An amazing lecture and entertainer, Tung's lectures were never boring to attend (it was like watching a cinematic movie). Gives a lot of extra credit (although it didn't really help me) just by doing more than 75% of the hmw and supplemental math. He does curve the class, but unfortunately grades are inflated due to the cheaters. Kudu as a hmw platform sucks a$$, make sure you save all your hmw answers before closing the tab. I thought exams were very difficult, but still fair. I recommend drilling all discussion problems until memorized and understanding lecture definitions. Unfortunately, I would have given him a higher score, if not for our quarter's unfortunate dilemma of him taking an extended medical leave for 6 weeks (basically absent for both midterms and final). I felt bad for how much hate he got, but in all honesty the TAs really carried us this quarter via OH/discussions. It was slightly unfair how much self learning we as the F'25 quarter had to do... keep that in mind. Best of luck :)

Tung was out for a majority of this quarter due to a family emergency. He often didn't respond to emails from students nor his TAs, and when he would send out his pre-recorded lecture videos, it would end up being the wrong link, or they would be sent out very late. He provides no practice exams in this course, just an equation sheet, but for my lecture section, he sent out our equation sheet less than 24 hours before our final was scheduled.
Despite all of this, the materials he did provide were extremely similar to the questions featured on his exams. As long as you attend the discussion sessions and make sure you really practice the examples he does in his lectures, I think you can definitely end this course with a decent grade. Make sure you utilize the TAs as much as you can, and attend their review sections even if you feel confident in your physics abilities, since much of what they go over is featured on the exams Tung gives out. If you do well with asynchronous courses, I don't think you need to worry that much about this course with Tung. I personally had no prior experience in any physics courses prior to taking him this quarter, stupidly skipped all of my discussions/review sessions, and procrastinated on all of the content he distributed throughout the quarter, but with that being said, I think that this class is very manageable to at least pass, and if you avoid doing what I did, you could very likely end this course with an A.
Here are some of the things I wish I had known prior to taking this course that might help anyone taking this course with Tung in the future:
- The Kudu homework he assigns is mostly busy work, I would recommend spending the least amount of your studying it, other than understanding the conceptual questions they have, since many of those end up as MCQ on his exams. It's graded on correctness but you have unlimited attempts on each question.
- Make sure you really pay attention to the examples he does in lecture, since they often end up being very similar if not the same to the FRQ questions he has on his exams
- If you're able, find people who have access to his past exams, since he sometimes reuses the questions on his exams and they also are just relatively helpful for extra practice
- Do his extra credit assignments, if you're doing kinda bad in the class, they'll help you to a pretty good extent, but if you're doing really well then these assignments aren't very impactful on your grade
- Form study groups with other students very early in the quarter, especially if you're worried about doing well in this course. I didn't start studying with other people until the day before my final, and really regret not studying with others sooner
Overall, Tung was meh but this course really isn't as horrible as other people have made it out to be this quarter. Just make sure you study and you're set, if he goes M.I.A. in the future, just pay extra attention to his online lectures and really prioritize asking your TAs for help.

Without a doubt the WORST professor I've had in my three years of undergraduate studies. Ignore the Covid reviews saying he's good as it's pretty obvious why those students would make those claims. Instead, read the most recent reviews from F25 to get a clearer image of what you might be walking into. For starters, Tung simply cannot teach. His lectures are full of AI generated videos and he tries to make the class "fun" via demonstrations that ultimately waste time and serve only to fill the gaps in his nonexistent instruction. His entire method of "teaching" is just deriving formulas for 75 minutes straight, and not showing any appropriate examples nor exam pertinent guidance whatsoever. Another note — Tung disappeared after week 3 due to a surgery his wife was undergoing, which is completely understandable and something none of us had a problem with. The issues arose when he didn't return for SEVEN whole weeks until week 10. During those 7 weeks, all he did was send old lecture recordings from years ago — some of which even being from 1A, which was not the section we were in, and led to a lot of confusion among peers. He was completely unresponsive to both the students as well as the TAs (props to the two TAs this semester, as the class would've been near impossible without their help). On the off chance Tung did send emails, they were quite literally AI generated, with the ChatGPT prompt appearing in the announcement itself. Speaking of AI, the Kudu website he used for homework was a disaster. The assignments were filled with AI generated questions and often times failed to save answers, grade answers correctly, or just didn't function at all. Many times I checked my assignments on the due date after completing them DAYS earlier, only to find that half of the assignment unsaved itself and lost my progress. He wasn't present for any of the midterms nor final, didn't hold any synchronous class sessions during his time away, and for the two lectures he did return for during week 10, he spent the first 20 minutes reading a script about how "we persevered" and "made it to the end despite difficulties" followed by 55 minutes of a pointless demonstration that had no relevance to the final exam. We were left to self-teach some of the hardest material in 5A to prepare for the final, without any study guides, practice questions, or any sort of material. Also, forget about understanding ANYTHING in your lab section, as his class is so awfully behind you end up self-teaching laboratory material to yourself as well, and praying that your lab mates with more competent professors know what they're doing. Coming into an introductory physics course already nervous, Tung has done nothing but ruin my perception of physics and made me intimidated for 5B and 5C. I'm not one to back down from challenging courses, but this class takes incompetence and unprofessionalism to another level. Whatever you do, do NOT take this professor. Fair warning — you'll regret it.

