Professor

Shenshen Wang

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2.1
Overall Ratings
Based on 13 Users
Easiness 3.8 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Workload 3.8 / 5 How light the workload is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Clarity 2.2 / 5 How clear the professor is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Helpfulness 2.1 / 5 How helpful the professor is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

Reviews (13)

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PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 27, 2020
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+

Here's my advice for this class: don't take this class. Prof Wang could NOT care less about her students and I learned nothing from her. She reads her lecture notes to us by scrolling through a pdf of her scanned notes from years ago, which is just a harder to read version of the textbook. If you care about your education at all, don't do it, I don't even know what else to say because this quarter had me speechless. I'll summarize:
-she's almost always late to class, record being 20 minutes or something
-class just cuts out sometimes because of her internet issues, and she will tell you she's going to upload a recording for you to watch, but she won't
-doesn't show up to her OH sometimes
-cancelled class two(?) times for unknown reasons even though we ended up being so behind that she dropped the whole unit of tensor analysis
-spent half a quarter on math 32 stuff which everyone already learned, rushed through Fourier/Laplace which is new, dropped everything else (tensors, PDEs, etc.)
Basically all you have to do in this class is skim the textbook before exams and do the HW since most of the quarter is review. I can't think of a single reason why you would take this class with her unless this is the last class you need to graduate and you just want an easy A.

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PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 31, 2020
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A

Self-study from the Boas text and you can get an A. Her lectures are utterly boring and she doesn't care for her students. In fact, I think she may actually hate her students. She still hasn't posted FALL 2020 grades yet (it is 12/30/2020 today), and she was extremely unaccommodating when it came to exams. The tests were in-class and extremely flat in terms of the quality of the questions. The test questions were for the most part from the homework and discussion sets.

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Jan. 1, 2021
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A-

As you have already seen from the reviews, students seem to strongly dislike Shenshen. Before I get into that, I will say, this class felt like a lower division math class. The class was mostly plug-and-chug and the HW problems were pretty simple/low-thought. I will also admit that Shenshen's notes were directly from the book, but I don't think that's as big of a problem as everyone seems to think it is. If she believes the book is the way to present the material, then that's her choice. If the book isn't challenging or engaging enough, that's the physics department's fault for choosing an inefficient textbook. I think Shenshen would follow whichever book is used, so if a different, more challenging book is used, her HW questions and notes would be more fit for that book. As for her "not caring" for her students, she was late multiple times to class. She also cancelled class a couple of times (although, I think she was very sick one day). I wouldn't have skipped tensors and PDEs like she did, however. She should've given pre-recorded lectures on those topics to not compromise our education. Other than that, I think Shenshen is one of the professors who really is struggling with online teaching. Her internet connection, lack of a medium (like a tablet) to write things down on, and inability to turn on her camera really affected her teaching. In my opinion, she's not rude or uncooperative (as she was always very polite with me), and I think she would've been a much better professor in person. With all that being said, however, I still feel as if my education was highly affected by taking this class. As a physics major who struggles with the math that comes with physics, I really hoped this class would strengthen my math enough for me to be more confident in physics. That was definitely NOT the case. I really wish all of this wasn't online. It hurt my education and hurt Prof. Shenshen's teaching abilities. I really liked the TAs though. Thank you, Ji and Paul!

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PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 18, 2020
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: B

While the content and ideas of this class are not as difficult to handle, Shenshen made this class almost unbearable. It was clearly apparent that she couldn't give less of a shit about us. She would constantly be late to class by 10 minutes every lecture, read off pre-written notes for her lecture, behaved somewhat hostile when asked questions, give us crucial information at the last minute, etc. She literally gave us our final grade on New Years Eve, over 2 weeks after our final exam. She rarely showed up to office hours and was quite rude to me when I asked for help on a question. She was not accommodating in the slightest for the midterm and final exams. I feel quite robbed of my education that I had such an unenthusiatic and uncaring professor this quarter. Honestly, just read the book and self study and you will be good for this class. She doesn't deserve an audience for the way she treats her students. At least TRY to care a bit more Shenshen smh lol

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PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 30, 2020
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+

I cannot emphasize how little Shenshen Wang cares about teching. She was the most horrible professor I have ever had, by a huge margin.

