This class is taught entirely by TA and is ABSOLUTE FUCKINGLY RIDICULOUS. The TA doesn't tells you what to do, and then deducts points for reasons he pulls out of his ass. Sometimes his reasons are even contradictory. Every report he would deduct points for a new reason that 1. He never talked about 2. Is nowhere to be found in the lab manual. With every report you are basically guessing, praying that your work pleases the TA god who works in mysterious ways.

I would devote almost 10-12 hours for every report, walking on eggshells, making sure that I incorporate everything taught in class, yet I would lose points for reasons never discussed anywhere either verbally or in written.

Ultimately I dropped the class after 5 weeks, and retook this summer. This TA is even fucking worse. I had an advantage having previously taken this class, so from lab 0 I made it look like a professional lab 7 report. But everyday I would walk into the lab with students arguing for the exact same reasons mentioned above.

This class needs an absolute redesign. If you are not a physics major and can avoid this class somehow, AVOID IT.

This class sucked, and I got an A+. Find older friends with old lab reports and use those to get a sense of what the formatting should look like. Get River Snively as your TA if you can. It's a 2 unit class. Don't sweat it.

Honestly this class sucks. If you aren't really interested in physics and are just taking this for your major, try not to take this class with courses that actually matter to you (if possible), because 4AL will really bog you down with its time-consuming lab reports.

For an idea of what the class is like, you are basically stuck in a room with your lab partner and 20 other students for up to 3 hours a week trying to collect data according to the lab manual instructions. For writing the lab reports, the calculations are time-consuming but not hard (use excel), however analysis and actually understanding what half the equations you are using come from is not easy. Luckily, you don't have to really understand the physics to get a good grade but just reading through the manual and trying to understand where you're supposed to start with your abstracts/conclusions is a pain (or at least it was for me.)

If you want to do well in this class, you should probably read the lab manual before class (especially for the later labs) so you can finish the lab as quickly as possible, since the later labs are actually quite long and you will run out of time if you have to spend most of the time figuring out what to do. I didn't follow this advice and suffered from not being able to collect all of the required data, you can still get an A like this but it requires some really good report writing skills and adds lots of unneeded stress.

The grading depends on your TA; from my experience you can lose a lot of points for formatting or style, so ask your TA what they want and learn from your mistakes early on. It also helps to look at sample reports online (DON'T COPY THEM) just to see what the standard is for a high grade and the general approach you should use for the longer, full reports.

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.

Everything you've heard about this class is true.

The harsh grading scheme makes it impossible to obtain any useful information from this class. The labs will often be marked down for minor faults to create an artificial curve. This class deserves an award, because it is the only class at UCLA where I came in with a strong appreciation of physics and left hating the subject. Furthermore, this lab does not teach skills that would be useful in a real lab. I will commend my Lab Assistant, as I thought he did the best he could considering the awful structure of this class. Overall, a thoroughly terrible experience that no student should be forced to endure.

I got an A+ in this class. Still, I believe this class should be seriously redesigned by the physics department.

-Workload is extremely heavy, as the last 2 reports may require 3000 words each.
-The guidelines provided by the professor are unclear and disorganized. That is, you have to rely on your TA to a large extent since they are the only ones who can decrypt the professor's enigmatic wordings in the lab manual.
-The grading scheme is ridiculous. There's no point of curving in a 15-student section.
-Your TA can be really strict in grading. My TA insisted us to adhere to some unnecessary criteria (e.g. "every lab report should be double-column and shorter than 5 pages"), otherwise our grades would be significantly reduced.

Here are some suggestions:
-Use LaTeX, which formats your reports nicely and gives clean layouts.
-Use Python/Matlab/some other more efficient tools to automate data analysis, since dragging those excel boxes can be painful.
-Start early. Don't wait until the night before due date to begin writing. Do the data analysis 1-3 days right after you finish your labs.

Campbell's whole vibe with this class is "I'm trying to screw you over any way I can" - The other reviews say it all; each lab is a test of how well you can intuitively guess what Campbell is looking for because his instructions are vague and unclear. And even if you do the best job anyone has ever done on a lab report, he'll find a way to subtract ten points for "imprecise wording." Work really hard to get in the top third and you'll get an A, but expect to lose your mind a little along the way. This class really ought to be changed - in the grading scheme if nothing else

Just a formatting class. Don't be naive and think you will actually be learning physics or useful lab skills in this class. 99% of your grade in this class is how well you can follow the lab manual which is extremely unclear, but this won't stop your TA from deducting points from your scores. And the curved grading in this class is hell. Your final grade is purely based on how well you performed compared to your classmates, even if you get 95% in the class you could still end up with a C. If Campbell is teaching this course try to take it during the summer to avoid this hell.

Easily the worst class I've ever taken. Unfortunately this class is required to get through Engineering. I learned a decent amount of excel, but that is the extent of this class' value. The labs take 15-20 hours a week and are incredibly tedious and repetitive.
The fact that the class is curved in your section is also extremely frustrating. You can get all 95's and get a B+ and there is nothing you can do about it.
This class is not worth the thousands of dollars it costs to take, in addition to all the time it will take away from your other more relevant classes.