Zhongbo Kang
Department of Physics
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4.6
Overall Rating
Based on 34 Users
Easiness 3.7 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 4.3 / 5 How clear the class is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Workload 3.7 / 5 How much workload the class is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Helpfulness 4.6 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Would Take Again
GRADE DISTRIBUTIONS
31.0%
25.8%
20.7%
15.5%
10.3%
5.2%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

23.9%
19.9%
16.0%
12.0%
8.0%
4.0%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

33.9%
28.2%
22.6%
16.9%
11.3%
5.6%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

36.9%
30.8%
24.6%
18.5%
12.3%
6.2%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

34.7%
28.9%
23.2%
17.4%
11.6%
5.8%
0.0%
A+
A
A-
B+
B
B-
C+
C
C-
D+
D
D-
F

Grade distributions are collected using data from the UCLA Registrar’s Office.

ENROLLMENT DISTRIBUTIONS
Clear marks

Sorry, no enrollment data is available.

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Reviews (23)

2 of 3
2 of 3
Add your review...
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A+
March 30, 2020

Professor Kang was one of my better physics professors I have had so far at UCLA, having taken the intro physics 1 series courses. Broadly, he's a great guy who clearly professes his concern on student well-being and learning, and it's very evident. He's also extremely nice and willing to listen to student concerns, but I can say that personally he was not very engaging as a lecturer.
First, N.B. that the class does require the use of Mastering Physics, which is where all of your homework will be assigned. For us, due to COVID-19, our final exam was held on Mastering Physics as well. There's homeworks every week, usually around 7-10 MP questions taken from the textbook, so the workload is very consistent. The grading breakdown is originally as follows, but due to declining lecture attendance, Professor Kang decided to hold these short quizzes (to check for participation) that might've changed the following grading scheme:
1% - Course Evaluation
3% - Discussion
16% - Mastering Physics Homework
20% - Midterm I
20% - Midterm II
40% - Final Exam
Following up, Professor Kang gave us advance notice of the participation quizzes, and it was simply a google form where you filled out your name and some simple conceptual question (what's great is that as long as you answer, correctly or incorrectly, you get full points for participation). Discussions are held similarly. We switched formats throughout, but settled on this: doing a discussion worksheet [in groups] for the first 10-15 minutes, before the TA (mine was Tadi) would give a review of that week's material, followed by more discussion worksheet time. As long as the worksheet wasn't completely empty, and you gave honest effort, you were getting a 100% for discussion grades.
The reason Professor Kang gave us lecture participation quizzes was because he "feels more motivated to teach with more students in the lecture room". He really does care that students show up and are giving effort, which is something that he looks for in students. He basically begged everyone multiple times to show up to his office hours, and pleaded with us to use the google form he created where we could send in feedback about the class and make any comments. He proclaims himself as the "captain" of our ship, and because he's our "captain", he's always on our side. He posts preliminary lecture notes and finalized lecture notes on CCLE, for those who couldn't read the board or hear his soft voice, but honestly even up front his lectures just aren't very engaging, and it's not for a lack of effort on his part. As a student, I really appreciated how much effort and how serious he took his teaching responsibilities.
Overall, I wouldn't say that he cemented in the material extremely well, but it's pretty standard. What makes him great is more his other aspects, essentially how much he cares about student learning and wellbeing, and that he genuinely is trying to help everyone do well in his class. Given how considerate, kind and thoughtful he is, I would say that Professor Kang is definitely worth a shot for Physics 1C.

Helpful?

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Quarter: Winter 2023
Grade: B
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
June 23, 2023

He is a very very nice Professor, especially in comparison to other physics professors. However, this class is challenging of course. You should do your homework during the week and bring up questions during his office hours which he appreciates if you attend. His practice exams are super helpful and his exams are fair. He tells you which examples will show up on the exams which is super helpful and he also does tons of examples in class. As long as you do his examples and go to a few office hours you will do good in his class.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Spring 2022
Grade: A+
June 29, 2022

WE LOVE ZHONGBO KANG. When you see those physics lectures in movies where the professor is engaging, doing demos, and every student is completely focused, that's Kang's class. He focuses a lot on derivations of physical properties / formulas as opposed to other teachers who focus more on just plugging into formulas. This is good because 1) it sets you up better for later physics classes which build on this material 2) it's just cooler to really understand how these properties of our world came about 3) the tests are EASY. Every Thursday lecture starts with a demo where he does a cool (and sometimes dangerous) experiment like microwaving lightbulbs or creating radio antennas. ~2 hours of HW per week, infinite retries on questions until you get it right. Topics are magnetism, inductance, EM waves, lenses, and relativity. If you need to take Physics 1C, take it with Professor Kang

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Spring 2022
Grade: A
June 7, 2022

Prof.Kang is a really good professor with clear teaching and reasonable exams. He gives the detailed notes, powerpoints and recorded lectures. At the same time, he is super approachable in his office hours and on via campuswire. He also gives a lot of extra credits. One of the best class I've taken in UCLA

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2022
Grade: A+
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
March 30, 2022

Kang was great! Very nice and understanding teacher, decent lecturer. Fair grades and exam problems (often similar to practice test problems, or ones from years past as well if you can find them).