The homework kudu’s are not very helpful, especially for the second half of the quarter as Professor Tung wasn’t there to clarify any concepts due to a family situation. During the few weeks we had in person, the lectures were engaging however they were highly conceptual. The entirety of his teaching is derivations and maybe solving one problem in lecture. I would say I did well in the class due to the TA worksheets and also studying past exams. However, if I did not have those resources, I would have suffered. Professor Tung seems like a nice person but his true face showed when he barely made any effort to reach out to students during the weeks we were “online.” I used quotations because you are basically teaching yourself everything. He never addressed midterm grades, he didn’t grade the midterms, and he didn’t even show up for the final. Bless our TAs who fully have their own education and lives to worry about but still helped us as much as they could. If it wasn’t for their review sessions and worksheets this class would have been a no go. As some have said below, he does tricks at the end of class but it seems like more of a facade to cover up his lack of teaching skills. He had us teach Torque (a difficult unit btw) completely to ourselves) and used maybe the last few lectures to teach us the most difficult things in this series. I mean he was going so slow at the beginning spending weeks on displacement and distance, etc, and we had to play catchup. Finals weeks was already so stressful for me as I have a full stem workload this quarter, and his unprofessionalism and absence did not make it any easier. I remember the first week of class he talked about how chat gpt could do this whole class for us but then we wouldn’t be learning anything. But he actually used chat gpt to draft his emails. I’m pretty sure that’s worse but ok. He’s passionate about physics but doesn’t care for his students. I understand he had a personal matter to attend to but this is his job and hundreds of us are taking the first class of physics already anxious about the class. He never addressed any of it either and just gave us some bs speech during the last week about how resilient we were and how we made it. I mean the TAs were doing his job for him at that point by proctoring all the exams and doing the grading. Take another professor if you can.

Homework: Assignments on kudu that were not helpful, only did them merely for points but they had basically no relevance to what we saw on exams. I do appreciate the unlimited attempts though.
Labs: If you have Professor Tung, you will be at least two weeks behind on the content that is gone over during lab sections. You will probably be lost during lab section and have to rely on your other lab mates who are in the lectures of the other professor to even know what is going on. Labs were pointless because we used concepts that had not yet been covered by Professor Tung and used different formulas than what was provided on tests.
Midterms: Midterms were okay. Nothing crazy surprising HOWEVER Professor Tung does not provide ANY review materials so it is up to the student to find past exams to get a slight sense of the type of questions that will be asked. The multiple choice were each 4 points each, so you miss a couple and your grade is already suffering. Midterms were usually around 7 MCQ and 3 FRQ. Good partial credit.
Final: ALL SYMBOLIC. There were no surprising concepts and finished before 3 hours, but without the review sessions by the TAs, the final exam would have been extremely difficult. The TAs were shocked at the level of difficulty of the final given Professor Tung's absence which says a lot.
Overall: Professor Tung is a very sweet and likeable person. However, he is not the best professor and you will have to rely on your TA and outside sources to ultimately learn the material. Be prepared to spend a lot of time outside of class teaching yourself because lectures are a waste of time. Professor Tung is very passionate about Physics but if you want to genuinely learn maybe consider a different professor.

