bruinwalk keeps failing me. tung was HORRIBLE this quarter. i would not recommend this class one bit.

Either something big changed after the pandemic or the old reviews are bait. Granted, this class is packed with material and is part of the notorious 1 series. He tries to cover most of it, and goes a lot in depth behind the derivations of formulas/principles you'll use. However, he often rushes material in the last few minutes of lecture. The discussion worksheets have little relevancy to the material covered in the most recent lectures. (The TAs don't even know what has and has not been covered during disc. sections). The exams are nothing like what Kudu problems are, despite him encouraging students to study off those questions. I wish there were more practice questions he would cover in class instead of the theory.

Tung changed the exams from kudu to paper and pencil right before a few days of the first midterm. I did all the kudu homework problems, however, like the others have said, the kudu homework questions are not good preparation for the exams at all. I took Physics 1B with Corbin and got a better grade in that class than in this one. Even though I felt comfortable with the material covered in class and the lectures were fun, the exams were downright horrible. It does not help that they account for 80% of the grade (20% for each midterm and 40% for final). Avoid this class if you care about your GPA.

TLDR: if you want a really high-quality, interesting physics class, and a professor who truly cares, but you don’t mind getting a lower grade, take this class.

I got As and A-‘s in the other physics 1 series classes, so I was pretty surprised to receive this grade. In general, Nathan Tung is very kind and cares deeply about student learning. His lectures are beyond entertaining, and I don’t even like physics that much. However, I felt this class was not very forgiving. None of the midterms were dropped, the TAs were not helpful at all, and the questions on the exams felt sort of unpredictable. However, there was a chance to get 3% extra credit which was nice. Furthermore, I cannot emphasize what a wonderful lecturer and kind professor Tung was. Overall, I enjoyed this class the most out of all my physics classes, despite getting the worst grade in it. (He did tell us in the beginning that he would try to keep the class average gpa pretty low as the physics department was requiring it, which kind of sucks.)

this class was so hard. For summer it was an online 6 week class, with homework assignments and weekly kudu quizzes and an online final at the end (because of the hurricane quizzes 2 and 3, and 4 and 5 ended up being combined). Lectures were streamed on YouTube live and Tung is more focused on derivations than showing how to solve problems (although to be fair this has been my experience with all the UCLA physics profs I've had). The kudu quizzes were so hard not necessarily because the questions themselves were super hard but because they were a time crunch (I suspect to prevent people from cheating), so if you made a mistake in one of the questions you would not have a lot of time to go back and redo it. The final was also difficult and nothing like the kudu homework assignments or quiz questions. Class got up curved pretty heavily at the end, and Tung still had his policy of 65% required homework and anything extra is extra credit though so I can't complain too much. if you like physics you should be fine

I enjoyed Tung's lectures. Material is definitely difficult, but if you are attentive in lecture and keep up with all of the practice problems it isn't too bad.

For Summer, it was all online and Tung streamed his lectures on YouTube, which I liked. For me personally, the material of this course was pretty interesting, probably because I'm EE. But it was also because his lectures were clear and his teaching style was very engaging for me. We had weekly Quizzes which were generally easy, if you watched the lectures and did practice/HW problems. Most of the HW was easy. The final exam was fair as well. It was like watching a streamer everyday, he has an intro video and everything.

Tung definitely is an engaging professor- he does a lot of cool demos in class, which I really enjoyed. He is also helpful- he answers questions during the 5 minute break/the end of class and is more than willing to help during his virtual office hours. Overall, I liked him, but the class is VERY content dense and moves extremely fast. Knowing what to focus on when studying for tests is a challenge, so staying on top of the kudu readings is key. He also offers ~3% extra credit for answering online questions in class and for doing more than the required amount of hw.

TLDR: Don't take the class, waste of time take a class with a bad prof and teach yourself since you will have to teach yourself in this class too

just don't that's my opinion. I came from horrible physics professors ie Freiman etc and yet he managed to be worse. He thinks he is a god at lecturing and because of that he justifies giving exams which are actually hell. For example the final and second midterm weren't evenly spaced out on the material at all. Like bro? For a cumulative final I expect the content to be spread out.

He is a mid lecturer at best. He goes way too much time going into derivations of formulas and teaches us barely any skills on learning how to solve a single physics problem. Don't worry though you can derive a formula though!! His discussion worksheets were irrelevant to the course where the TA's would be like "yea idk why he gave you this"

Don't even get me started on Kudu. This man straight up goes "my lectures accompany Kudu and Kudu accompanies my lectures" so now I have to read a terrible textbook ifykyk and deal with his derivation heavy lectures. At least with bad lecturers, you can teach yourself from the book. But nope not with this class!

The practice problems from Kudu and the discussion worksheets are nothing like the exams. But don't worry he won't give you a practice test because "Kudu is practice enough"

This man is the definition of ego issues too. He should not be a prof

Dr. Tung is a passionate lecturer and cares about learning, but this is a challenging and content-heavy course. Homework is not very time-consuming, but understanding the concepts beyond that can be. Something that helped me was attending his office hours. They were hosted over Zoom at a convenient time. The few times I attended, there were little to no people in attendance. He was very attentive to my questions and provided explanations from different angles than in lecture.

He also hosted a lengthy final review stream, which was so considerate! He gave a few hints about the final material, but ultimately the final was far beyond my abilities. It almost seemed a little unfair as the last unit was not tested evenly. Nonetheless, I believe he curved the final. To succeed on the tests, really understand the discussion questions and his "Nathan's Notes" pdf, not the homework! He often glosses over problems in lecture, so discussion questions are really the only place you'll see problems that he "likes." He often writes the discussion questions and relates them to what he wants you to know.

In terms of exam difficulty, I do believe Dr. Tung was just doing his best to satisfy the physics department policy (class mean must be around B-). However, he also tried to reward proof of understanding. He would even give points if we wrote out our thoughts in English, and mostly full credit if we just erred in computation. Also, 2-3% extra credit was available (which theoretically could bring the class mean to B).