This class is extremely difficult. I felt defeated after submitting my final exam, as well some of the quizzes. However, I was able to get an A, so the curve must have been generous. I think the following factors contributed to my eventual success in the course:

- I attended the lectures live, and I watched the lecture recordings later on to reinforce the material.
- I made it a goal to be able to be able to solve most of the examples / derive most of the formulas from lecture. This prevented me from flipping through my lecture notes and tricking myself into thinking that I knew the content.
- Near the end of the quarter, I attended a couple of office hour sessions. I found these to be moderately helpful in reviewing some of the core concepts.

This was the hardest class I have taken so far. I studied really hard to just get a C. I left every lecture even more confused.

The man really does live up to his reputation. I personally found this class to be really, really difficult. The practice problems he assigns as (unchecked and ungraded) homework do not reflect the difficulty of exam problems at all. You either know the material on an intuitive level or the exam will whack you. The only consolation is that the exam whacks a good 80% of your peers too, so the overall curve is surprisingly kind (I got a 21/90 raw score on my second midterm and still got a B in the class. Hold that).
His lectures are hit or miss for me. He is very engaging, but I wish he had used the giant projection screens in the lecture hall rather than writing on the blackboard (my vision is doodoo and it was difficult to see what he was doing sometimes with more complicated work, even when sitting near the front of the hall). He also uses minimal premade lecture notes, so his lectures can be difficult to follow sometimes, but YMMV. It's often not clear what he is leading into until halfway through that topic's discussion, which can be jarring. I will fully admit that this was partly my fault for not reading along in the textbook until Week 8 or so, but I've never had to do that in 1A or 1B either.
Corbin emphasizes development and familiarity with "first principles" of whatever topic is currently being covered. He doesn't allow cheat sheets or notes during exams for this reason, and expects you to derive expressions for physical phenomena from basic ideas rather than writing down a memorized or recorded formula (this is why his exam problems usually look so convoluted). Usually, this boils down to a few equations or qualitative rules about what you're studying, so if you can get familiar with those for each topic and your intuition for physics is strong, you're pretty well set for exams. FYI: he will probably tell you that the final is going to be relatively "straightforward". He really does mean it. On my final, two of the questions were almost directly lifted from work we wrote down as notes during class and were almost simple as a result.
THE BEST ADVICE I CAN GIVE TO PREPARE FOR HIS EXAMS IS TO LOOK AT PROBLEMS DONE IN CLASS and then considering how he could make the problem even nastier (what if this quantity that we take to be constant isn't a constant? what if this quantity we assume is zero is not actually zero? etc.). This sounds super masochistic, but I promise that this is the best (and possibly the only real way) to prepare for his problems without having access to past exams.

tl;dr hard class with an even harder instructor. If you can, enroll in 1C with a different instructor, and go to Corbin's lectures to learn the material in great depth.

Corbin is a fantastic lecturer. He is extremely clear, funny, and all-around informative and engaging. I really like him as a lecturer.
He doesn't like to answer homework questions in Office Hours or anything which is a little unhelpful.
His tests and quizzes are hard, but not impossible. In my experience, for *most* (not all) of our quiz questions, he did an adjacent problem in lecture.
The curve is very very generous. I averaged an 80% on the quizzes and got a 42% on the final, but managed to get an A in the class.
My largest word of advice is to do the homework on a weekly schedule. Do one chapter a week because you're going to have the worst time Week 10 if you save it all to the end!

Super nice professor (and person)! His lectures are super clear and funny, and help me a lot understand the concepts of some abstract materials such as magnetism and relativity. He doesn't have mandatory homework, but it's always a good idea to try to practice as much as you can. Problems on the textbook are not that helpful. One reason is that those usually involve numbers, but Corbin only uses letter variables in his exams. GO TO HIS OFFICE HOURS!!! I've never heard a professor who has as much as FOUR WHOLE HOURS for office hour per week except him! It's a golden opportunity to reinforce the materials on the lecture, and have more practice, with some fun personal stories of him as a small boost. I had my lunch time overlapped with his office hours, but I still went to his office hours often, at a cost of not having lunch, as I thought it helped me a lot. Midterms are tough, and the time is tight. NEVER DO THE FIRST PROBLEM FIRST. For the 4 midterms I had for him for both 1b and 1c, the first problem was always the most comprehensive one, and I always lost points for not fully understanding the problem. Though it may not always be the case, a better strategy is to look at each problem first before you work on them. Choose the easiest one first, and leave the more challenging ones after. Again, SUPER NICE PROFESSOR AND PERSON!

