Up until the midterm, I sat faithfully during lecture and wrote down detailed notes. When studying for the midterm, I read the textbook and my notes from class. I shit you not they were word for word the same thing. After the midterm I went to lecture and sat there with the textbook open. Professor Wong said exactly the same things as the textbook! At that point I just left and took notes from the book since he was just copying down the textbook onto the board. Pretty easy class overall with the midterm being easy and the final being hard AF. Lecture is useless unless you want to watch a professor who doesn't care read out of the book. He was a nice guy though and very friendly!

Absolutely useless lecturer. Everything is derived from the textbook so best bet to just learn by yourself since you can look over confusing material more slowly. Easy midterm, but he absolutely blindsided us for the final. Don't get complacent.

Overall it's just a chinese person reading off the textbook. Final did not test anything and was hard as balls. Median was prob around a 50% or less.

Lectures are right out of the book. 50% homework, 25% midterm, 25% final. Homeworks aren't bad. Midterm was easy, final was impossible. I could see this class would be an utter pain, but the professor did not make it as hard as it could have been. I would recommend that you take this class with him.

I started this class and had no clue why the reviews were so bad, but you will quickly learn that they're much more accurate than anyone would hope

Chee Wei Wong is a very nice guy that genuinely isn't trying to make your day miserable, but unfortunately that's what happens with this class. My biggest issue with this class is the textbook, written by Jia Ming Lu, who also teaches at UCLA. Maybe he chose this textbook because they're friends or something, but this is at the detriment of the students because THIS TEXTBOOK IS THE WORST. It assumes you know way too much before entering a class with too few prereqs (they should probably require EE 101B or EE163A). It asks end-of-chapter questions that are extremely loosely related to the example questions in the chapter. I'm not asking for the exact same question, but these questions are crazy hard and borderline unrelated with solutions for only a scattered few questions online. The TA answered 1-2 homework questions in discussion but he really didn't bother to make it palatable or readable for anyone who wasn't well versed in the topic already. The content IS NOT SIMPLE. A lot of this isn't intuitive and there are not many good resources out there for this that aren't papers filled with math. This class really needs to be better if it's going to be the entry course for the photonics series.

As for the class itself, Wong's lectures are unfortunately him reading the textbook word for word, which isn't helpful for such a terrible textbook. I stopped showing up to lectures after a while because it wasn't worth my time to watch him read a book. He needs slides instead of projecting the paper he writes on because maybe that'll get him to talk about some of the theory and not just the math.

The exams are obscenely difficult. There might be a couple questions that can be followed through with a formula, but most of these are very conceptual and significantly harder than anything seen in the homework. I can appreciate a class with limited homework, but the 3 or 4 end-of-chapter questions assigned per every 1-2 weeks are literally useless for preparing for the exams.

The only solace with this class is the super lenient grading for exams and homework as well as what is probably a giant curve because the exams screw everyone. This class could be way better with a different textbook, but someone should probably beg Chee Wei Wong to make that happen. I have never been in such a state of fear over my grade because there is little to no transparency regarding the grading. If you like tons of E&M, optics, and math, then take your chances with this class and try not to stress out too much. If you have any doubts about whether you like this content, DON'T DO IT (at least until Chee Wei changes the structure of the class or someone else teaches it)

I have no idea how I received an A in this class. The other reviews are right, you can get by in this class with just the textbook. I spent maybe an hour a week just doing the short homework assignments for this class, and I just did all of the practice problems at the end of the chapter to study for the exams. I never went to lecture and never read the textbook, except for the equations that pertained to the homework problems. Additionally, it seems that Professor Wong and his TA have eased up on grading the homework, as it was fairly easy to get 100% on the homework assignments, and I didn’t find the TA to be a particularly harsh grader.

In this class you either know it or you don’t. If you do, it’s easy, if you don’t the tests will be impossible. You can’t BS your way through a Chee Wei exam. Homework takes very little time. Lectures are boring as he just reads through the textbook