Prof. Rosenzweig is a nice guy who is very knowledgeable and passionate about physics, however I would strongly recommend avoiding his class. It was very painful, and it made me want to never take a physics class again. This class was very challenging and confusing. Although I really disliked this class, it should be noted that Dima Vaido, the TA, was excellent.

Dima is GOAT, glad we have him for 1CH

Honestly, the class is as hard as every review says it is. Jamie is also as described by the other reviews. However, I wanted to come on here to give him some credit. Even though he made the course so difficult and hard to understand, (compared to all the other courses I have had at UCLA this course is through the roof) there is some sort of appreciation I have developed for his course. Towards the end of the course, I was finally able to understand what was going on and it felt like my physics skills had become so sharp and so refined. I ended up taking the regular course for physics 1C and it made me appreciate Jamie's class even more. He basically taught the majority of the physics 1C content to us in 1BH and it makes my current course feel like child's play. Also, the style of questions in 1BH is truly beautiful when compared to the plug and chug questions given in the regular course. Furthermore, Jamie's exams were all written really comprehensibly and nicely (although I'm not quite sure how to describe it but they were really good). So even though mid way through this course I was ready to give it a 1 star, and never take a honors course again, I reflected upon my experience and decided it is worthy of a 4 star. Not only that but I regret my decision of not continuing the honors class with him even though it was torture (call my a masochist). I'd say, the struggle is well worth it and if you do decide to take this course, just do 1CH and struggle on. It'll be valuable it at the end.

Learning with this professor is simply equal to self-learning. If you have enough time to learn on yourselves and read everything in the textbook you can try this course, otherwise avoid him.

Avoid him. He will torture you with some who knows upper or graduate math which I still don't understand (Dirac-delta, Fourier analysis, convective derivative...). Sometimes he spent a whole lecture talking about things way beyond the scope of the textbook. After electrostatics, you need to spend lots of time self-studying because he simply didn't cover all the required material, and he just rushed through some basic stuff.

If you plan on taking Math 32B with this course, please reconsider taking 1BH. 32B concepts show up from the beginning and a lot of the honors material stems from rigorous math including and going beyond 32B (do not even get me started on dirac delta functions). The math shows up heavily in lecture and homework. It's not impossible to do well if you take this class alongside 32B, but it's definitely harder, especially if you've had limited/no exposure to electricity/magnetism.

The lectures are sometimes hard to understand due to the formatting (he has pre-written notes that he goes through and annotates as he talks) as well as the aforementioned rigorous math. I would strongly recommend reading the Purcell and Morin textbook as well as Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics (not required at all but I found the explanations more simple and straightforward than P&M). P&M is an...interesting book. Around Ch. 2, there are several sections devoted to the concepts of divergence and curl (along with Divergence Theorem and Stokes' Theorem) which are explained in a very strange way if you're not familiar with them. If you're taking 32B alongside this course, just read the math textbook, or look at Griffiths Ch. 1. More importantly, around Ch. 5, P&M decides to assume you know the principles of special relativity and jumps into magnetism from that perspective. Read appendix G of P&M before reading Ch. 5; if you're still confused (and you probably will be), read Griffiths Ch. 12 and watch YouTube videos (I especially recommend the MinutePhysics series on special relativity).

It should be noted that Jamie is a really nice person who is very passionate about the subject. He gave a very generous curve and demonstrated a desire for all of his students to do well and improve. Still, if you have a limited/lack of background in the math and physics required for this course, I would strongly advise against taking it.

Like the other reviewers said: if you took 1AH, then you know what to expect. The class is hard, and you'll feel out of your depth for the majority of it, but it's important to feel uncomfortable, and you'll definitely learn more than in a regular physics class if you actively work through the discomfort.

As far as curriculum goes, this class skips fluid mechanics and waves from 1B (which we ultimately cover in the context of E&M waves in 1CH), and starts on electrostatics. This will require 32B knowledge from the get-go, so I would recommend using online resources or the textbook to get familiar with line integrals and surface integrals (as this really confused me in the beginning). From there, we learned special relativity and derived magnetism from special relativity, which was indeed very confusing and hard to understand, but actually kind of cool now that I think about it. Special relativity was overwhelming for everybody in the class -- I believe the best way to approach it is to read the appendix in the textbook about it and then watch YouTube videos until you understand the basics. From there, the textbook has fantastic derivations for the special relativity formulas you'll need that are relevant to E&M, and the textbook is very clear on which frame is moving/not moving, so I found that helpful. Finally, we finished off with magnetism, which was easier stuff compared to relativity.

Jaime's lectures are definitely tough to digest at times, and I didn't watch them for the first half of the class and relied solely on the textbook by Purcell and Morin (which is pretty dense, but makes sense if you give it time), but I would recommend watching them from the start, even if they don't make any sense at first. His written homework questions are extremely tough as well. However, I felt his exams were very fair in difficulty. Although I did terrible on the first one, well below the average, I didn't think it was nearly as impossible as the homework problems. For the exams, the questions definitely draw from concepts in lecture, so I would recommend attending lecture or at the very least copying down his notes if you rely on the textbook.

It's true that Jaime can be hard to understand, and his handwriting is self-admittedly pretty bad. However, he's a really nice guy, he is clearly very passionate about physics, and he's more willing to work with his students than any professor I've had before (i. e. extending homework deadlines when we were overwhelmed, letting students who were struggling with their health make up exams, just generally willing to answer your questions during lecture, etc.) Plus, it's clear that he really wants you to learn and do your best. He holds 3-hour office hours each week, and he held 3-hour review sessions before the exams, which is insane for any professor to do. Now that I'm in 1CH, I've come around to Jaime's teaching style, and his lectures that used to be super overwhelming and seemingly impossible for somebody like me to comprehend make more and more sense each week. At the end of the day, if you can let your ego take the blow that's going to come with this class, ask your peers for help, put the work in, and accept that you may not understand everything at first, you can definitely do it.