TLDR: If you enjoy physics and want to completely understand the different concepts in the class, I'd highly recommend Corbin. If you do not care too much about the subject and just want to get it over with as a requirement for your major, you're better off taking a professor who just uses formulas and asks direct questions in tests.

Corbin is an amazing lecturer with clear and engaging lectures. Attending office hours is tremendously useful as he covers a lot of examples. There is a lot of homework worth a total of 10% of your grade.

I'd recommend making a cheat sheet for every chapter, using it to do homework questions using variables and not numbers, and then plugging in the numbers to check if your answer is right. This is what I did and felt like it gave me good practice.

The quizzes were of moderate difficulty and you can get away with one poor quiz. The final, however, was a different beast with tough questions. I fell short of time but the curve carried me to an A.

When I enrolled in Physics1A with Corbin, I didn't even know about Bruinwalk at the time. God damn, I wish I did because this quarter was not a fun experience. When people say his tests are hard, THEY MEAN IT. His tests have no numbers in them; they're all with variables, but the setups are really hard a lot of the time.

I think a lot of people on Bruinwalk say that Corbin is an excellent lecturer, and I would say that he's a good lecturer, but no matter how good he is at explaining things, you won't be ready for his tests unless you do a stupid amount of studying. You might be thinking, "oh I'll be able to learn the material more", but no, please it's not worth it. I HIGHLY recommend taking a different professor sorry Corbin :)

Personally, I did not enjoy Corbin's class. Everyone told me to take him if I wanted a challenging class where I would really learn Physics. However, that was not my experience. His lectures were interesting and not terribly difficult to follow, but I feel like they did not teach me physics. He often blew over the algebra parts of solving, and he was not receptive of questions. His tests are ridiculous and even though he ends up curving the class a bunch in the end, I personally feel that it is not a good learning environment. There's no homework technically due in class and although the book problems are helpful to do, nothing can prepare you for his crazy tests. The final however is a lot better than both midterms, and even though I was below average on both midterms, I got a B in class and I believe it's because the final was much more straight forward and you actually had time to think and work through the problems. Overall though, I wish I had not taken his class and I would not recommend anyone else take it either.

AVOID THIS PROFESSOR AT ALL COSTS!
His lectures are unclear and rambling, his tests are super difficult and have nothing to do with the homework, and no one learns very much.
The only thing I can thank him for is making the curve so easy. The average grades on the 5 quizzes were (out of 30), 13.2, 13.3, 13.42, and 14.6 (I don’t know the average of Quiz 1). That’s an average of 45.4%!! This should be proof enough that either Prof. Corbin’s online teaching style is insufficient, or that his quizzes were way too difficult (or both).
The average on the final was 59/150--that's a 39.33%! I got around this average (as did most of my friends), and we passed, so its not that he is tough on people who fail, but rather that the whole class failed and didn't really learn any physics.
The class itself had serious issues. In the class, he basically discouraged questions, always treating them as annoying or silly (he even went so far as to call them "interruptions"). He often made a student feel dumb for asking anything, so after the first week, the class became silent with entire 2 hour lectures going by with zero questions. This discouraging environment was not just felt by me, but many of my friends, and is perhaps the most common complaint on Bruinwalk, going back years. In future, he needs to stop and ask if anyone needs something explained more in depth, and he needs to treat all questions, no matter how basic they seem to him, as serious for that student.
Finally, unlike in all my other classes where the forums section of CCLE was a place to ask questions of students and the professor, in Corbin's 1C we were provided no official place to ask the professor questions or hold a serious discussion of the material. The "Forums" of CCLE contain only two posts for the entire Quarter: a link to the GroupMe, and a link to the Discord. THAT'S ALL.
Instead, students were left to fend for themselves on a private GroupMe, with TA or professor to help.
This class had a cold, business-like feel, with the professor doing the bare minimum of teaching during the lecture time, and being completely absent otherwise.
I'm not idly complaining here. I enjoy physics and have gotten good grades in all other physics classes. The F AVERAGE of every quiz and the final should speak for themselves.
If you get stuck in this scary place, do yourself a favor and take it P/NP.

This was my favorite class in the Physics 1 series by far! Corbin made it seriously so interesting--especially special relativity, Maxwell's equations, and interference (those were my favorite). By far, this class was super hard and I studied a lot. However, you honestly learn so much and get a lot from how Corbin makes sure you understand things conceptually and aren't chugging textbook problems. Corbin is very scary at first but he has a big heart hiding behind is exams. Definitely, the final matters a lot--I did poorly on the quizzes throughout but did pretty well on the final. He grades on improvement and I think if you study enough, you definitely can get there.