Prepare yourself for a long rant but plz read if you have to take this class with him bc you can’t get into anything else or whatever, like actually do:

Tung, tung, tung…

The things I would’ve said to your face if I could’ve, but you were too scared to show up to ur own final. Today when I see an email bright and early saying send an individual email to a. Support team for each question his STUPID BROKEN website graded wrong, and then signing off the message with good luck with the rest of your exam prep when our exam was on Wednesday…lord have mercy. I was trying to mentally recover from the torture he put us through and he won’t let me heal. this man is the single most unprofessional teacher I’ve ever met. Genuinely (pardon my French) what the ever living fuck is your problem? I understand having a medical or family issue but let’s be fr about what ACTUALLY HAPPENED (according to Tung himself):
The first week of classes were cancelled on Oct 19, bc he said he woke up feeling ill
After that no information was given and we were asynchronous to the final, receiving 3 or 4 emails total, all of which were chat gpt and most of which were incorrect. Bro spent more time correcting himself than he did ever on the actual class material. I really do understand having a family emergency I’m not evil, it’s just if it was really so time consuming that you can’t answer an email, show up to class, have a zoom OH every once in a while, DO ANYTHING AT ALL!!! You would probably not have a) in person exams, b)EXAMS AT ALL (for what teaching????) c) IDK MAYVE GET SOMEONE ELSE TO LECTURE LIKE YOUR EXTREMELY LOVELY AND COMPETENT TAS.
More on that literally bless Jinyan and James heart. I was soooo exhausted after the final and delirious and I was tearing up looking at them collect tests bc they tried so hard to help us went absolutely above and beyond but clearly understood how unfair it was. I feel like they got equally as screwed over as us and i really admire the work they put in to clean up the mess to the best of their ability. Without their review sessions at the end we prob wouldve gotten a class average of 10% or less (maybe we did idk). Plus certain ppl lowkey insinuated we were cheating on the midterm 2, which is hilarious bc the class average was a b so he knew in his heart that he didn’t teach us well enough that we could’ve possibly gotten a b (midterm 2 is notoriously easy in comparison to the other exams). Bro admitted he hadn’t been teaching at all and gave us an in person final.
My actual advice to anyone who has to take this class:
I know from other people under normal conditions that he is a conceptual based teacher. My take on his teaching style is he spins a ball in a circle and then asks you to calculate the rotation of the earth.
His lectures are worthless, don’t go, unless ur required too. Sometimes he puts 5% sometimes not. I have never seen him get any part of the website he plans to take attendance on to work. Just don’t go or literally doesn’t matter he will show you videos of nuclear weapons and stuff and walk thru one problem, symbolically to derive the equation you need to solve a problem that is 10000000x harder.
For midterm 1, ur gonna do bad no matter how you study. Can’t help you on that front, you will learn nothing, have no idea what’s going on, and do bad, sorry about it.
Midterm 2 I got a near perfect score, did not cheat. Go thru all of his practice exams for like 5 years back bc he won’t give you one and make a list of all of the hardest questions he’s ever asked. That will be what the exam is, he is too lazy to make new questions.
The kudus I think might help around midterm two time, other than that ask for answers, get quizlet, or chat gpt them. It’s hundreds of questions and will eat up all of ur studying time for absolutely zero reward. Do not spend any time doing the Kudus after midterm 2.
Okay now for the final. I no joke, lost my mind studying for this final. The finals week and subsequent all nighter I pulled after watching the review session where the TAS LAUGHED about how impossible the exam was… it was actually like going to war. I could not eat, could not sleep, could not read bc of anxiety and just mental overload. Idk what he expects you to learn in the two weeks between the midterm 2 and the final, but whatever it is it’s not possible in that amount of time. I would only pay attention to the review sessions with the TAs.
Make a group me and participate in it, make sure he or the TAs don’t weasel their way in.
Never ask Tung for help if you really need personal help as the TA or a smart person in ur class. Spend the time you have from skipping his lectures to pray and watch organic chemistry tutor videos/professor dave explains. Nothing else will save you.
To conclude:
I can’t stand unprofessional stuff like this it made me go insane to be dragged along and just randomly being told something every two weeks, stopped watching his lecture videos after 2 weeks of him talking about centrifugal force for 3 hours back in summer 1A PHYSICS. I literally made my wallpaper the screenshot of the slide saying “what about centrifugal force?” Bc every single lecture started and ended with that slide. For two full weeks I learned that centrifugal force is a fictitious force bc no force goes radially outwards only radially inwards. Luckily the exam was one question that said what about centrifugal force? And I thus got a 100 in the class.
Yall it was comical!
Class was so poorly planned that I laughed out loud when I opened the final. sincerely lost my sanity over this class it was AWFUL and the last kind of stress I needed with all of my other hard classes.
UCLA should be better than this, I understand it was a tough situation, honestly would’ve been understanding if I had ever heard it from his mouth, not chat gpt, not a TA, BUT HES TOO SCARED TO SHOW UP.
If you can’t tell I genuinely cannot stand this man. I hate the reviews where people are like bad teacher, good guy. Sorry? What about this man is good? He single handedly and without a care in the world ruined the careers of like 600 students? HE DIDNT EVEN GET THE FINAL DAY RIGHT ON THE SYLLABUS LEADING TO MASS PANIC AND CONFUSION!!!! How do you fuck up everything to the point you can’t write 3 numbers down without fucking up? He’s just sloppy, he takes no care in his work, but gaslights everyone into thinking he’s nice, when he’s just plain and simply not. Plus he has a pattern of disappearing like this only to reappear with an exam weeks later, crafted by Lucifer himself. That’s prob where he was, travelling to the 9th circle of hell to speak to the whispering trees of condemned souls and writing exam questions with them.
Yall, I am not even kidding, listen to my words. I am a trooper, I do NOT get scared of hard classes, I opened this final and literally almost vomited from the stress of just reading it.
In the end, I Honestly I think I will do okay among many others who worked their asses off, I don’t care, it cost me my health and sanity so he could spend 30 seconds every 4 weeks to put a prompt in chat gpt and send us the wrong shit for the exams. moreover, KUDU needs to be removed from the internet as a terrorist threat? Plz don’t ever. Dont ever. Why would you have a website that is admittedly useless to our learning and assign HUNDREDS OF QUESTIONS. WHY IS THETE NO SUBMIT BUTTON ALSO????? the user interface is like intentionally bad. Please guys heed my warnings, do not solve the riddles three of tung. Don’t try. Wait for someone else. Fuck this class backwards upside down sideways in any shape or form I don’t care -********************/10
(Also, my fellow F25 5A soldiers, I will remember you forever we have been through the valley of the shadow of death. Everytime I see that g force spinning carnival ride, or wake up screaming thinking tung tung sahur is going to come get me with la polizia I will think of you 💔💔💔 hopefully our slaughtered GPAS can comfort eachother in the grave.)

