You can tell professor Lancaster is very interested in helping students. He is very helpful in office hours and emails. I found his lectures to be quite repetitive after a certain point. Even at 2x speed, I would skip parts of his explanations because it would just be him reading a bulletpoint or explaining all the variables in an equation. Thankfully, lectures were posted online early.
Homework was a bit difficult to do. Although there is a week to solve it, I remember having to watch all the lectures for the specific week until I got to a problem I was stuck on. The flexibility of the homework makes it so that it often didn't reflect the lecture material. But honestly none of it matters because homework was such as small percentage of the grade and his tests were very reasonable. Both the material and the time limit were very fair (although the final was cut short because of the physics department)

DISCLAIMER: Took this class Spring 2020 during the COVID Quarter

This was probably the easiest class I've taken at UCLA and Prof Lancaster cares a lot about the well being of his students. The midterms were both 24 hrs and only 3 questions long. The average on both was ~97%. The final was only 2 hrs long but not many people took it because the final became optional due to the social unrest in the country at the time.

Lectures were all prerecorded and Prof Lancaster used slides from the Pearson website. You might need to skip some parts though as he is always defining the same variables over and over again. But he is just trying to make sure we understand it after all. The concepts itself weren't too difficult to grasp.

The homework, on the other hand, was ridiculously hard and sometimes did not reflect what was learned in lecture. I had to look up a lot of stuff online to be able to do the homework.

Labs were much easier this quarter with online classes. The pre-labs consisted of us just sending a picture in of the household materials required for the lab and post-labs were just 8 different questions. Labs are due two days after your lab section ends, but I used to finish it about 1-2 hours after lab ended because it was just much easier than in-person labs.

Either way I highly recommend this class with Professor Lancaster and go to his office hours!

Don't pay attention to the grade distribution or good reviews for Spring 2020. This professor does the absolute minimum to interact with his students. He posts prerecorded lecture videos from last spring that simply reads off the slides in the most dull manner. His office hours had to change in the middle of the quarter, so if you had shifted your schedule around his initial office hours then too bad if they conflict now. He would constantly make mistakes during his office hours. You only get 35 minutes plus 15 minutes submission time to take a midterm. And rather than getting the full three hours for a final, he only gave us 2 hours.

Midterm 1 - 25%
Midterm 2 - 25%
Final Exam - 25%
Discussion - 5%
Homework - 5%
Lab - 15%

So 75% of your grade is decided by a little over 3 hours of test time. If you make a simple mistake due to lack of time, you're going to drop a whole letter grade even though he makes many mistakes during office hours. Last quarter for 5A, he used to go over practice tests that were similar to midterms. THAT WAS THE ONLY POSITIVE OF THE CLASS. He said he would keep the same format for this quarter and LIED because he did not go over practice tests. Even worse, he told us to study irrelevant material for midterm 2. 5A concepts and other things we weren't told to study showed up on the test. The only reason people got a decent score for Midterm 2 was because the TAs were very lenient and generous with the grading and gave a lot of partial credit. If you didn't BS some answers on it, you were out of luck. For the final, he gave us the helpful advice of study everything. He did not listen student concerns and was very dismissive of them. He did not curve for our class. But don't worry, he gave us a measly .3 % extra credit that won't do much. Save yourself the headache, you will receive neither engaging lectures nor an easy A with Lancaster.

IF you have the option to change professors! Do so do not rely on the curve for this class. He was the only professor to give a closed note and no equation sheet. The class was told to be likely to be curved which he did not end up doing. This was unfair as many people dropped the class raising the average in this class. Other people I know taking other professors had a great experience with this class, it was clear, felt well prepared for exams and the professor would show practice problems similar to the exam. In this class, I had to watch hours on youtube to understand the concepts as they were brushed off in lectures. It is much harder to get an A in this class than in other classes. The test exam questions are also less straightforward. I stayed in this class hoping for a curve to average out my scores but he ended up not curving the course.

RUNNN ... He literally sent me to therapy .. This class will mess you up. He makes you memorize every equation/ constant for the exams. He deducts points for every time you get a mastering question wrong. He said a curve could be applied, hence giving me hope that I could pass the class, but in the end, no curve was applied. For extra credit, you have to post a lot on campuswire for 0.3% max boost. Its not worth it.

This class was often frustrating, but I don't agree with a lot of the other reviews on here that this is a bad class. The prof really didn't give out any accommodations due to the pandemic (such as a 24-hour final or no harm tests) but the exams were honestly pretty easy. He gives a "practice exam" the week before every exam and it's basically just a rough draft or variation of the actual exam. I got a 100% on both midterms which as a 3rd year stem major has NEVER happened to me before in any classes. The class average was a B+/A-.

