Alright this class is definitely not a walk in the park but is definitely not the worst thing to take. The class has 6 labs and will likely change depending on what quarter you take it in. 5 of the 6 are with your group with the last one being solo. For each lab you're given roughly 1 and half weeks to work on. The labs are NOT the same level of difficulty. Anything involving fluids is easy, anything involving stress-strain analysis is mid, and anything involving heat transfer or thermo is painful & really long. For example, the thermodynamic analysis lab where we evaluated a refrigeration system wasn't difficult but was painfully long to analyze the data. We had to make 4 T-s Diagrams, 2 Mollier Diagrams, get COP coefficients ideal and non-ideal, Superheat, and then 3 P-V diagrams. This is just the data analysis by the way, so once this is done you still have like 80% of the report to write. BUT, professor Hu is not a demon. He grades generously and you'll get anywhere from a B ~ A depending on the level of effort you put into it; so not all hope is lost. Also, your experience in the class is dependent on you group members. So please choose a decent group if you can, if not just hope for the best. Lastly, remember how I said there is an individual report ? Yeah, you get to have the enjoyment of writing one of those beasts on your own. But be smart, in the beginning of the quarter he lets you choose your group # and depending on your #, you'll be given a different solo lab report. Now you didn't hear this from me, but the easiest solo lab report is the flow measurement one :) Also do not confuse this class with 157W, that beast is different.

One of the best professors I have had at UCLA. Professor Hu's class is very enjoyable. He cares about students' understanding the materials and he is very knowledgeable about it. I believe that I learned a lot from this class and it helps prepare me better for my future career.

Professor Hu is absolutely amazing. He is very smart and always very helpful for the class. He really cares about us students and makes sure that we all understand the content. The classroom settings are a little outdated: Some computers were old and slow; Experiment equipment seem to be existing for more than decades. But the professor made the class easy to learn and very enjoyable. Overall, the professor is excellent and I enjoyed a quarter of learning experiments and data analysis.

Regarding the lab report, the professor created different categories which helps. You can find lab reports from previous years which are helpful as references, but be careful though, there was a group in my class copied the whole lab report from previous years and they were caught by the TAs (yes, the TAs are very sniffing). Well, UCLA honesty policy is strictly enforced here.

Honestly, the professor isn't even that bad. The class though-the class is a Kafkaesque nightmare of busywork, unclear instructions, useless material, aging equipment (they use computers running Windows 95! your tuition dollars at work...), and did I mention the bulk of your grade is tied to group reports? A student desiring to do well in this class must do so at the cost of participating in more worthwhile activities, because the amount of crap you have to deal with will blot out the sun. Prepare for long nights spent doing the mental equivalent of digging holes in the ground and filling them in, with the added knowledge that you're going deeper into student loan debt for the privilege to do so. This class is proof that the MAE department does not care about the quality or relevance of undergraduate education. As you perform monotonous tests abandoned by industry decades ago and contemplate just ending it all while sifting through the garbage heap of meaningless data, remember this warning and don't complain that nobody told you It'd be THIS bad.