The worst class ever at UCLA. If you are taking this class it is because you have to cause of your major, so I will list the keys to do well.
-You will never see the professor and the TA grades all your work, so become best friends with them. I went to my TA's office hours every week and was always the first person there. I made many mistakes in lab reports and didn't lose points because he overlooked them thinking I was a good student.
-Talk about how the calculations should be preformed with the TA in office hours and the reasoning behind the uncertainty calculations. I was able to convince my TA multiple times my way of finding uncertainty was better so it was almost as if my report was the rubric helping me get good grades (another reason to become friends with the TA)
-The lab reports take many hours, most of them 1000+ words long and need nice looking charts from excel so start early
-Practice editing charts on excel so they look good and practice basic excel coding before you start
-One thing I like to do was write the excel code before lab. After collecting the raw data I would input it into excel and the code would automatically produce the graph I wanted, I could check and make sure the data was correct before leaving lab or redo the experiment until I got correct data
-Read the lab manual before not enough time in lab to read it and do the lab
-Take the class with one friend in your section and can choose one lab partner to be with for the whole class (just set nice to them on the first day)
-Be very careful about lab reports one or two mistakes takes you grade from an A to a B, the grading is just dead awful.
Overall this class is a pain, but at least it is not curve to a B- anymore so it is slightly easier to get a good grade. Pro tip this same class if offered at UCSD and UC Irvine over the summer and in these college over 70% of students get A's and all they do is very easy worksheets. So u could take it over the summer there and get away with an easy A by doing no work (I wish I did this)

This is one of those classes that you might develop a sharp adversity to like I did (my TA was Zhenyu She). Physics is my favorite subject, but the lab hardly focused on physics concepts, only the very basics. The rest is tedious, at times frustrating, stressful if you leave it to the last night, but somewhat satisfying when you finally finish the lab report. The labs mainly train you to write in the style of professional scientific works, and the grading is rigorous. Not gonna lie, I definitely teared up multiple times doing labs for this class lol, but I also didn't read the lab manual beforehand like some of these reviews said to, and I would usually take 2 days to do each lab. For some reason they took me forever, and the last and longest report (your final) took me 20 hours. So MAKE SURE you reserve time for this class.

That being said, it's only 2 units!! Just focus on passing and following the manual. It's annoying that a class with such a harsh curve but low units takes up so much out-of-class time.

This class is so much work, but I thought it was very worthwhile. Do not take it if you're just looking to satisfy your lab requirement, as you're going to live and breathe optics. If you're genuinely interested in optics, you're going to learn so much and have meaningful projects to put on your resume. The lectures were very long, and I wish Professor Hamilton would give us a 5 to10-minute break halfway through the 2-hour block, but they were helpful background for the labs. Professor Hamilton is very engaged in the actual course and will stop by during your lab just to check in. He is clearly very knowledgeable about the material and wants you to succeed. Your TA definitely makes or breaks this course, and I feel that I got really lucky because Arthur does research in Professor Hamilton's lab. Would definitely take again.

He's okay. Not particularly great, but not bad either. The homework problems are mostly algebra (despite the fact that TAs were okay with calculation software) and were quite uninteresting. The final exam and the second midterm had some fun problems. The content of the course is extremely exciting, though Prof. Hamilton doesn't have the infectious enthusiasm of many other QM professors. Griffith's QM, the textbook, is as terrible, but Shankar's book and Youtube will help you a lot.

I don't care that I didn't get the best grade in this class as I felt like I learned the most out of any other core-series class. This class made me realize why I was studying physics. The content was very interesting, and Professor Hamilton explained it in an intuitive and interesting way. Some people criticize him for being a mundane lecturer, but I really liked how thorough his lectures were and how he approached explaining concepts from varying angles. One of my favorite classes and favorite professors in the department.

The instructor is nice. He is willing to help students and answer questions. He is a great person, and I would love to take his course again.
The problem is the course content. I would rather die than doing any AMO experiments in my life again. I completely lost interest in AMO. The elective of optics is not offered, so all theory is new to me. I have to learn the theory and the experiments while writing all the reports and pre-labs. All of this takes all my time. All the experiments except the last two take so long, and when I left the labs, it was always mid-night. At least I can say confidently that there is no homeless people on campus in midnight because I was really physically on campus. The experiment s were hard to conduct, and sometimes the TA did the labs for us becuase we spent hours on it and couldn't succeed. For example, in the cavity lab, all the alignments were done by the TA because all our attempts failed miserably. After the labs, we spend so much time writnig reports and answer questions, but the TA grade harshly for some ridiculous reason. After constantly grinding and failing, the hopelessness made me lost hope of life and I started to weep lonely. Another thing to mention is that there is so much information in lecture, and every week after the lecture, my brain is cooked. I don't understand anything from lecture, and I have to self-study. Basically, I self-studied all the theory part, spending days and nights reading lecture notes myself. The instructor did his best, but we have so much material to cover in so little time. This should be a multi-quarter course. I now have a PTSD for lab course. It is completely different from my experience in an actual lab.