***FOR PHYSICS 5C***

This is hands down the worst class I've taken at UCLA. Here are some reasons to convince you not to take the class:
• Lectures were mostly screenshots of the textbook and were extremely disorganized
• Final lecture was 67 screenshots from ChatGPT
• Homework was done on Kudu and often included extra concepts we didn't need to know + confusing to understand how it connects to class content
• Midterm 1 included calculus we never learned; not a single person in a 300 person class received an A on it (highest was a 92)
• Curve is based only on the highest score, not the median??? So if the high is a 95%, curve is 5% no matter the median???
• Homework is only 5% of the grade, so exams determine almost everything
• Little to no partial credit
• No access to midterm or quiz solutions
• Quiz 5 did not provide constants until halfway through
• Practice final contained multiple incorrect solutions. Sometimes lectures/homeworks contained errors too so you waste so much time searching for the correct answer and doubting yourself
• Tried to put 5a content as "challenge problems" on the practice final like bruh
• He went on a tangent about how he saw that his class was "too easy" online so he made it harder this quarter and how "doctors shouldn't get easy As"

I could genuinely go on and on about how awful this class was. Mckeown is a nice guy but he should've just kept his previous teaching style instead of this switch up. Save yourself and drop it.

**FOR 5C**

At the beginning of the quarter, I thought McKeown's strengths included his willingness to listen to student feedback and his accommodating nature. However, I soon realized his weaknesses were significant. His slides were unhelpful, and they were not published until after the lectures at first, which made it difficult to follow along during class. I disliked how his slides were often just copied and pasted from the textbook and contained whole paragraphs without highlighting the key points we needed to focus on. Since he read directly from the slides, attending his lectures didn't contribute much to my learning.

I appreciated it when he wrote on the board, but his writing was often too small and messy to read clearly. Additionally, his slides were disorganized, making it challenging to identify the problems he presented. I wish he provided more resources or practice worksheets, as I found his files to be unorganized, and the modules tab could be organized better. I think it'd be more effective for my learning if he could just write and project it on the projector.

I have mixed feelings about Kudu, the site for our homework and textbook. While I appreciate that there is an AI assistant to help with homework, I still encounter numerous errors in the questions. Furthermore, the Kudu text sometimes includes extra information that is not relevant to our tests.

I was also bothered by his comment about making his tests harder and including challenge problems involving advanced calculus at the beginning of the quarter. He stated that he received feedback suggesting his class was "too easy," which made him feel like he wasn't a "real" professor. As a student, I find that very discouraging to hear. If his goal is to teach effectively, then he shouldn't make things "harder" in such an indirect way. It seemed a little tone-deaf when he said these challenge problems would "only be 15%" of the test. Since I wasn't clear on his expectations for what we should know as students, this just made it overwhelming to me. Even though I went to his office hours, I still don't feel like I've learned much from him. At this point, I think time could be better spent just grinding out practice problems or watching YouTube videos.

I do feel like tests can be straightforward at times, but not enough room is given on the paper to show all our work. I appreciate that he put more consideration into the time it takes to do each problem, but I wish he provided more practice tests. I often felt like I needed more time on the tests, which I think is a common sentiment.

Overall, he has some likable qualities, but the class is very disorganized, which can be overwhelming and negatively impacts my experience as a student. I understand that physics is mostly self-taught (as he emphasized), but I feel that the lectures aren't helpful enough, and I wish we had more resources available. However, he offers some extra credit and is willing to curve in a way where the class average would be a B, but he said it'd be more difficult to get an A since too many people got an A in his class in the previous years and the department didn't like that -_- I think I just unlucky with his class this year with it being a lot harder

Actually review for 5C!!*
This is the most horrific professor I've ever had. NEVER TAKE A CLASS WITH HIM EVER. I need him to pay for my therapy. He has no idea how to teach, uses screenshots from a textbook that he didn't share with the class. Doesn't give enough resources to actually do well in his class - students are forced to find their own resources. Always blames others for his mistakes. Intentionally makes his tests difficult so that "he would be taken seriously by people online" and so that "individuals wouldn't go into the medical field for the money."

I had Dr. McKeown for Physics 5A (for some reason not listed here), and going into the course, I was concerned that we would be learning a lot of irrelevant, technical physics that wasn't related to my career path as a pre-med student. However, this wasn't the case, as Dr. McKeown correctly designed this course to be relevant to pre-med students by including topics and concepts that are actually relevant to biology and medicine. Because of this, I was interested in the topics of this course and found what we had to learn to be intriguing rather than tedious.

Additionally, Dr. McKeown's lectures were helpful, on-task, and weren't boring. He always stopped to take questions from students and clarified everything thoroughly, which not all professors do. I felt that our quizzes and tests were very reasonable and had nothing unexpected/surprising that strayed from the lectures/homework. I also appreciated how he gave us unlimited attempts/graded the homework on completion, rather than correctness, so we could actually use it as a learning source and not an assessment.

Overall, I would highly recommend taking a course with Dr. McKeown as he is passionate about Physics, and teaching his students in an effective and legitimate manner. You definitely won't regret taking a class with him.