I have very mixed feelings about this class. It started off strong, but then Tung left right after week 3 and did not come back until week 10. The class starts being really easy, and then you get hit by a semi truck. It doesn't help when you have to watch videos from 1A and not even the actual class. The midterms are hard but fairly reasonable if you can self study quite a bit. Jinyan and James, the TAs this quarter, were absolute angels. They were very understanding to the students and picked up Tung's slack. I do understand that Tung had some medical family complications, but he could have prepared MUCH BETTER for his absence. I think Tung as a person is a kind, charismatic man, but I don't even know where to begin on his teaching. His demonstrations are fun, but at this point in the quarter I am realizing that this may have been a coverup for his poor lecturing skills. He spends an entire class period going over ONE problem, and three different ways to solve that ONE problem. Then he tests us on 3-4 of those long ass problems, and expects us to know how to do them. Kudu doesn't help at all either, I wish Tung gave us actually written homework problems. This class is AI slop, even the professor can't help but send out a CLASS ANNOUNCEMENT with "Here is the revised, finalized draft. It's ready to copy and send." If you want to take a class created and facilitated by chat gpt, this is your best bet. Otherwise, I would avoid Tung as a physics professor. Great man though.

This course, during the Fall of 2025, was definitely not ideal for Professor Tung, since his wife was undergoing medical care, but he left week 4 and switched us to online pre-recorded lectures and came back week 10. I kid u not, this made it so difficult for not only me, but everyone I spoke to in the class. On top of this, the online prerecorded lecture videos were NOT for physics 5A, yet they were instead for physics 1A, which is AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT COURSE that is taught at a different level and different speed. This clearly displays Professor Tung's lack of preparation when teaching this course. This is a very heavy course, and when your professor disappears for more than half of the class (Both midterms came back right before the final), it feels nearly impossible to perform well in this course, let alone simply passing. I hope this is not the case for everyone who has taken this course with Professor Tung, as he is a sweet man, but he should have known better than to teach this course. He additionally sent out an email with an AI prompt in the title and then claimed it was "a personal draft" he left in the email by mistake. His lack of accountability as a professor is incredibly unprofessional, and I highly suggest you stay away from Professor Tung for the time being; that is, until he is capable of actually showing up to his job. :)

Side note: he had only ONE office hour held before midterm 1 that was on Zoom, not in person. That should not be allowed. A professor teaches this course. The TAs had to end up teaching the entire class, all while Professor Tung was ghosting them just like he was with us students. I am very fed up and angry since all of this was fully out of the student's hands. Professor Tung thinks he is being engaging by doing little stunts in class, but beware that those are fully a waste of time, and he is busy dressing up as Indiana Jones instead of explaining the never-before-seen problems he's putting on the midterms/final...

