Gelmini is a very good professor. She will explain in every way possible until you understand the material. Aside from her jokes, she is very entertaining during class. You won't be bored.

Her HWs are 10%, and take some time to complete. Her mid terms are quite the challenge but very very doable, with normally 1 really hard question; you'd be quite brain dead after her mid terms.

Her final is very challenging but if you do all the questions including the "Challenge" questions in the Mastering Physics text book, you should find it easier than others.

There is a problem though. She does not give error carried forward points. For example, if a question has parts a,b,c, and d, and everything relies on the answer if part a, if you get part a wrong, parts b,c and d will probably only give you a total of 1 mark.
This happened in my final for a 30 point question. I made a calculation error and got the answer wrong. I ended up getting 5/30 points and a B+ because of this :/

Overall, I'll definitely recommend her, but just becareful of your exam calculation and answers.

I took 1A with Gelmini last spring quarter. I really like her since she is really funny during class with her accent(but you can understand what she is talking about). But her homework can be a pain in the ass since it takes you a lot of time but almost worth nothing (10%), both of her midterms are ridiculously easy and the curve is really high. That is to say, her final is quite challenging so make sure you really understand the materials. Overall, I would recommen this professor.

I hate to say anything negative about Gelmini because she really seems to care about student learning and seems like a very nice person, however, I feel as if I got little to nothing out of this class other than a hatred for physics. I feel that an average score of an F on a final exam indicates that the teaching skills of the professor are severely lacking. Several other commenters have mentioned her accent, I don't believe that this is the reason I found her so difficult to understand. My inability to understand her wasn't a failure to understand the words, but a failure to understand what the words had to do with the equations she wrote on the board.
The homework was pure torture, and usually took at least twice as long as the program said it would. The book was only somewhat helpful.
If you have to take this class I would highly recommend trying harder than I did: make sure you actually understand the homework when you do it, join the "lab" (a course where you get more practice problems, and extra help), go to all discussion sections (my TA made everything make sense, I wish he had taught the class), and maybe even go to office hours.

I thought Gelmini was a great professor. She is so difficult to dislike because she is clearly so dedicated to teaching: 3 office hours a week and totally willing to spare extra time if you ask. She clearly loves being the lecture hall and practically begs the class to ask her questions. She has a pretty thick accent but after a little while you can pick up on what she's talking about. Class is mostly proving the theories, and to be honest she only asked us to prove one or two things the entire quarter during an exam, but if you understand where the concepts come from you'll be in a very strong position for the exam.

Homework is worth almost nothing (10%), and it took me like 4 hours a week to do. Just try to start it early so that you don't end up completely screwed the night it's due.

Her midterms are set up so that you should get almost everything right. Usually she also puts almost all easy questions and one pretty difficult question that you can miss and still be OK in the class. So if you end up missing some points on the midterms it's really not a big deal.

It's also important to note that her final (which is also 50% of the class) is a killer. The average on her exams were C+/B-, but on the final the average was a flat 80/160 (which is an F). Only 3 people in the entire class got A's. Keep this in mind if you try to weight the final as 70% of your grade (I think she gave people this option if they failed one of the midterms).

Overall a great professor. I would recommend her to anyone.

I thought that Gelmini was a solid professor and I would recommend taking her.

She makes most of the concepts understandable in class, and the exams seem to be fair enough if you study (i.e. no over-the-top tricky questions). Online homework assignments are easy. Grading is also pretty fair. For the amount of effort I put in I probably did not deserve an A, but I still got it. Note, that if you HAVEN'T TAKEN PHYSICS BEFORE, you will probably have to put in a lot of effort to do well. However, if you did AP Physics in high school (I did), the material in this class is almost all review and seems ridiculously easy for awhile. I only studied right before the exams, and like I said, still received an A. Physics 1B will probably be a different story, but if you have take high school physics this class is definitely a review of old material.

soooo shes a nice lady, but shes pretty difficult.

i suggest taking another professor if you don't want to get dominated on the final. period.

First off, Gelmini has a really thick accent. It doesn't interfere too much in class, and you get used to it really quickly, but sometimes she's hard to understand because of it.

Other than that, however, Gelmini's a pretty good professor. She covers all of her topics in great detail, and I left her class with a pretty good understanding of all the concepts in the class. The only problem, however, is that while she covers concepts really well, she doesn't do much in the way of examples or practice problems in class, so you definitely need to study and do all of the homework in order to have an idea of what to expect on the tests.

Her tests tend to be kind of hard, but usually fair. You'll never see anything that wasn't covered adequately in lecture. The good thing about her tests is that she's pretty generous with partial credit, so even if you don't get all of the problems right, you'll do okay if you prove that you know the concepts she's testing you on.

The worst parts of her class are the things that are completely out of her control. There was only one TA for my class (poor guy had three or four discussions right in a row to plow through, although since I was in the last one the sections were usually pretty helpful), and we had to do all of our homework online because the Physics Department is too poor to hire a grader for the class. The homework sucks to high heaven, but there's no way around it, so just be sure to do all of the problems, even if you don't get a high percentage on the assignment overall. I got less than 50% on three or four of the homeworks (mostly due to laziness) and managed to get a B+ in the class overall, so you can definitely afford to screw up a bit on the homework.

Overall, Gelmini's a really good professor. Recommended.

Professor Gelmini is great at what she teaches and she knows the subject very well. But in my opinion her lectures are all conceptual. She teaches nothing that will appear on her exams because she does no examples or mathematical physics in class. Also I could not understand what her questions were saying on the exams, so I had to read the question about a million times until I understood. This was bad because the time is not enough for her exams. I don't know but she really lowered my gpa.