He's had a reputation for being harsh, sarcastic, unfair, etc. Here are some factual tidbits about him: he was coerced into reassigning the grades in 104AL in W08 when he gave out only 1 A and 2 A- to a class of 49 (avg grade C+; the new grading scheme still only had one A); the highest grade he gave out the next quarter was a B+.

My experience with him wasn't all that bad. Writing a lab report for him is like walking into a minefield; any slight wrong move can cost you big. He'll tell you that shorter is better, but I've found that this is bad advice because then you'll just get lazy and leave out important details. Basically, the trick is to cram in as much important, meaningful, and relevant analysis as you possibly can into the page limit. Also, be as quantitative as possible, be perfect in formatting, and make your writing very concise. Put a lot of meaningful plots/visuals. People in my class started figuring him out by the second report (5 of like 50 people got 90%+, a figure thought nearly impossible to reach). It's also essential to really understand the experiments because a lot of them have tricks (or design flaws, possibly intentional) that you need to figure out to do well on the reports/presentations (but he won't tell you that).

And these rumors that he's subjective/arbitrary in the final grades may be a bit wrong. He reassigned our grades in 104B and admitted that he accidentally didn't include our report scores when calculating our grades. I bet this isn't the first time this has happened, and that no one had really bothered/had the guts to approach him about it. He's an old dude, really smart but nevertheless makes mistakes like any old guy. He's pretty nice and I'd use this class to make your writing and presentation skills better. He grades you as if you were his employee so I'd get used to the criticism and use it for improvement/prep for the real world.