If I’m being honest, I was terrified of this class the instant I signed up for it. If you’ve read some of the reviews of the other professors that taught this class you’d know why lol. But now that fall quarter is over I’m so grateful I took this class. Professor Campbell really is a great teacher because he’s not only trying to teach you the material, but also teach you how to think like a physics major. I remember some questions from the start of the course that felt completely impossible to do by myself… and by the end of the course those questions felt like a joke. Our TA, Charlie, was also an amazing physics super genius with very helpful office hours.
This class is only offered fall quarter, and I highly recommend not missing out on the opportunity to enroll!

P.S. I got annihilated by the midterm but don’t worry if you do well on the final you can still make it out with an A!

This professor curves down for labs. I shouldn't even need to elaborate but I will. The labs weren't particularly hard but due to the course being online in Fall 2021 (for whatever silly reason they kept a lab class online when every other one was in person at this point) the labs were notoriously difficult to set up properly to get data by the end of the course. At one point the TAs, who were really the only way to get help due to the class structure, didn't even know what to do/how to answer students questions about the labs. I went to just about every office hours trying to learn Python for this course since I had never used it before (Python should be a prereq for this course). Going to all office hours and meeting with TAs outside of their normal hours to complete my assignments to their liking I was still somehow losing points on the labs. Regardless I ended the course with ~93%. In any other course this would be an A or at least an A-. In Wesley's class this is a B+. Despite having shown significant effort to accomplish the tasks assigned to both TAs and the professor and confirming that my assignments met the requirements they were looking for before submission every time, he refused to remove the down curve because that was "representative of the work I did." The work I did didn't raise any alarms when I showed it to you before submission, make it make sense.

I loved having Prof. Campbell for mechanical physics. He is a young guy that interacts very well with students. I thought he gave some good lectures, but you can expect to fall asleep a couple times in his class. Some people love that he gives massively curved tests (the average on the first midterm was a 37%) and others don't. He is generous with the curve though to make sure that people succeed and learn something in his class. Would definitely recommend him to anyone.

Professor Campbell was overall a good professor for Physics 1A (probably better than the overrated Corbin). He was very direct and clear about what physics we needed to know and he explained and derived physics very clearly. The class was built around a 33/33/33 A/B/C and lower curve, but I felt that Campbell was very generous with the grades that he gave out considering that I got below average on all 3 exams. His exams are way harder than the practice exams from previous years exams that he uploads to CCLE and there is really no way to study effectively for the exams outside of doing the old midterms and going to lecture. One of the more disappointing parts about the class was his use of the BS Mastering Physics program which does not further the understanding of physics and does not help at all for the exams. Overall I would rate him a 7/10 and I would recommend him over other 1A professors. Good luck on his hard tests though.

Only a quarter after I've taken him do I realize how much I liked his class. He's always helpful and willing to answer questions patiently. His midterms aren't too difficult, but his final blew everyone out of the water. There was one question that I would be surprised if anyone got above 20% on it. The highest score on the final was a 67%, and the average was a 47%, if I recall correctly. Don't be arrogant and skip lectures. What he discusses is important.

Worst class i've ever taken so far in ucla.

This is by far the worst class I have taken my entire freshman year at UCLA. If you're a South Campus major you can't really get around it because its a pre req for a lot. To start off with, the grading scheme is crazy and very detrimental to student collaboration. 1/3 of your lab section gets an A, 1/3 gets a B, and the other 1/3 gets a C. So collaboration is really not encouraged with other people in your lab section because you're competing against them for a grade. You could get a 92 on the lab report but if everyone else gets a 97, you're getting a C on that report.
The lab manual is not helpful or clear at all. The professor expects you to just intuitively know what to include in the lab report and never actually tells you what specifically you need to address. The instructions for the labs are confusing and the TA's don't really know whats going on so they can't help you. The lab reports are pointless busy work that teach you nothing but how to use Excel. Each report takes probably 15-20 hours a week and they're just pointless restatements of the lab manual and pages long derivations of error equations.
I have learned nothing in this class about physics that I didn't know before. The time that this class takes up is way too much for what a 2 unit class should be. Start the lab reports early and include everything you can possibly think of even if you think its obvious because chances are you will get points taken off for not including the derivation of one little equation that you thought was just a known fact.

This quarter has not ended yet but I really would like to say this is the worst class I've ever taken. Number one, even the TA says the lab manual is poorly written. Number two, I really don't like the way lab reports are graded, because we're often asked to pretend to write real research papers about something everybody knows. I just have no idea how to pretend that way. Also, the requirements for the lab report is very unclear so I end up losing points for reasons that don't make sense. I work in a lab and my PI and postdoc say I write very good abstracts, papers, and proposals, and my scientific writing worked for real conferences, so I don't understand how the grading scheme works. I would seriously prefer the way the chemistry and life sciences departments do the lab classes (though I really hate the chemistry CPR writing assignments). It's week 7, and I haven't learnt anything new from this class. LS23L is also a 2 unit lab class and similarly the professor never showed up, yet I learnt a lot from that class about gel electrophoresis, PCR, and so on that I couldn't learn from other LS classes. I strongly recommend Dr. Campbell to learn from other departments. Number four, I can't believe how much time this class takes; it should really be 4 units instead of 2. What's worse, I don't really learn from the time I spent.

This is one of the worst classes ever. It is a complete and utter waste of time. You learn absolutely nothing meaningful. Perhaps this class should be called a typing lesson or something because all you do it type for pages and pages about some principle of physics that is obviously true. (Why else would they make you do it)? The "experiments" are not as much experiments as they are UCLA's desperate attempt at creating "laboratory" experiences for their undergraduates. However, this class is a complete failure in that sense, since you only need to spend about 10 minutes to collect the data, and the rest is busywork that you do on your own. The professor never shows up, instead it's just a TA that does everything. I can't believe that a professor would actually get paid for "teaching" this class, since they seriously don't do anything. This class could be easily removed from the curriculum and it wouldn't affect any student's understanding of physics.

This is the worst class I've taken so far in my entire life. TAs tend to return your last lab report after you have submitted your newest one, which even seems ideal since mine gave us feedback even two weeks later for the last few experiments. So if you ever make a mistake, you usually make at least twice. This number could be larger when your TA suddenly decides that he would start take points off for some details. This class is basically destroying your quarter from beginning to the end.