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Spring 2021
Grade: NR
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
June 8, 2021

Professor Kang is awesome and, of course, the best physics professor I have taken at UCLA. I love his way of presenting the materials which is full of logic. He also likes to provide historical background on how the physics theorems were developed over time, which is so stirring because you witness the born of a historical moment when the final formula appeared before your eyes.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Spring 2020
Grade: A
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Sept. 14, 2020

Actually just try follow the lectures and do the homework carefully- this is enough for preparing for exams. The homework, quizzes, and midterms/final are all fairly assigned and graded. Frankly speaking I did not spend a lot of time in this class, I pretty much believe the key in here is to try understand those physics concepts instead of just memorizing the formulas. Take Zhongbo's 1C, making you healthy and happy.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Spring 2020
Grade: B+
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
July 19, 2020

Prof. Kang is such a nice and caring professor. I HIGHLY recommend taking his class. I have had a really rough time with 1A and 1B but everything began to make sense in his class. Other professors in the physics department have a god complex but Kang does not. He is willing to help, and really does not want to give you a bad grade. He has an anonymous tip line to give him feedback and he really tries his best to adjust to the students needs. The only complaint I have is that I took a discussion in the beginning of the week, but I suggest you sign up for a Thursday or Friday discussion because the worksheets in class were often subjects we had not yet covered.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A+
March 29, 2020

Overall, this class was a pretty average experience. Boring lectures, fair exams, and hit or miss TAs. Professor Kang is a really nice guy who goes out of his way to help students, but physics at UCLA is just so hard to learn from lectures alone. Personally, I invested about 10-15 hours a week reading through the textbook and taking notes, which really helped me develop intuition for E/M and optics.

Both midterms were fair, although 1C is a naturally hard class so you still need to study a lot to do well. I thought the first midterm was fairly straightforward, but the second was a lot harder due to a time crunch and a couple of tricky questions. The averages were pretty high at 84 and 78, respectively. Under normal circumstances, I would expect the final to be difficult, but Kang turned ours into a Mastering Physics problem set due to COVID-19. It was very easy (median 100%!), which inflated grades a bit.

Overall, I would take Kang again because I learned E/M and optics pretty well without suffering through Corbin's exams. Although I'm a Civil Engineering major, I found 1C to be really interesting, specifically Maxwell's equations and special relativity. If you allocate plenty of time to learn the material outside of lecture you should do fine.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 24, 2020

Kang is the best Physics professor I've had at UCLA. He genuinely cares about student's learning and our grades. The tests are very fair, and it's easy to do well in the class if you keep up with the homework and textbook. I definitely recommend taking him!!

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A+
March 30, 2020

Professor Kang was one of my better physics professors I have had so far at UCLA, having taken the intro physics 1 series courses. Broadly, he's a great guy who clearly professes his concern on student well-being and learning, and it's very evident. He's also extremely nice and willing to listen to student concerns, but I can say that personally he was not very engaging as a lecturer.
First, N.B. that the class does require the use of Mastering Physics, which is where all of your homework will be assigned. For us, due to COVID-19, our final exam was held on Mastering Physics as well. There's homeworks every week, usually around 7-10 MP questions taken from the textbook, so the workload is very consistent. The grading breakdown is originally as follows, but due to declining lecture attendance, Professor Kang decided to hold these short quizzes (to check for participation) that might've changed the following grading scheme:
1% - Course Evaluation
3% - Discussion
16% - Mastering Physics Homework
20% - Midterm I
20% - Midterm II
40% - Final Exam
Following up, Professor Kang gave us advance notice of the participation quizzes, and it was simply a google form where you filled out your name and some simple conceptual question (what's great is that as long as you answer, correctly or incorrectly, you get full points for participation). Discussions are held similarly. We switched formats throughout, but settled on this: doing a discussion worksheet [in groups] for the first 10-15 minutes, before the TA (mine was Tadi) would give a review of that week's material, followed by more discussion worksheet time. As long as the worksheet wasn't completely empty, and you gave honest effort, you were getting a 100% for discussion grades.
The reason Professor Kang gave us lecture participation quizzes was because he "feels more motivated to teach with more students in the lecture room". He really does care that students show up and are giving effort, which is something that he looks for in students. He basically begged everyone multiple times to show up to his office hours, and pleaded with us to use the google form he created where we could send in feedback about the class and make any comments. He proclaims himself as the "captain" of our ship, and because he's our "captain", he's always on our side. He posts preliminary lecture notes and finalized lecture notes on CCLE, for those who couldn't read the board or hear his soft voice, but honestly even up front his lectures just aren't very engaging, and it's not for a lack of effort on his part. As a student, I really appreciated how much effort and how serious he took his teaching responsibilities.
Overall, I wouldn't say that he cemented in the material extremely well, but it's pretty standard. What makes him great is more his other aspects, essentially how much he cares about student learning and wellbeing, and that he genuinely is trying to help everyone do well in his class. Given how considerate, kind and thoughtful he is, I would say that Professor Kang is definitely worth a shot for Physics 1C.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Verified Reviewer This user is a verified UCLA student/alum.
Quarter: Winter 2023
Grade: B
June 23, 2023