However, Lancaster is frustrating, boring, and a confusing prof, but as long as you find a good TA's OH's and know how to use the internet you should be fine. His lectures are all prerecorded from the summer and he has the most monotone voice EVER, like zero inflections. I sped up his lectures 2X but still found it too slow (which depending on how you look at it makes lectures really short). The discussion are also "pre-recorder"/nonexistent depending on the TA, so if you can't make OH's you basically don't have any human interaction.

All in all, I will probably forget about this class, but I walked away with an A. If you are looking for a structured, compassionate, and engaging prof don't take this class. If you are okay with a hot mess but relatively easy class Lancaster is your guy. Just try not to scream if you lose 7% on an exam for forgetting a sign.

Side note: if you have a loud or distracting work/home environment I might take a 5A with another prof that gives take-home/24-hour finals because for Lancaster's exams time is definitely not your friend.

First midterm was too easy, second midterm was too hard, and the final was what was expected. Since he is a first time professor, he had trouble gauging how hard to make the test questions, and he didn't seem to take into account the amount of time we had (50 minutes for 3 problems with multiple parts). I was quite nervous after the second midterm since I didn't do well on that, and our tests were worth 20% of our grade. I ended up doing well on the final though (and so did the majority of the class, the median was ~90%). The best part of this course was my discussion TA, Collin Roberts. He went above and beyond, and I learned a lot more from him than Lancaster. He had extra office hours before exams, and even came up with more practice questions for us. Try to get him as your TA, he's the only reason I got an A in this course. As far as lectures, I stopped going to them after the second midterm cause I decided they weren't very helpful. Lancaster goes over a bunch of random stuff that doesn't show up on the test, such as things like burning calories. I started studying for each of the exams about 2 days before them. I would spend a day reading through all the slides, and then spend a day doing all the discussion problems and some mastering physics homework problems. I guess for the amount of work I put into this course, I can't complain. The lab for this course was more tedious and annoying than anything else, but all 5A students have to take it. The mastering physics problems were challenging, especially since I like to complete homework early but sometimes Lancaster doesn't cover the material until Friday lecture. I would say don' t rely too much on these Fall '19 reviews, since Lancaster would probably change a lot, given that we were sort of his guinea pigs.

I know a lot of these other reviews make this class seem like the worst but honestly overall it was not that bad. Sure the professor implemented a new way giving exams this quarter but after taking the first midterm it wasn't as scary as it seemed. The professor gives practice exams before the midterms and final that are very similar to the actual exam, so if you knew how to do the practice you would more than likely be fine on the actual exam as long as you made sure to be mindful of the time. All lectures are prerecorded, which consist of the professor reading off slides but I would just watch them at 2x speed. The discussions worksheet were often difficult but as long as you tried to solve it you would most likely get full points, also professor Lancaster always went over how to do the discussion worksheets during office hours. We also had homework assignments every week on mastering physics which were about 25 or so questions. I usually tried to spread out the homework throughout the week and I never felt like it was too much work. For the labs they were pretty annoying to be honest but I think most TA's are lenient graders, I got full points on all of them, but they aren't extremely difficult either and I found using the lab campus wire to be helpful whenever I didn't understand something. One major complaint I do have is that the professor could be a bit disorganized, often with the practice midterms and practice final he would find mistakes or didn't make the question clear enough to solve so he would modify the question during office hours which could be annoying if you could not make it that day. I wish he would go through the problem and work out any errors before releasing it to us, luckily the actual midterms and final were way clearer than his practice exams. I never took physics in high school and I didn't think this class was as unreasonable as others have stated, so if you do end up taking this class I wouldn't be too worried. I'm not saying I loved this class but it was definitely doable.

Dr. Lancaster was a good professor and a good introduction to physics courses at UCLA. While his lectures were just taken from the textbook company and he went into extraneous topics that never appeared in exams, he was pretty easy to follow when lecturing. His tests were one of the best parts of the class, though - they rarely had conceptual questions like other physics classes and were very similar to the homework problems from Mastering Physics (your online HW). As a result, averages were high (two of the three tests had B averages), so don't expect that from this class again. The workload is definitely doable provided you pay attention during your labs and complete the online homework on time. I recommend taking this class with Dr. Lancaster if he teaches it again.

All this Lancaster slander is excessive. His exams have all been almost identical to the practice exams he gave us prior and went over multiple times. It's true that it would be nice if professors would be more forgiving during these hard times but Lancaster is not remotely as bad as what people are insinuating. I suspect that for many this may be their first quarter at ucla and they may be unfamiliar with the new level of difficulty. I'm sorry that they felt stressed. However, that doesn't mean it's ok to flood his reviews and absolutely bash him when he dedicates so much of his time to the students. Just look at the grades! The averages are literally so high, most people are getting As and Bs. I haven't been doing very well in this class but even I know that it's my fault not Lancaster's. I have no idea why everyone's so mad.