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.

Everything you've heard about this class is true.

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 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.

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.

I feel like I don't really need to write anything bc all the other reviews have said it all. My least favorite class so far at UCLA. Only 2 units but SO much work. You're spending at least 8-10 hours a week to do a lab report that is basically useless. The last two lab reports are combined (6&7) and this took me almost 20 pages and 20 hours of work. The formatting is v strict and you don't really know what is considered "correct" formatting until you have had points taken away. The lab manual doesn't explain things well and you're either left with unsatisfactory data or data you don't really know how to use until you struggle over it for hours back in your dorm room. The curve that is set makes sense in theory since TA's grade with different harshness; however, it makes NO SENSE that 1/3 should get As, 1/3 should get Bs, and 1/3 get Cs. You're graded against the approx. 20 other people in your class meaning only 7 of you will get an A. (not including A-'s). That means if you're working with a partner (or two), the chances of you getting an A is relatively small. tldr: horrible class with extremely heavy workload for 2 units and terrible curve. I would say not to take it but you don't have a choice :-)

Objectively worst class I've ever taken in my life. The TA grades you on things you possibly can't know (ie centering charts, or your text is too large, or your lab report has gaps that are too large). You almost feel bad cause it's the terrible professor making the TA grade so harshly. Overall, this class is spitting in the face of UCLA's physics department and should be reevaluated/removed entirely. You will not learn anything.

This class is a blemish on the academic standards of UCLA

I lost 10 points in my report due to a pretty silly "mistake" (they can define anything to be a mistake to create an artificial curve) .
Had to drop because this class was ruining my quarter.

Retook it, made sure to correct that mistake. -10 again:-
Why did you do it this way? You were supposed to do this *exactly how I did it last quarter*

Fuck this class, fuck the TAs, fuck the professor (who never shows up btw). Hope this class comes under the probe of academic senate and he pays heavily for it

This class is absolutely ridiculous and poorly run. Most of what I have to say has already been said below, with regard to the failings of this class to actually teach any useful physics or have a consistent grading scheme. I did have a nice TA, but unfortunately niceness does not make up for petty grading and a lack of clarity in what was expected for lab reports. Nevertheless, he did have a great quote about this class - "It's not a physics class, it's a report writing class" - with which I agree wholeheartedly. This class does NOT teach you any physical concepts - you are working at a much higher level of complexity in the 1 series. Yet beyond that, it barely even teaches you scientific writing. The majority of the red marks on my returned lab reports had nothing to do with the quality or style of my writing - they were petty points taken off for graphs or other formatting that didn't look EXACTLY as the professor desired (even though many of these requirements were written exactly NOWHERE in the lab manual). What would make this class more palatable is a required format for lab reports listed at the top of the lab manual, so one doesn't have to search through the 100 page long lab manual to find what the professor wants for each section. Beyond this, however, would be a much greater emphasis on physics and a lesser emphasis on the style of writing Prof. Campbell wants grad students to come into his lab with. My only theory for why Prof. Campbell tells the TA's to grade the reports with such a laser focus on minutiae is that grad students were coming into his lab not knowing how to write physics papers. For the 5% of the class who are physics majors, this MAY be a worthy use of their time (and that 5% is a generous estimation). For the VAST majority of the other students, this class is a waste of up to 13 hours a week (including lab time) for a 2-unit class who's grading scheme punishes smart classes. Overall, this is an extremely poorly designed class that is useless for many majors (especially CS, which I am). Hopefully, departments throughout South Campus will begin to realize how useless this class is for their major and STOP making it a prereq.