This class sucks, but I don't think it's the professors fault. Grading is 40% weekly quizzes, 15% homework, 10% discussion worksheets, and 35% final. Weekly quizzes are hard, almost felt like a mini midterm I was studying for each week. Homework and discussion are impossible to not 100% if you give effort (infinite tries on HW, discussion graded on completion). Final was very fair and felt like the weekly quizzes, just longer. Overall, you will struggle in this class unless ur very cracked at physics, and if you have little/no physics experience you will really struggle. However, this is true for any 1A professor, and IMO Saltzberg is probably ur best bet. His lectures are great and hes very helpful (I had a question after class, we went to his office and worked on it for 10 minutes, and it changed my way of thinking about physics entirely). Gear up, put in the work, and it'll be a very rewarding experience.

As with all physics classes, I think performance in this class mostly comes down to being willing to read the textbook and do a lot of practice problems. Saltzberg is not really a good lecturer and also seems easily frustrated with students but I don't think he really negatively affected my experience or anything. There's no curve (which is fine) so the final exam is pretty important; it's mostly quiz repeats and with some bad luck they'll be the quizzes you did poorly on, so those are really crucial to review and understand. It's an okay class.

Professor Saltzberg's Physics 1A class was a positive experience for me. Rather than two midterms, there is a quiz every week (each second lecture of the week), so you'll have to stay on your toes a little (even though it might be tempting to slack off at first, you might regret it by week 3 or 4). However, I think it is a good system, and, as a bonus, Professor Saltzberg will generously drop the worst quiz!

I thought the exams and quizzes were definitely fair, and he even used questions directly from the previous homeworks and lectures! Therefore, doing the homework honestly and understanding its problems are crucial. Moreover, as is true with any physics class, practice problems are ESSENTIAL to making progress--I learned this the hard way after not doing well on a few quizzes. Fortunately, Professor Saltzberg gives copious amounts of extra practice problems through the Pearson Textbook Software, which he also uses to assign homeworks (unlimited attempts). In my opinion, reading the textbook--which is worth reading from time to time--is cumbersome through the software. I would suggest finding a pdf online: not so hard to come across.

Also, his office hours were all excellent, yet, surprisingly, very few people go! Working through problems alongside him was very helpful in furthering my physics intuition. Another benefit of attending office hours is that he is a very kind, understanding man who cares a lot about his students, especially when they make the effort to be engaged. This class helped me gain confidence approaching physics, and it has excited me to continue the series. I would take Physics 1A with Professor Saltzberg again.

This class was probably the most difficult class I've taken at UCLA. We had quizzes every week. We were expected to essentially master the material and be prepared to take a quiz within a week. I worked extremely hard in this class but the quizzes greatly varied in difficulty and I felt that I could never fully prepare for them.The quizzes are very similar to the homework, but there was always one trick question that threw me off. I couldn't understand what was happening during the lecture because we didn't have enough time to write things down. Given it was my first time taking physics, I would not advise those new to physics to take this section. There was a clear knowledge gap between those coming in with experience and those without, and everyone without experience was definitely struggling. The grading scheme is also unforgiving, and the professor said he doesn't curve the class. It definitely took a toll on my mental health and I think this course could be revamped, and students could get opportunities to show their mastery of the material in ways besides exams.

Absolutely the worst instructor I have ever come across. Lectures unclear and disorganized. Weekly quizzes insanely difficult. He tries to act understanding and friendly but is very misleading. After many students expressed concerns of difficulty of course, he continued to ignore everyone. Do not recommend Saltzberg.

Take this class if you want an easy A, not if you want to learn physics.

Don't bother with lecture; he's bad at lecturing and doesn't go through many examples. Either read the textbook or find online resources (of which there are many, considering this is an introductory physics course. Michel van Biezen is my personal favorite) and do some of the textbook problems.

Literally every question on every quiz and the final was taken from either the homework problems or the in-class slides that he posts. A high B/low A in this class is very doable if you actually do the problems. If you're consistently getting 60s in the quizzes, that's a skill issue. His homeworks are graded on accuracy, but you have infinite tries on them and they tell you whether you got the answer right or not. There are also weekly mandatory discussions.

The people I see complaining on the GroupMe and here about the quizzes being "hard" and there being no curve have no idea how bad physics 1A can be lmao. I assure you that in terms of 1A professors, Saltzberg is one of the better ones because you can easily get an A if you put some effort in.

Overall, Professor Saltzberg was an okay lecturer, he does clarify some of the more difficult topics; however, he mostly lectures like he’s reading off the textbook. Whenever he’s lecturing, he can go quite fast, causing us to miss the notes he wrote, but he does record lectures and posts his notes on BruinLearn after lecture. While lectures can be dull at times, he does tend to spice them up with demonstrations and multiple choice questions for the entire class (optional).

For the homework, he assigns them through Mastering Physics and he gives us one week to do them and gives us “infinite” tries for each question; hence, the assignments aren’t too bad. However, he tends to give some challenge problems on the homework, which may be three to five times longer to solve than a regular homework problem.

I would say the most difficult part of the class are the weekly quizzes, which are worth 40% of our entire grade (there are no midterms). The quizzes are based off of last week’s lecture topics and homework, which may seem easy, but he sometimes throws a curveball at us by giving us relatively difficult questions. The first four or five quizzes weren’t too difficult (if you took Physics or AP Physics 1 during high school), but onwards, it can be somewhat challenging since he incorporates some Calculus into them. Moreover, nobody is allowed notecards for the quizzes (even for equations), and he expects everyone to memorize relevant Physics equations beforehand (to quote him, “these equations are your friends, and you should remember your friends’ names”). To best prepare for the quizzes, I would do the optional textbook problems he assigns on Mastering Physics since tends to give quiz questions from there (but you can’t really do all of the optional questions since there are about 300 of them for each chapter).

