It was an absolute honor to take Physics 1A with Dr. Tung! I was very scared about taking this class beforehand as I had never taken a Physics course in high school before, but his clear explanations and demonstrations really made physics intuitive for me. His midterms weren't a walk in the park, but they were very doable given the 24 hours he gave. Some tips: I strongly recommend going over class examples before the midterms and exams and making sure you understand every step. Also, the homework and worksheets he assigns are often much harder than his exams, so it's more useful to focus on Tung's lectures to study.

Tung is easily one of the best professors I've had in my time here. I didn't have that great an experience with physics in high school so I was unsure of what to expect in 5A, but Tung immediately dissolved any hesitations.

He makes lectures very engaging with super interesting demos and conveys the information in such a way that it's very easy to grasp. Like most physics classes should be, he gives you all the information you need to be able to solve any kind of problem, which does, admittedly, make his tests harder because he gives problems that you've never seen before and makes you work through them.

I'm not sure if the format of the class will stay the same in the regular school year (since I took it in Summer) but he has 4 midterms over the course of the 6 weeks each testing only the week's material (not cumulative). Your grade is also made up of homework problems through MasteringPhysics as well as lab (which was simultaneously fun and tedious). I would definitely take a class with Tung again!

I took the course over the summer, where homework and extra credit assignments were done on Kudu. The exams, also on Kudu, consisted of multiple-choice questions with some short-answer items. There was no partial credit for multiple-choice questions, and the entire course, including exams, was online without a camera requirement. None of the exam questions were available elsewhere online—I think he wrote them all himself.

Exams were held weekly, though he canceled one in week 5 and adjusted the grading scheme accordingly. Class averages never exceeded 75%, typically staying around the mid-60s, yet he didn’t curve the grades at all. While he seemed knowledgeable and, in fairness, putting in the effort could help improve your grade, it was frustrating that, despite low averages and the potential for a curve, he ultimately chose not to adjust grades.

He spends an entire lecture on one problem showing you how to derive problems using basic algebra often with no numbers at all. His lectures were not helpful besides for the MCQ portion of the exams. The TA (josh) posts discussion notes on bruinlearn every week which were REALLLLLYYY helpful. The hw system kudu does give practice problems but they often did not help on the exams.

You can tell that professor Tung cares about his students and cares about teaching. I feel like everything was covered well and the class felt fair. Demos were fun too. Only think I had an issue with is our final class grade was not transparent at all. Extra credit was determined by some weird formula, but we never did actually find out what we got on the final exam or from extra credit. Due to this, I did worse in the class than I anticipated. Overall would highly recommend though!

Tung is a good lecturer, but not necessarily a good professor. He didn't provide us with that many resources to be successful, and the assigned homework felt disconnected from the content that appeared on the exams. The first midterm was fine, but it went downhill after that. The second midterm had like a 15% average decrease. Tung does seem to truly love physics, and the demonstrations he does during class are very engaging. However, he tends to rush through important practice problems and the entirety of the last 2 units (which showed up as an FRQ on the final) were shoved into the last class period. Also he claims to give extra credit but it's based on this weird arbitrary scaling that he himself is in charge of deciding so I'm half convinced he didn't add any extra credit at all. My advice would be to really focus on problems he does during class and definitely pay attention in lecture, because small things he says may show up as multiple choice questions on the exam. Good luck!!

I had such high hopes coming into this class, but my expectations were certainly not met. If you are looking to actually learn physics, you may want to consider a different professor, but if an A is all your searching for; this class is for you. It is clear to me that Tung is passionate about teaching, but not so much about physics (or at least 1A). Tung tried his best to make his lectures engaging and fun, but he often went on tangents about completely irrelevant topics (like atomic bombs, "artificial gravity," and neutron stars) for a large portion of lecture and then proceeded to rush through the derivations and lessons that we actually needed to know. The slides - which he is essentially reading off of - also sometimes had mistakes.

The discussion section and assigned homework were also extremely unhelpful. My TA was amazing, and obviously very knowledgable in 1A, but she had no guidance from the professor and the example problems she gave us looked nothing like the exam problems. KUDU is also terrible, so many mistakes in the questions and textbook and also nothing like the exams, I wasted so much time trying to understand the problems, just for them to not be relevant whatsoever. I even tried to ask for help on some of the KUDU problems and neither Tung or my TA were able to explain the answer, just because the KUDU problems were blatantly wrong.

One good thing about this class is that the exams are pretty fair. There was never a time crunch and Tung even added some repeated MCQ from previous midterms onto the final. I took AP Physics C in high school and I would say this course was certainly not as in-depth or involved as the AP version, but the tradeoff is that if you don't have AP Physics C experience, you may not be learning everything you need to know for future classes with Tung.

I was honestly disappointed after reading reviews and then taking this class, as I had high hopes. We went very slow in the first few lectures which honestly made simple topics more confusing, and then caused us to rush through the harder topics at the end. Additionally, the professor often took up class time going on tangents about topics not related to exams. Kudo was really frustrating to work with for homework questions and often had mistakes, weirdly worded questions, questions that went way outside the scope of the class, and answers that were plainly wrong. I spent a lot of time focusing on Kudo questions that did not even help on exams- homework and discussion questions were not like exam questions at all. Exams were tricky, not horrible, but hard to prepare for because exam questions were unlike anything we practiced. I also went to an office hour in which the professor could not answer one of the Kudo questions and honestly just confused me more, and I was later able to solve this question very quickly so it seems he does not really know what he is assigning. My best advice would be to focus especially on what is taught in class and his class examples for exams.

At the beginning of the quarter I was happy. I continued to be happy when I found out that all the homework was due at the end of the quarter, to which you could check if you got them all right guaranteeing full points in that section. I continued to be happy taking my midterms to which I got As in both even though he did not give practice tests and said to rely on the homework to guide you to victory. All this happiness came crashing down the day I walked into the final. For some reason he thought it would be an amazing idea to build your hopes up, "Im actually doing alright in this class" I said with glee... When I tell you I have never seen half of that final material in my life- I am not joking in the slightest. Not in any notes, not in any homework, not in any discussion section, not even in the final review session. Only God knows what was going on in that mans head when he wrote it, my theory is that he was possessed because thats the only logical explanation.

Professor Tung is a really sweet and funny guy, which is why I feel bad to give him a bad review. However, his exams were very difficult, and they often recalled material that he glazed over in class. In addition, his practice problems in class were very long and complicated and used variables instead of actual numbers, making them not very applicable to learning how to actually solve equations. He gave us little to no review resources, so how well you study really just depends on what test banks you can get. He also said he'd give us extra credit but didn't give us any :(