He is a very very nice Professor, especially in comparison to other physics professors. However, this class is challenging of course. You should do your homework during the week and bring up questions during his office hours which he appreciates if you attend. His practice exams are super helpful and his exams are fair. He tells you which examples will show up on the exams which is super helpful and he also does tons of examples in class. As long as you do his examples and go to a few office hours you will do good in his class.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Spring 2022
Grade: A+
June 29, 2022

WE LOVE ZHONGBO KANG. When you see those physics lectures in movies where the professor is engaging, doing demos, and every student is completely focused, that's Kang's class. He focuses a lot on derivations of physical properties / formulas as opposed to other teachers who focus more on just plugging into formulas. This is good because 1) it sets you up better for later physics classes which build on this material 2) it's just cooler to really understand how these properties of our world came about 3) the tests are EASY. Every Thursday lecture starts with a demo where he does a cool (and sometimes dangerous) experiment like microwaving lightbulbs or creating radio antennas. ~2 hours of HW per week, infinite retries on questions until you get it right. Topics are magnetism, inductance, EM waves, lenses, and relativity. If you need to take Physics 1C, take it with Professor Kang

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Spring 2022
Grade: A
June 7, 2022

Prof.Kang is a really good professor with clear teaching and reasonable exams. He gives the detailed notes, powerpoints and recorded lectures. At the same time, he is super approachable in his office hours and on via campuswire. He also gives a lot of extra credits. One of the best class I've taken in UCLA

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Winter 2022
Grade: A+
March 30, 2022

Kang was great! Very nice and understanding teacher, decent lecturer. Fair grades and exam problems (often similar to practice test problems, or ones from years past as well if you can find them).

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Spring 2021
Grade: NR
June 8, 2021

Professor Kang is awesome and, of course, the best physics professor I have taken at UCLA. I love his way of presenting the materials which is full of logic. He also likes to provide historical background on how the physics theorems were developed over time, which is so stirring because you witness the born of a historical moment when the final formula appeared before your eyes.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Spring 2020
Grade: A
Sept. 14, 2020

Actually just try follow the lectures and do the homework carefully- this is enough for preparing for exams. The homework, quizzes, and midterms/final are all fairly assigned and graded. Frankly speaking I did not spend a lot of time in this class, I pretty much believe the key in here is to try understand those physics concepts instead of just memorizing the formulas. Take Zhongbo's 1C, making you healthy and happy.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
COVID-19 This review was submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Your experience may vary.
Quarter: Spring 2020
Grade: B+
July 19, 2020

Prof. Kang is such a nice and caring professor. I HIGHLY recommend taking his class. I have had a really rough time with 1A and 1B but everything began to make sense in his class. Other professors in the physics department have a god complex but Kang does not. He is willing to help, and really does not want to give you a bad grade. He has an anonymous tip line to give him feedback and he really tries his best to adjust to the students needs. The only complaint I have is that I took a discussion in the beginning of the week, but I suggest you sign up for a Thursday or Friday discussion because the worksheets in class were often subjects we had not yet covered.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A+
March 29, 2020

Overall, this class was a pretty average experience. Boring lectures, fair exams, and hit or miss TAs. Professor Kang is a really nice guy who goes out of his way to help students, but physics at UCLA is just so hard to learn from lectures alone. Personally, I invested about 10-15 hours a week reading through the textbook and taking notes, which really helped me develop intuition for E/M and optics.

Both midterms were fair, although 1C is a naturally hard class so you still need to study a lot to do well. I thought the first midterm was fairly straightforward, but the second was a lot harder due to a time crunch and a couple of tricky questions. The averages were pretty high at 84 and 78, respectively. Under normal circumstances, I would expect the final to be difficult, but Kang turned ours into a Mastering Physics problem set due to COVID-19. It was very easy (median 100%!), which inflated grades a bit.

Overall, I would take Kang again because I learned E/M and optics pretty well without suffering through Corbin's exams. Although I'm a Civil Engineering major, I found 1C to be really interesting, specifically Maxwell's equations and special relativity. If you allocate plenty of time to learn the material outside of lecture you should do fine.

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 24, 2020

Kang is the best Physics professor I've had at UCLA. He genuinely cares about student's learning and our grades. The tests are very fair, and it's easy to do well in the class if you keep up with the homework and textbook. I definitely recommend taking him!!

Helpful?

0 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
2 of 3
4.6
Overall Rating
Based on 34 Users
Easiness 3.7 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Clarity 4.3 / 5 How clear the class is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Workload 3.7 / 5 How much workload the class is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Helpfulness 4.6 / 5 How helpful the class is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

TOP TAGS

  • Would Take Again
    (17)
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