Terrible class with a draconic grading policy. Points are taken off at random and your experience is solely determined by your TA. The professor is an a**hole and never shows up at all. Take this over the summer or when you have easy classes as it will eat up all your time.

I am still wondering why this class still exists in UCLA. It is a joke. Professor never shows up and tells TAs to do whatever they want. That means, they could deduct tons of points from your carefully-arranged, scrutinized, pages-long lab reports, and you cannot even argue with them because they are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. Although many of the times they act ridiculous. And if you are lucky enough to have a TA like the one I got, who could not even clearly express her ideas and doesn't reply to your email until deadline passes, there you go. I LITERALLY DID NOT LEARN ANYTHING USEFUL EXCEPT FOR SOME PATHETIC FORMATS AND EXCEL SKILLS. Good luck. I'd certainly celebrate if the physics department takes down this class. Shame on you, a physics lab but has nothing to do with real physics.

This class is entirely taught by the TA. Mine was fantastic and made physics lab great. I think a lot of people blow physics lab out of proportion. Take good data and take your time and it will make it a lot easier. Also donthe fixes your TAs give and you'll do fine. Grading is fair in this class. Overall would take again.

I don't understand why people are so butthurt about this class on here. Yeah it sucks and it's too much work for 2 units, but so are all the other engineering labs. And this lab is actually significantly easier and less time consuming than others (ie. CS 35L) since NO new content is covered, NO new physics material is learned, and all you have to do to ace the labs is write a lot of educated-sounding BS about your procedure/methods while closely following all the guidelines in the book (those of you who took IB in high school are probably also experts at this).

This course took me no more than one day a week to write the labs (about 7-8 hours per lab), and I just made sure to write a lot (usually 20+ pages, double spaced) and thoroughly label my graphs to get good grades on all of them. Although this class sucked because of the length of write-ups, it'll help you get really proficient with using Excel, and it basically requires no brainpower since you don't have to learn or understand anything new about physics. Just a lot plotting and typing, you'll get an A.

For a 2.0 unit class, I spent more time writing labs for this class than studying for my other major-required 4.0-5.0 unit classes.

The grading scheme should be updated. One visit to BruinWalk and you will read that many students agree with this logic. In this class, it is possible for a student to receive a a high grade on a report, but receive a C because other classmates averaged higher. This is by far the factor that demotivated me the most. A learning environment such as a lab should be designed to reward students for effort, and for participating in the experimental experience. A lab manual does not substitute for a professor and therefore grading should not be harsh on students' lab reports. With no professor, and only Helen's help during two hours for the entire week + email, the class should not have a curve which gives 1/3 A's, 1/3B's and 1/3 "C's and below".

Campbell, the professor, was not present to discuss the formatting and presentation of these labs. I have heard great things about this professor but unfortunately did not see him let alone learn anything from him or get any personal advice about the lab manual.

I wish the lab reports weren't so harshly graded. This is a class where you can lose a substantial amount of points if the TA does not particularly agree with the formatting of my report, even after spending multiple hours upon hours writing it. Participation grading + Completion should be more heavily weighted than the format of the report.

Class was really rough, and definitely a challenge. A strong math background is absolutely required, and a lot of Campbell's explanations during lecture will involve a lot of tricky math, as do his solutions to problems.

The workload is okay, most of my time was taken up doing extra studying in preparation for the exams. The midterm and final are both difficult, and I thought I was failing for sure, but he provides a really generous and nice curve at the end that will probably save your grade.

Overall: The professor is passionate and the class has fun demonstrations and physics concepts, but you can get easily lost in the weeds without a solid math foundation and feel defeated, but the curve is great.

This class has been the bane of my existence and it's only two units!! There is a lab report due every week and they take HOURS. Worse than that, this is the only class I've ever had where the curve will actually hurt you: if everyone in the class gets above a 90 and you get 90, you're screwed. Luckily, the professor only gives out As, Bs, and Cs. The professor insists this is the best way to run the course, but I call bullshit.

Only take this BS if you need to. They will take off points on your report for anything. Too much white space, showing consecutive figures (even though professional reports do this all the time), spelling, punctuation, etc. Legit the grading for this class is BULL#@$%. I don't understand the logic here. By their reasoning, one could have everything correct and displayed correctly, but if there is too much white space between ideas or bad spelling or pretty much anything, they could technically get a zero. This is where my 60k out of state tuition is going? Are you kidding me? Like what exactly is this crap, shoulda went to SC man. Don't take this crap, go to a CC for it.

Yeah...I don't like this class.
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Pros:
* Shorter lab reports than 4AL
* Honestly the experiments are cool
* TA's can be nice
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Cons:
* Grading is very subjective
* The class itself is hard, wires are annoying
* Time crunch in labs

This class sucks. Some ways to make it suck marginally less:
- If you haven't taken 4AL, in the first lab try to figure out how many people in your section have. 90% of the points you lose will be on formatting details if you're new to writing labs like this. People who've taken 4AL will know how to do it and jack up the curve while you have to figure it out. If more than half of the people in your section have taken 4AL, switch to a new one immediately.
- Also if your TA is unhelpful or doesn't seem to know what they're doing, find a new section as well. I had to ask mine for clarification on almost every lab because the manual is so poorly written. Also make sure you know what your TA wants format-wise so you're not losing points.
- Reading at least the introduction section of each lab before you take the quiz will help you know what equations and concepts are important - makes it easier to figure out the questions.
- You don't have to read each lab in detail before you do it, but at least get a look at the questions for the worksheet and what data you have to analyze in the report. This'll tell you what parts of the experiments are actually important and you don't have to waste time on minor parts of it (especially for the labs where you'll probably have a time crunch).
- Try to do the analysis sections (graphing, linear regressions, etc.) in lab if you have extra time. That way you know you have everything you need and if something seems off about the data, you can ask your TA about it. If you're lucky, they won't dock you for your data seeming off if your procedure and analysis follow the correct steps, but it's good to ask them in lab and make sure.
- This will sound like a broken record but START EARLY. Writing up the labs are a lot of work but much more manageable as 1-2 hours a day. Especially since you have to pay attention to a lot of details like precision and significant figures, it's better to give yourself time to review it and fix stuff.
- As said before, most of the points you'll lose will be due to nitpicky formatting things. The only real way to see what was specifically wrong with your report is to check back on the Turnitin links for each lab after a week or so following its due date. If your TA leaves comments on the labs it'll help figure out where specifically points are being taken off and what you need to fix. A lot of the things I lost points for were formatting requirements my TA did not mention at all in lab.
- See if the TA would be willing to share information about score distributions for each lab after they're graded. Since the classes are curved by section, it'll help you get a better idea of where you stand compared to everyone else.