Grade breakdown:
Homework 15% (infinite tries until deadline)
Discussion Section Worksheets 10% (graded off of serious effort)
Weekly Quizzes 40% (lowest score dropped); no note cards
Final Exam 35%

Final Rating: 3.5/5
He’s certainly not the worst professor I’ve had, but he’s not the best (room for improvement)

hate this class and hate this man. don't be fooled. he seems super nice and down to earth but trust me that is not the case. we have 4 hours of lecture a week and i swear i learn nothing every damn class. he flies through examples and problems writing on his little ipad. doesn't explain how or why he is solving problems the way he is, and expects you to understand it. you have weekly quizzes instead of a midterm which is good and bad. if you ask questions during the quiz he gets really butthurt and blames you for not knowing the material. if you haven't taken physics in high school, good luck. the only reason im surviving in this course is because i have a physics background. idk if i can fathom how much i dislike this class.

Petitioned to switch to a different physics class during week 4. Very bad at lecturing, speeds through everything so fast that you won't even have time to take a picture of the slide. Explains nothing in depth and expects you to magically understand what he is doing. Highly NOT recommend.

Editing review: Okay y’all, I was extremely salty when I wrote that last review, and also I think the professor saw it :( it was very mean of me to comment on him as a person, when obviously I don’t actually really know him at all.

I did have some difficulty requesting extensions and such, although I am registered with CAE. But for the most part he was actually very generous with allowing extensions. I will say, be careful that you submit the homework before noon every Tuesday! He will NOT accept any late work as a general rule, even if it’s only a little late. This is pretty fair though because the deadline is the same every week and you have a whole week to work on it.

Also, he lets you submit answers as many times as you want to Mastering Physics, and doesn’t take points off for wrong answers (which I’ve heard some other professors do). He said his intention is that everyone gets 100% on the homework. I’m not sure how manageable this actually is, as some of the challenge HW problems are extremely difficult even if you attend office hours, go to tutoring, read the textbook, and watch the lectures (as I did). I ended up having to look up some answers to get full credit, which the professor totally knew because he can see how long you’ve been working on Mastering Physics.

I’d say try your hardest to complete the problems on your own and DON’T look them up if you can at all avoid it, because it’s a lot harder to motivate yourself to do the HW when all the answers are there - and most of the learning in class pretty much requires you to do the HW and just do tons of practice problems to really understand it.

Also, his office hours aren’t the best - I’d recommend getting a friend to help or maybe using the free tutoring options (which Saltzberg does do a good job of emailing everyone about). In office hours we would often end up on tangents that weren’t exactly central to the learning material, especially if you were still struggling to understand the basics of the material.

Still, I’d say this guy is pretty good, especially as far as Physics professors go. He’s friendly and cheerful, does demos, and basically gives “cheerful sweet grandpa” vibes. But his deadlines ARE still pretty strict, they are what they are, and in general STEM classes are more black-and-white and less accepting of late work than humanities or social science classes would tend to be.

Also, his quizzes are HARD. There’s weekly quizzes so that you don’t fall behind, but if you do fall behind it can feel really difficult to ever catch up, as you’re trying to catch up while also prepping for the next week’s quiz. If you’re actually able to do all of the HW, I think you should be alright on the quizzes - I would just frequently get stuck on the HW and try for a couple hours and then give up in frustration. I also haven’t ever taken any physics before - I think if you took it in HS, you’d have an easier time as well.

But still, the tests generally are much harder than the base material we go over in class; you really just have to do a TON of practice problems in order to succeed. Like, I would understand the base material and concepts, but this still be totally lost on applying it in the quizzes. One quiz I thought I did decently on, 60% at worst, and I got 10%.

There’s also no curve for this class as far as I know, which really sucks because the tests are hard. We tried doing a petition to get him to curve the class, so I’ll update again if that’s successful.

Also, he doesn’t give you a formula sheet at all, although we did get a 3x5in index card for the final. Not for any of the quizzes though, and basic calculators only. He likes to say “physics equations are your friends!”, which is a funny saying until the dread of having to memorize so many different ‘friend’s names’ sinks in and you realize you are actually really bad at even remembering human names, let alone physics ones.

He also wants you to be able to memorize all the different metric units for distance, from 10^-18 to 10^18 (ex: millimeter, centimeter, etc.). We had picometer on one of our quizzes, but he did warn us in advance that one of the unusual ones would be on that quiz. I don’t think it’s fully fair to test us on that because in reality some people just aren’t as good at rote memorization, and most people aren’t doing physics in their head while they’re driving. But to be fair, the problem was actually mostly solvable without even really needing to know how long a picometer was, so it could be worse.

Also, you have to attend discussion in-person to get points for the discussion sheets. Make sure you really over-explain everything on your discussion sheets to avoid getting points off; you don’t have to finish or have the right answers, but you do have to put in 50 minutes worth of effort. (One guy in my section stood up in the middle of class and started screaming at the TA for getting points off even though he wrote 2 full pages, supposedly.)

Tl;dr: This class is hard. You have to do a bunch of practice problems and memorize all the formulas to succeed. Make sure to turn your homework in ON TIME as late work will be difficult to get accepted. Don’t look up the HW answers if you can avoid it, because you’ll really be in bad shape if you don’t do the homework yourself. Success is possible but you will have to work for it!