I fear I would give a -10 / 10 rating for Professor Tung. :(

Worst class I have taken at UCLA. Tung tries to be funny and sweet but his exams are hard and not the materials which he goes over. He left our class from midterm 1 to 2 and only posted recorded lectures from 2024 PHYSICS 1A. He was going through a family matter, but it was something he knew was going to happen and fail to plan ahead. I have never struggled so much in a class because we are soooo behind in lectures to the point where labs end up being on things we haven’t covered. He is a poor educator and failed his students this quarter as a professor leading to failing students.

Heading into this class, I already knew from other reviews that his exams lean on the theoretical, conceptual side over calculations/plug-chug. HIs exams did reflect that, and I would say was particularly true for the first midterm (which was not that great for many people, as it was a lot of short answer for free response). Be warned that the somewhat new test format included a good amount of multiple choice, which could make/break your total score, as each question could easily be worth 3 points. You should actually learn the concepts to do well, and above the level that the slides go into. His lectures are genuinely pretty engaging with frequent demonstrations (Tung is very knowledgeable with strong interests in the material he teaches), but I wish he provided more practice resources that's not only the kudu (long, though not as difficult). I found the second midterm easier, as it was more problem-solving and I liked some of the circuit material. The final wasn't too bad, and going to TA reviews definitely helped. The only unfair thing was that the two lectures were a few days apart taking the final, and the test ended up being incredibly similar.

His lectures were impressive,,, I felt like he truly understood the kind of "physics fantasy" many freshmen come in with. Topics like astronomy or quantum mechanics naturally fascinate students, and he leveraged that excitement to keep us engaged. He seemed genuinely kind and thoughtful.

I liked the idea of giving unlimited homework attempts to discourage reliance on AI tools.... that showed he was trying to promote real understanding. But honestly, I’m not sure how well it translated into exam preparation.

Personally, I found the homework platform’s UI/UX a bit frustrating and distracting.

I also heard that he would give extra curve or grade boosts to lower-performing students if we consistently did quizzes and homework, but I’m not sure if that applied to me in the end.

The first two midterms were totally fine, I had no issues at all with them and was on track to get an A in the course. And then the final came... I am not going to say that I was the best prepared I could have been for the final, because I was not. However, that final was horrible. While Tung did not reck my 4.0 as I did not have one before, he did wreck my chance of getting latin honors.

Like many others, I thought this class would be a free A and be pretty easy, as it was for the first 8 weeks. Professor Tung's lectures were fun and engaging, and were recorded, though he takes attendance through Kudu, but if you have a friend, someone could tell you to log on remotely. However, this class was horribly paced. Too much time was spent on simpler topics such as kinematics, projectile motion, and forces and not enough content was spent on during class as Tung rambles about some random topics. By week 9, Tung was rushing to get through all the material, such as equilibrium and torque, making it super difficult to grasp these topics in time. Even though Tung had said the final would be cumulative, it wasn't and was almost completely based on torque. While he does give extra credit, it barely matters if you do well on the midterms. I had As on both the midterms and still ended with a B in the class.

Like many others, I thought this class would be a free A and be pretty easy, as it was for the first 8 weeks. Professor Tung's lectures were fun and engaging, and were recorded, though he takes attendance through Kudu, but if you have a friend, someone could tell you to log on remotely. However, this class was horribly paced. Too much time was spent on simpler topics such as kinematics, projectile motion, and forces and not enough content was spent on during class as Tung rambles about some random topics. By week 8, Tung was rushing to get through all the material, such as equilibrium and torque, making it super difficult to grasp these topics in time. Even though Tung had said the final would be cumulative, it wasn't and was almost completely based on torque. While he does give extra credit, it barely matters if you do well on the midterms. I had As on both the midterms and still ended with a B in the class.

To preface: If you have never taken an AP Physics class, or something along the lines, be ready to put in double the work that your peers are doing. Everyone is relearning concepts from their high school classes. Physics taught at UCLA is tough with any professor.
Tung is honestly overrated. Everyone praises him for being a great professor, but in all honesty, he is just like any other Physics 1 series professor. His format is deriving equations and doing practice problems at lecture, then doing practice problems at home.

Any physics class here is heavy self-studying.