Professor Tung is a great lecturer, his exams are easy if you understand his lectures. This class has 4 exams which are conceptual. Before each exams, he holds a review session where he solves problems which are similar to the problems you see on the exams. So definitely attend the review sessions.
Overall this class is easy A.
4 Midterms each worths 15%
Mastering Physics 20%
Discussion 5%
Lab 15%
Attendance: extra credit

Dr. Tung is a really funny guy. He really tries to make lectures fun and engaging with fun demos and random jokes. His exams were a little annoying for me because they were all theoretical with no numbers but I got used to them after a while. They aren't super challenging but he has no practice problems that are like his exam questions. He uses slides but they aren't really helpful so you have to go to lecture to get the actual notes. He gave a LOT of extra credit this quarter, I don't know if he does that for every quarter but attending class was extra credit and doing all of the launchpad problems were extra credit. Two midterms and a final. Labs were graded on completion this quarter which was great because they were hard to do at home vs in person. Overall, I can't say I loved the class but it definitely wasn't as bad as the other reviews made me believe before taking the class.

This class was absolutely awful. I know physics is not my subject and knew going into the class that it was going to be hard, but taking Tung, I felt absolutely stranded. He assigns homework assignments which have absolutely NOTHING to do with the exam. He provides no practice exams and will spend one class lecture working on one problem - and it doesn't even help with the exam problems. The discussions and TA's were the only help I got, and it still didn't help with exams. Sometimes it felt like parts of the exam problems were things we never even learned or practiced in lecture or discussion. Please take a different professor if you can. He also says he provides extra credit but I'm skeptical of it.

How does one describe the disaster of a class 5A with Tung was?

To preface, I am a fairly hard worker and typically believe that I or anyone can do well if you try hard enough. With this class, it got to the point where I genuinely believed I was inherently bad at physics and wanted to drop so badly.

I have never taken physics before + I took this class with Chem 14D (wouldn’t recommend), so take this advice with a grain of salt.

Tung was gone weeks 4-9, with minimal communication other than past recorded 1A lectures from this summer (that were useless). However, his in person lectures also tend to be fairly useless and were very conceptual and did not really help me.

Here’s my advice as someone who cried over this class every day (my parents are Tung’s number 1 haters after me):

• Don’t waste your time reviewing or really doing a ton of kudu (other than the conceptual questions), they didn’t ever show up
• Use Chad’s prep to supplement Tung’s lectures as he goes over many different types of problems that help prepare you for the exams far more than Tung’s conceptual lectures
• Spend a lot of time doing problems before each exam
• TAs carried me through this class (live laugh love Jinyan and James). Go to discussion and watch the review sessions as they will basically tell you what’s on the exam and prepare you accordingly. Also, they are super helpful during exams, so take advantage of that and ask follow up questions (they will answer!)
• Chat GPT is very good at solving problems, so use it if you need to learn the process
• Tung says there’s some sort of cosine curve, but many people in my class said otherwise. My grade never changed, so I’m not sure, but I do believe them

Tung was also EXTREMELY unresponsive and super unhelpful. I had to potentially get surgery over winter break, so I emailed him week 4 regarding taking the final with the other lecture and he ghosted me until week 9, which was after my flight was booked. I was extremely upset and had to confront him after class week 10 to finally settle everything.

I will say, Tung is a nice guy and he is decently engaging during lecture, but I always felt like he spent more time on gimmicks and tricks than actually teaching us content in the way he tested us.

I would never take this class again or any with Tung, but if you have the misfortune of having him, you can do this!

TLDR: Hated this class, almost dropped, use TAs and discussions/reviews, self taught through chat gpt and Chad’s prep, got an A after flunking midterm 1, so you will be ok (midterms don’t really matter, just clutch on the final)

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.