-She arrives 5-20 minutes late for lectures. She skipped it altogether a couple of times.
-She said she'd record the missed lectures and post them, but eventually, she didn't and chose to cut tensors out of the course instead. When interrogated, she said this was because she wanted to do lectures with the Zoom rooms so that people could ask questions.
-But when people asked questions, she'd just ignore them.
-She is singularly apathetic, and it took an uncomfortable amount of persuasion to get her to not schedule an in-lecture timed midterm on election day afternoon.
-She kept her camera off the whole time, which is unusual for a professor. It makes online classes even less appetizing; she doesn't ever even attempt to come off as a person. It's a small thing, but it seemed creepy and shady.
-Her notes were handwritten pdfs that she'd basically read off. They made very little sense, not unlike the garbage she'd say while trying to explain even the most basic concepts.
-The textbook, Mary Boas's Mathematical Methods, isn't bad, but it's certainly very little new information if you've done the prerequisite math courses.
-The few new stuff, like Fourier analysis, Laplace transforms, etc, were skimmed over, since she spent more than half the course on basic multivariable calc.
-She didn't publish grades by the given deadline, which is over two weeks after the end of the quarter, and my transcript just shows nothing for the course. This is unsurprising since she cannot show up for her lecture on time.
-She was generally hesitant to help during office hours; she skipped them occasionally.
-There was no feedback for homework or midterms.
-The second midterm was nothing like the homework at all.
-The homework is easy, uninteresting problems from the textbook. For the most part, there's no thinking; you just plug in a basic calculus formula and chug. It's uninspired, and obviously takes no effort or interest on Shenshen's part. They do not require a deep understanding of the concepts and they barely help.
-Midterm logistics were coordinated by the TAs, which just provides further evidence that she did not care about anything at all. But for people in other timezones, they were moderately accommodating: they said you can do the midterm anytime over the next 24 hours, timed with Gradescope.
-My entire class hates her so much, we have an agreement to leave scathing reviews on Bruinwalk since that's basically all we can do.

To summarise, this is an absolutely useless class when taken with Shenshen Wang. She is a despicable human with no sense of responsibility, and she should not be permitted to teach, least of all at a place like UCLA that boasts about being a "top" university all the time.
Overall: 1/5 (ideally 0). Easiness: 4/5. Workload: 3/5. Clarity: 1/5 (ideally 0). Helpfulness: 1/5 (it's a pity I can't use negative numbers).

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Dec. 21, 2019
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A-

She doesn't really give a shit about teaching and it shows. She walks in 5-10 minutes late to class almost everyday, her homework and exams are uninspired and are always taken from the book. The most I ever attended class was 30 minutes the first day of lecture where she was teaching how to take a cross product and I never attended again, you can teach entirely off of the book, you might as well have not had a professor for this class.

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4 4 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Dec. 31, 2020
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-

Just don't take this class if you can avoid it. Hell, even if you can't avoid it just don't take this class.
Wang obviously does not give a single fuck about this class or teaching in general. Consistently late, sometimes doesn't even show up to class or OH, lectures were just pictures she took of some handwritten notes that were basically just the textbook verbatim. We had to entirely skip tensors and PDEs (the two topics I was most excited about) because of how consistently late she was all the time and we literally went over only Math 32 stuff for the first 4 weeks. Not to mention the fact that there was no meaningful thought put into any of the homeworks or the tests. Most of the questions were legit just straight from the textbook with the exception of I think 1 or 2.
The only benefit to this class is that it's a relatively easy A. But, a GPA boost is 100% not worth how painful and abysmally taught this class is. Straight up cringe.

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PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
May 2, 2021
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-

DO NOT TAKE HER CLASS! PERIOD!!

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Jan. 19, 2020
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A+

The tests and homeworks are very easy. For lectures, she explained the concepts pretty clear, and also talks about the physical meanings behind them, though most of them are from the text book...Her lectures are not super engaging, but still teach you something. I would say you can probably do as well by just by reading the textbook. She didn't give rigorous proof to most the theorems, which I don't like very much, but I guess this is the way Maths are generally done in Physics.

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1 5 Please log in to provide feedback.
June 11, 2023
Quarter: Spring 2023
Grade: B+

I expected the absolute worst from her, seeing all the terrible reviews she received in the past. This was my first class with her so I have no idea how she was back then, but I believe she upped her teaching game over time. I didn't experience any of the issues I saw in those reviews and I think she taught the course fairly well. She's not the most engaging lecturer to be frank, but I think a part of that is due to the subject itself, which I personally didn't find super interesting.

As for the class itself: she followed the textbook very closely. The workload was manageable, with around 5 problems from the textbook assigned per week. Two midterms and a final. The midterm questions were similar to homework in terms of difficulty but I found the final rather challenging. The midterm you scored higher on was the one counted toward your final grade, which was nice.

Overall, really not as bad as previous reviews make her out to be. Her teaching was good and the difficulty was not bad at all.

