him at all! All I did was asking the TA and going to the Covel tutorial! I am so disappointed for the fact that UCLA is well-known to provide an excellent education, yet the fact, is the opposite.

First of all, the picture online doesn't quite reflect what he looks like now. If you want to know what he looks like, go to the lecture. But more importantly, it's good to go to the lecture to listen to what he has to teach you.

Like what people already said, he does derive a lot in class, but it would not be fair to say that he didn't work out problems at all. He does work out some problems after he derives the formula. And I think all that derivation actually give you a better understanding of physics. I am actually fascinated by how much calculus can do. Why does energy formula have the form 1/2 mv^2, 1/2 kx^2, and 1/2 Iw^2? The answer lies in the integration. Why is the velocity perpendicular to the acceleration and why does the acceleration points radially inward? It can also derived with calculus (the trig functions will indicate these properties). So I am actually excited to realize that the calculus I learn is actually of some use!

For those people who likes to use actual numbers instead of variables, it's good to know how to work out things with variables and plug in numbers at the end. You can avoid many rounding errors and get more partial credits by doing that.

The tests are not too hard, but you might run out of time on those miterms since they could be time consuming. The professor is also pretty nice in his office hours. His lecture is organized too unlike this review (sorry about that). The little experiments are entertaining.

He is a good lecturer and you'll do fine if you do homework on your own.

This professor is really funny! It is really entertaining when he does his little experiments in class, but other than that, the class can be quite boring. His lectures don't really help with the homework or midterms/final because he spends the whole time deriving and little time actually doing. His midterms were pretty tough, and even though he said that they would be problems from the homework...they weren't. Very conceptual teacher, but he curves very well in the end!