(Note: our TA, Dima Vaido, is amazing. If you can pick him for any physics class, I would highly recommend doing so.)

Past electrostatics, I was lost. If you can understand the relativity and Maxwells Equations, then a lot more of this should class makes sense. I think the textbook was pretty good at explaining the first half of the class but terrible for the second, I did not realize this until too late... GL to those taking, you know what your getting into from 1AH...

Jamie is a knowledgeable professor, and is very clearly passionate about E&M (he has talked about his research several times during relevant topics in class); however, his style of lecturing is very difficult to follow. Of course this only pertains to his online lectures, but Jamie would have everything written down pre-class, and simply scroll through his notes and explaining them. This made it very difficult to see the process of his explanations and solutions worked on, and was especially difficult when it came to mathematical derivations. The textbook for this class, Purcell and Morin's E&M is very dense and frankly very boring to read, but I do have to say it is quite helpful in clearing up things we've discussed in class. I highly recommend reading the textbook before or after lecture, but if you're illiterate like me, there are also a lot of helpful youtube videos that explain the concepts at a fifth-grade level.

Despite this class having Math 32B as a co-requisite, we used 32B knowledge from day one in this class, which made it difficult for me to follow along as I would learn the math in we used a week or two in 32B after needing it for physics. Furthermore, some days Jamie would spend the first hour of class explaining math that went over my head, but this math was never in the textbook, homeworks, or tests, so my inability to pay attention never hurt me.

The weekly (sometimes we are given more than week) homework for this class is always 7 problems, 1-2 written by Jamie and the rest from the textbook. Jamie's questions are usually a lot more difficult than the textbook ones, and would be a lot more mathematically involved. The textbook's solutions are easily available, and I honestly needed to use the solutions to even start the majority of the questions because I had seriously no idea how to; however, I think it was looking over the homework solutions and familiarizing myself with using its methods that helped me the most on the exams. In terms of the exams, they actually aren't as bad as I thought they would be. Doing Jamie's released practice problems (ahem I mean reading over the texbook's solutions for them) is one of the best ways to study IMO.

Overall, this class wasn't too much work. You can scramble together homework solutions in an hour or two and spend the rest of the time trying to get your seven remaining brain cells to actually understand what it is you learned in today's lecture. Even though I still don't really understand magnetism, figuring something out in this class is super rewarding. If you need to take this class, then take it. You might dread it but you'll be fine.

This guy knows his stuff. His passion for physics is obvious for anyone who goes to his lectures. He is very, very intelligent as well, which may make it a bit intimidating for someone to ask a question on the basic concepts such as Gauss's Law or the right-hand rule. His lectures often piqued my curiosity and they honestly seemed to breeze by most times. I wish I could sit in 4-5 hour lectures of him.

HOWEVER, and this is huge, this course assumes a mastery of math through 32B when you enter the class, and professor Roszensweig very often loses students in his derivations. You should also have a baseline understanding of E&M before you take this class, as it's pretty much implicitly assumed. I felt like a was fighting an uphill battle the entire time because I was not either mathematically prepared or prepared on the physics side. This course was the first exposure I've ever had to E&M outside of a three-week glaze in my 10th-grade high school physics class (so pretty much 0 experience).

Another thing: really emphasize problem-solving, even when the problems seem p=edagogical. My intent throughout the entire time was to convince myself that E&M is worth studying for its elegance, but I missed out on many opportunities to learn cold problem-solving skills. That is ultimately what lead me to be unprepared for a class of this level of rigor. I couldn't seem to make most of the homework problems make sense to me. I became insecure and thought of myself as an impostor. This was because when getting down to doing the math, I had a difficult time actually making physical arguments: I got lost in the math when I had to chiefly focus on homework problems. The solutions often seemed to come out of outer space. I did improve on this front a little bit, but not enough to have done well in this course (I'm not sure how my grades are going to be curved). I would really like to retake this course but have more necessary attributes to succeed. On tests, I tended to rely super heavily on wrote memorization, which helped me get through test anxiety in the past but wasn't effective for the midterms.

I suggest using Desmos and even Python for some problems in this class. To understand what is physically occurring in a problem, say it's about how relativity affects moving charges, you'll want to have some physical context that you can actually look at. Reading through Purcell and Morin was helpful to some extent, but was not enough for the concepts to sink in.

Some advice for the homework: this is not your ordinary "pen and paper" work where you cut yourself off from resources. Explore the problem/concept, discuss with peers, and if you need to, put in numerical values to help you understand limitations in physics. You really need to understand the dx/ds/da terms in an integral. try asking yourself why the topic you are learning are contained within the same course. Then bust out your best attempt at the problem with reasoning. You might get stuck or be wrong. Interact with your TA (Dima Vaido was pretty good) and classmates (who are very intelligent and diligent). Try to avoid putting off work until the last day.

Ultimately, this class is very challenging for a novice, and one can easily question their own abilities and/or why they would be crazy enough to take this class. Yes it's hard, but if you really engage with the material and find ways to enjoy and enhance your learning, I believe this course is manageable. Unless you are already very well acquainted with E&M, I would suggest that you avoid taking this class with other demanding courses. This class easily ate up 3 to 4 hours a day outside of lecture. If you are in 4 classes that also have steep learning curves, you'll overwhelm yourself or not get as much out of a class as you could have.