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PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+
Dec. 27, 2020

Here's my advice for this class: don't take this class. Prof Wang could NOT care less about her students and I learned nothing from her. She reads her lecture notes to us by scrolling through a pdf of her scanned notes from years ago, which is just a harder to read version of the textbook. If you care about your education at all, don't do it, I don't even know what else to say because this quarter had me speechless. I'll summarize:
-she's almost always late to class, record being 20 minutes or something
-class just cuts out sometimes because of her internet issues, and she will tell you she's going to upload a recording for you to watch, but she won't
-doesn't show up to her OH sometimes
-cancelled class two(?) times for unknown reasons even though we ended up being so behind that she dropped the whole unit of tensor analysis
-spent half a quarter on math 32 stuff which everyone already learned, rushed through Fourier/Laplace which is new, dropped everything else (tensors, PDEs, etc.)
Basically all you have to do in this class is skim the textbook before exams and do the HW since most of the quarter is review. I can't think of a single reason why you would take this class with her unless this is the last class you need to graduate and you just want an easy A.

Helpful?

4 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A
Dec. 31, 2020

Self-study from the Boas text and you can get an A. Her lectures are utterly boring and she doesn't care for her students. In fact, I think she may actually hate her students. She still hasn't posted FALL 2020 grades yet (it is 12/30/2020 today), and she was extremely unaccommodating when it came to exams. The tests were in-class and extremely flat in terms of the quality of the questions. The test questions were for the most part from the homework and discussion sets.

Helpful?

3 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A-
Jan. 1, 2021

As you have already seen from the reviews, students seem to strongly dislike Shenshen. Before I get into that, I will say, this class felt like a lower division math class. The class was mostly plug-and-chug and the HW problems were pretty simple/low-thought. I will also admit that Shenshen's notes were directly from the book, but I don't think that's as big of a problem as everyone seems to think it is. If she believes the book is the way to present the material, then that's her choice. If the book isn't challenging or engaging enough, that's the physics department's fault for choosing an inefficient textbook. I think Shenshen would follow whichever book is used, so if a different, more challenging book is used, her HW questions and notes would be more fit for that book. As for her "not caring" for her students, she was late multiple times to class. She also cancelled class a couple of times (although, I think she was very sick one day). I wouldn't have skipped tensors and PDEs like she did, however. She should've given pre-recorded lectures on those topics to not compromise our education. Other than that, I think Shenshen is one of the professors who really is struggling with online teaching. Her internet connection, lack of a medium (like a tablet) to write things down on, and inability to turn on her camera really affected her teaching. In my opinion, she's not rude or uncooperative (as she was always very polite with me), and I think she would've been a much better professor in person. With all that being said, however, I still feel as if my education was highly affected by taking this class. As a physics major who struggles with the math that comes with physics, I really hoped this class would strengthen my math enough for me to be more confident in physics. That was definitely NOT the case. I really wish all of this wasn't online. It hurt my education and hurt Prof. Shenshen's teaching abilities. I really liked the TAs though. Thank you, Ji and Paul!

Helpful?

3 2 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: B
Dec. 18, 2020

While the content and ideas of this class are not as difficult to handle, Shenshen made this class almost unbearable. It was clearly apparent that she couldn't give less of a shit about us. She would constantly be late to class by 10 minutes every lecture, read off pre-written notes for her lecture, behaved somewhat hostile when asked questions, give us crucial information at the last minute, etc. She literally gave us our final grade on New Years Eve, over 2 weeks after our final exam. She rarely showed up to office hours and was quite rude to me when I asked for help on a question. She was not accommodating in the slightest for the midterm and final exams. I feel quite robbed of my education that I had such an unenthusiatic and uncaring professor this quarter. Honestly, just read the book and self study and you will be good for this class. She doesn't deserve an audience for the way she treats her students. At least TRY to care a bit more Shenshen smh lol

Helpful?

2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A+
Dec. 30, 2020

I cannot emphasize how little Shenshen Wang cares about teching. She was the most horrible professor I have ever had, by a huge margin.

