Professor Freiman has improved a lot since Spring of 2022. I've now taken Physics 1A and Physics 1B with Professor Freiman and I can say that most of the reviews on this page are pretty harsh. I think there was likely a bit of a learning curve, but I noticed that he took student's comments into consideration and did what he could to improve upon any negative feedback. He clearly cares about his students and is very open to feedback and willing to make changes for the benefit of his students' education and grade.

1B is a lot more difficult than 1A as most of the content is stuff you haven't seen and the class is pretty fast paced with a lot of material to cover. The textbook is a helpful resource on this front, but be prepared to give quite a bit more effort to learn this content. As for the class in specific, Freiman's grading scheme is very generous and the 5% extra credit is huge (something you should certainly take advantage of). 3 midterms was a bit much, but he drops the lowest which is nice. To best prepare yourself for the exams, you're definitely going to have to do more than just the Kudu problems and Discussion Worksheets, though the discussion worksheets are great practice. The practice midterms he gave were also useful, but be warned, the exams are more difficult than the practice ones.

Overall, physics is a notoriously difficult subject, but Freiman's generous grading scheme on top of recorded lectures and his receptiveness makes it a little more palatable.

Having taken Professor Freiman for both Physics 1A and Physics 1B, I can say he has shown considerable improvement. His slides are relevant to the topics discussed, he cares for his students, and he's very responsive via email. His grading scheme is also flexible, allowing there to be no situation in which everyone fails, and he offers 5% extra credit. That being said, I did find having 3 midterms and a final difficult to manage and the somewhat arbitrary Kudu dates made working on assignments on time cumbersome. The lectures are also recorded, which can be helpful.

Awful and outdated textbook, way too much content expected to be covered in this course. Course needs to trim off extra topics as there is not enough time to cover them well and the core material suffers as a result. Lecture presentations were very confusing and only amounted to copying textbook equations with no context or explanations, and lecture slides are a collection of textbook figures with no commentary or context presented. Homework exercises were pulled straight from the textbook, very confusing, and not useful for preparing for exam material. Midterm exam was well beyond the mastery level reasonably achievable from lecture presentations and studying of textbook, leading to an average score below 50%. No dedicated office hours in an already confusing and difficult course made the experience even worse. Lecture presentations routinely went over the allotted time and still did not cover the content adequately.

Update after final exam: The final exam was significantly different than the midterm exam, largely for the better. Questions were mostly focused on providing descriptions of course concepts with a reasonable level of depth. Additionally, while the written assignment did feel a little tacked on, likely to fulfill some ABET requirement for graduate courses, it was not too strenuous to complete and will likely serve as a nice grade buffer if it is not graded too harshly. Overall, while Professor Frieman did have shortcomings as a lecturer and preparer of homework and exams, I believe that the issues with this class primarily stem from the selection of course content being exceedingly large. Even at the fast pace of this class, we still ended the quarter around two weeks behind the content listed on the syllabus and only covered content from 4 out of the 5 intended chapters. I believe that if Frieman continues to teach this class he will undoubtedly improve as he showed towards the end of this quarter, but it is still hard to recommend this class without specific prior experience in its content unless the breadth of content is significantly reduced.

Great personality! A bit difficult to hear him at times so make sure you sit at the front of the class. He has a french accent but it helped make the lectures more engaging as he'd often make some funny jokes that would simply make the lectures more engaging. I thought he was a really cool dude. GO FREIMAN!

The TA Worksheets are graded VERY harshly! This is 10% of you grade you can't sleep on these!