Do. Not. Take. At the beginning of the quarter, Dr. Tung seemed like a dedicated teacher who would have to deal with some personal issues that involved us going online. Totally fine, right? WRONG. Unlike a typical online class, we did not receive Zoom lectures at the regularly scheduled times, rather we were sent the recorded lecture videos from A SESH 2024. FOR PHYSICS 1A!! That was also only when the video links worked of course.
Our poor TA’s (only two for the entire class) had to deal with so many confused students.
I am not upset about having personal issues, that is understandable. What is inexcusable, however, is leaving hundreds of students without a teacher or proper materials when you KNEW you were going to be unable to teach. This lack of preparation is so unprofessional and honestly just rude. Not only that, but we were held at the same standards for turning in work and going to in-person midterms.
We also weren’t even given the courtesy of hand-written emails. No, instead we got ChatGPT regurgitated slop each week, which was incredibly unhelpful and error-ridden.
If you’re looking for a teacher who does absolutely nothing when circumstances are slightly different, Dr. Tung is your guy!
I cannot believe I paid to not have a professor, to learn the hardest concepts of the entire quarter the week before the final, and to teach myself the entirety of the course.
The lack of preparation, professionalism, and flexibility from Dr. Tung was shocking and hurt hundreds of students.

I do not recommend this professor putting aside the fact that he wasn't present basically the whole quarter and gave us lecture to watch from 1A the lectures didn't compare to the tests. I felt like the lecture were so unhelpful and unrelated to the exams and exam formats. There were no practice exams which was the worst part of it all. The TA's held review sessions which were probably the only helpful material we had available as well as the discussion sheets. The KUDU homework wasn't helpful either. I wish we had more resources to succeed in this course because I was so lost during the whole thing. I had to teach myself everything regardless of always taking notes and not missing a lecture. To me the exams were difficult and unpredictable I do not recommend taking this proffesor. The TA's also feel the final as difficult for us and taking it I was so confused as the m Ian concepts were just brushed upon.

This was easily one of the worst classes I have taken at UCLA. Professor Tung started off well and after reading some reviews I was excited for his class because people made it seem as though he made physics more digestible. This could not be further from the truth. Not only did he teach us nothing related to what we would be tested on, he also gave us no practice material so there was no way to even teach yourself the concepts. A lot of the other reviews for Fall of 2025 are much lengthier and I recommend people look at those to see just how bad this class was, but please just DO NOT TAKE IT.

The few lectures that Tung gave this quarter were very engaging, and I could tell that he has a genuine passion for physics. However, considering the range of material we learn in 5A, I don't think the class was appropriately paced. He spent the first 3 weeks of the quarter explaining displacement, and crammed some of the most important topics (that extend to 5B/5C) in the last 2 weeks of the course. Furthermore, the videos that he sent to us were past lectures for Phys 1A, so it was unclear what we should be studying for the final. Homework and extra-credit supplementary math assignments are assigned through Kudu, which I found to be an unhelpful AI-heavy resource. Focusing more on the discussion worksheets and review sessions from our TAs was much more helpful for exams than any of the material Tung provided.

While I understand that Tung was going through a tough time, his lack of communication throughout this quarter, not just with students but with his TAs, was unacceptable. It's genuinely distressing to think about how much stress this guy probably put on Jinyang and James, who basically ran his class for him despite having their own PhDs to worry about.

Overall, I'm disappointed that I paid UC tuition for this class. Stay away from Tung if you aren't interested in taking a class that's almost entirely AI generated. If you have to take him, you might be lucky if your TAs are as gracious as ours were this quarter.

Ooooooooooooommggg there are no words to explain the stress and frustration I felt in this class. Genuinely. I have never felt so disrespected by a professor in my life. I understand that he had a personal situation and I hope all is well with his family but I don't think it's fair that he left us to rot. This dude spent the first 3 weeks explaining displacement and then left us until finals. Take this class if you're cool with disregarding every single piece of information he puts out and completely learning everything yourself. Not to mention that every email he sent was AI generated and WRONG. We are lucky that we had TAs as great as we did who really wanted us to succeed and tried their absolute best. His homework is shit and does not help during exams in the slightest. I recommend pulling a Tung and just Chatgpting that because it is not worth your time. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he does really seem to love physics.