-She arrives 5-20 minutes late for lectures. She skipped it altogether a couple of times.
-She said she'd record the missed lectures and post them, but eventually, she didn't and chose to cut tensors out of the course instead. When interrogated, she said this was because she wanted to do lectures with the Zoom rooms so that people could ask questions.
-But when people asked questions, she'd just ignore them.
-She is singularly apathetic, and it took an uncomfortable amount of persuasion to get her to not schedule an in-lecture timed midterm on election day afternoon.
-She kept her camera off the whole time, which is unusual for a professor. It makes online classes even less appetizing; she doesn't ever even attempt to come off as a person. It's a small thing, but it seemed creepy and shady.
-Her notes were handwritten pdfs that she'd basically read off. They made very little sense, not unlike the garbage she'd say while trying to explain even the most basic concepts.
-The textbook, Mary Boas's Mathematical Methods, isn't bad, but it's certainly very little new information if you've done the prerequisite math courses.
-The few new stuff, like Fourier analysis, Laplace transforms, etc, were skimmed over, since she spent more than half the course on basic multivariable calc.
-She didn't publish grades by the given deadline, which is over two weeks after the end of the quarter, and my transcript just shows nothing for the course. This is unsurprising since she cannot show up for her lecture on time.
-She was generally hesitant to help during office hours; she skipped them occasionally.
-There was no feedback for homework or midterms.
-The second midterm was nothing like the homework at all.
-The homework is easy, uninteresting problems from the textbook. For the most part, there's no thinking; you just plug in a basic calculus formula and chug. It's uninspired, and obviously takes no effort or interest on Shenshen's part. They do not require a deep understanding of the concepts and they barely help.
-Midterm logistics were coordinated by the TAs, which just provides further evidence that she did not care about anything at all. But for people in other timezones, they were moderately accommodating: they said you can do the midterm anytime over the next 24 hours, timed with Gradescope.
-My entire class hates her so much, we have an agreement to leave scathing reviews on Bruinwalk since that's basically all we can do.

To summarise, this is an absolutely useless class when taken with Shenshen Wang. She is a despicable human with no sense of responsibility, and she should not be permitted to teach, least of all at a place like UCLA that boasts about being a "top" university all the time.
Overall: 1/5 (ideally 0). Easiness: 4/5. Workload: 3/5. Clarity: 1/5 (ideally 0). Helpfulness: 1/5 (it's a pity I can't use negative numbers).

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2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A-
Dec. 21, 2019

She doesn't really give a shit about teaching and it shows. She walks in 5-10 minutes late to class almost everyday, her homework and exams are uninspired and are always taken from the book. The most I ever attended class was 30 minutes the first day of lecture where she was teaching how to take a cross product and I never attended again, you can teach entirely off of the book, you might as well have not had a professor for this class.

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4 4 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
Dec. 31, 2020

Just don't take this class if you can avoid it. Hell, even if you can't avoid it just don't take this class.
Wang obviously does not give a single fuck about this class or teaching in general. Consistently late, sometimes doesn't even show up to class or OH, lectures were just pictures she took of some handwritten notes that were basically just the textbook verbatim. We had to entirely skip tensors and PDEs (the two topics I was most excited about) because of how consistently late she was all the time and we literally went over only Math 32 stuff for the first 4 weeks. Not to mention the fact that there was no meaningful thought put into any of the homeworks or the tests. Most of the questions were legit just straight from the textbook with the exception of I think 1 or 2.
The only benefit to this class is that it's a relatively easy A. But, a GPA boost is 100% not worth how painful and abysmally taught this class is. Straight up cringe.

Helpful?

1 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Fall 2020
Grade: A-
May 2, 2021

DO NOT TAKE HER CLASS! PERIOD!!

Helpful?

1 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 131
Quarter: Fall 2019
Grade: A+
Jan. 19, 2020

The tests and homeworks are very easy. For lectures, she explained the concepts pretty clear, and also talks about the physical meanings behind them, though most of them are from the text book...Her lectures are not super engaging, but still teach you something. I would say you can probably do as well by just by reading the textbook. She didn't give rigorous proof to most the theorems, which I don't like very much, but I guess this is the way Maths are generally done in Physics.

Helpful?

1 5 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHYSICS 112
Quarter: Spring 2023
Grade: B+
June 11, 2023

I expected the absolute worst from her, seeing all the terrible reviews she received in the past. This was my first class with her so I have no idea how she was back then, but I believe she upped her teaching game over time. I didn't experience any of the issues I saw in those reviews and I think she taught the course fairly well. She's not the most engaging lecturer to be frank, but I think a part of that is due to the subject itself, which I personally didn't find super interesting.

As for the class itself: she followed the textbook very closely. The workload was manageable, with around 5 problems from the textbook assigned per week. Two midterms and a final. The midterm questions were similar to homework in terms of difficulty but I found the final rather challenging. The midterm you scored higher on was the one counted toward your final grade, which was nice.

Overall, really not as bad as previous reviews make her out to be. Her teaching was good and the difficulty was not bad at all.

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0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
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