Personally, I disagree with the reviews below this one. McKeown's an interesting, quirky, and cool guy, but his class is interesting (in a bad way). I normally don't write bruinwalk reviews but felt the need for this one because the professor could make a lot of adjustments to make the class even better. Out of all of the physics classes I've taken, his class was the easiest, yet I managed to do the worst in it, which I think this is due to the way the class is taught and ran. His slides are an absolute mess. Slides are supposed to supplement the textbook, summarize the material, and make learning easier for students. His slides are literally just screenshots of every paragraph in the textbook, and the textbook is relatively mediocre at explaining concepts. Screenshots normally don't bother me but when your powerpoints are over 100 slides long just to explain a concept that can be explained in a few bullet points, I have to reconsider. The lack of effort put into these slides is especially annoying during lecture as he just reads off of them. The textbook will occasionally talk about deriving an equation by "adding equation 32.21 and 32.18" and he will just screenshot that and read it word for word during lecture... How are we supposed to know what equation 32.21 and 32.18 are!? It would really help if he wrote his own notes instead of reading off his screenshots from the textbook as he is not that bad at explaining some things. Now, let's talk discussion. I normally go to every discussion for every, single class I take, but this class managed to discourage me from going to discussion. Discussion does not add anything really to McKeown's class. The TA just retypes homework questions in LaTeX and tells us to work on problems. I could see it as helpful if you're not finished with the homework, but if you are, there is really no point in going. It would be nice if new, original problems were written that were a bit more challenging to students rather than something we could just find by scrolling the homework. That way, we would actually be learning some new applications and skills that could help us in our upper divisions. Lastly, I do not like the tests in this class. Tests seem to just be measuring if we can convert units. Seriously, I think some of his questions are pulled from the textbook as they have so little to do with physics and rely more so on unit conversion and plug and chug (this isn't a high-school chemistry test on dimensional analysis). The exams would be a lot better if they were just in terms of variables. Myself, and a lot of other students, have lost many points due to calculator and unit errors, which is pretty dumb as that doesn't test our ability to understand physics but rather out ability to use a calculator and convert units. Tests are also pretty poorly formatted. I don't know why he writes them the way he does, but everything just looks like its screenshotted from the textbook and pasted into a google doc. For example, sometimes he pastes the figure in the middle of the question and his questions usually either give too much room for work, or not enough. He gives designated space for each question which is nice, but I think it would be easier if he just wrote the question at the top of one page, and gave us space underneath it so that one question takes up one page and we wouldn't have to flip back and forth. It would also really help if he used equation editor (not a joke). McKeown's tests are some of the most poorly formatted/ugly exams I have seen; they hurt to look at. Text is unnecessary big and any values or variables given are not typed into equation editor so they look extremely messy and hard to read (ex. m_electron = 9.109x10^-31kg is something you'll have to get used to dealing with and reading). McKeown often also stresses that the average for the class should be around a B-, and his tests get him there but not in the way they should. Instead of making questions difficult and more physics-oriented, the points you lose seem to come from calculation mistakes and incorrect units. I don't think it makes sense if your class average is reached not because the concepts tested were hard but rather because your students made mistakes because the units given on a test were funky. Advice for future students: take McKeown if you want a fair, easygoing professor, but don't expect to learn the concepts as well as students who take it with other professors. I personally regret taking it with McKeown as I feel as if I learned more on my own from videos and from just doing the homework than from the professor himself. Unless he changes his ways, I would recommend to suffer a little more and take a different professor as you'll learn the concepts better.

The best physics professor I had so far. He’s very caring, supportive, and passionate about learning the material. I didn’t actually consider him a professor because I did consider him as a father to his students. His exams, quizzes, and homework are fair as long as you study well. I def recommend taking it with him.

McKeown is the best professor in the physics department. Super kind, fair, and understanding lecturer, Take it with him no matter what.

Professor McKeown genuinely cares about whether his students are understanding the material. Both midterms were exactly like the homework and his final was basically based off all of the homeworks completed. He is very understanding and listens to his students! I hated 1a and tolerated 1b but this professor made me actually interested in physics. I 100% reccommend anyone who needs to take the 1 series to aim for Professor Mckeown!

McKeown is an amazing guy and a very fair professor. He makes physics accessible to everyone. His quizzes and exams are very fair and similar to both his lecture and the homework. He gives adequate homework to really help you understand the lecture material. I really like the textbook as well, and I find it really helpful for me to tune into his lectures and then read the corresponding section of the textbook after. Considering how I took 1B in Winter 2023 (over a year by now) and how I got a C+ in that class (worst class I've ever taken at UCLA especially as a CS major who will never need physics in my life), take it from me: McKeown makes physics accessible to EVERYONE. I hate physics and I still do, but damn did I really enjoy his class. He's just an overall super nice and chill professor and I really appreciate how fair he tries to be. It's a shame that the UCLA physics department is so stingy with their GPA quotas because physics should not be made as hard as it is at UCLA, but I have faith McKeown is a step in the right direction for the future of UCLA physics.

McKeown is a super passionate professor who wants to spread his love of physics to his students (he almost made me think I could be a physics major for a second until I took one of the midterms lol). His understanding of the topics are unmatched, and he loves to go into details of any questions students ask during lecture. This unfortunately led to us getting off schedule, and skipping over the optics unit entirely. There is a few homework assignments due every ~2 weeks, but at the end of the quarter we had 3 assignments all due on the same day after the final? Which was odd but great preparation for the final. I read from the textbook for every single unit we had, and this combined with McKeown's helped a lot (I just am a bad test taker). Overall he is a great professor, semi-great lecturer, but I heard his office hours were super helpful too.