Gabriel Freiman is without a doubt, the WORST teacher I have ever had anywhere, and I’ve had horrible teachers before. I’ve had teachers that actively belittle and mock students, teachers that have been fired for physical assault, teachers that don’t even bother showing up for class sometimes, and in all honesty, none of those teachers reached the insanity that was Freiman’s Physics 1A.

The very first thing you realize when taking Freiman’s class is that Freiman has no organizational skills whatsoever. For starters, the Bruinlearn page for this class was not published until the second day of the first week, and to add on to that, the page published was completely disorganized and clearly intended for a different class. It took several days for Freiman to update the page to reflect the current class, and even now, the page is still a mess. For some other examples of Freiman’s nonexistent organizational skills, lecture slides and recordings are often posted hours, if not days late, equation sheets for exams were missing many equations, lecture material were often incorrectly locked behind Bruinlearn modules, Freiman takes weeks to grade exams, etc.

Freiman is not transparent about grading - he provides no way to accurately calculate grades, and has changed the grading scale during the quarter. The class is graded on an absolute grading scale, as well as a class curve (ie. top 10% gets an A, 50% B, 80% C, etc.). You get the higher grade of the two scales. Freiman does not provide anyway to measure yourself against the class, and since the exam are so hard, the vast majority of the class will possibly be graded on the class curve, so most people have no idea what grade they will get (if the class curve even exists at this point).

Freiman’s lectures are a sick joke. Freiman has a horrendous French accent and has the English communication skills of a third grader. The pacing is awful - Freiman goes incredibly slow on very basic example problems (ie. plug and chug f = ma difficulty), but will then speed through incredibly important concepts by simply dumping formulas with no explanations whatsoever. The lecture slides he post are similarly useless - all they consist of are the formulas with no explanations behind them, the same extremely basic example problems Freiman spends 5 years going over in lecture, and stupid GIFs of people pushing boxes or pandas rolling or whatever Freiman feels is slightly related to the lecture’s topic. It doesn’t help that the class relies on Kudu’s online textbook, which is confusing and awful to study from.
Speaking of Freiman’s nonexistent communication skills, trying to communicate with Freiman is a chore. Freiman takes days to respond to emails, and when he does, his responses tend to involve him either demonstrating nonexistent reading comprehension, or simply trying to dodge the question. It doesn’t help that his office hours are conveniently placed at 8:30 AM and last only 30 minutes long. I can only begin imagine how useless his office hours are!

Let’s talk about discussion sections. Discussion sections, like just about everything else in this class, are awful. They are mandatory, yet are completely useless, thanks to the TA Michael Wyatt, who just like Freiman, is horrendous at teaching physics. For starters, the discussion sections are consistently behind the lecture’s topics - for example, week 4, the discussion was still focusing on kinematics, while the lecture was moving on to conservation of energy and kinetic energy. Additionally, the discussion worksheets are both hard (granted, the difficulty is partly created by Freiman’s nonexistent teaching skills), and worst of all, they are graded extremely strictly. I’ve lost points on the discussion worksheets for simply writing the incorrect symbol for work! Wyatt does not explain his insane grading standards for the discussion worksheets, and frankly, it seems that he just deducts points for the sake of it.

Every week, we have pre lecture assignments due on Tuesday and homework due on Friday, both during noon. Tuesday’s assignments are stupid - they are three incredibly basic questions, yet are often not officially taught in lectures beforehand. The homework, on the other hand, is absolutely insane. The questions asked are extremely hard, and because they are due at noon before Friday’s lecture, often involve material involving topics that haven’t been officially taught yet. On top of this, sometimes the homework involve material that are straight up taught weeks later, if not in future Physics 1 classes or Math classes not supposed to be required for Physics 1A. If you try to do these homework assignment legitimately and not use Quizlet or Chegg, then maybe you can finish the homework by the end of summer. The one saving grace is that the homework are “graded on completion”, which is a relief as otherwise everyone would have an F in terms of absolute grading.

Now for the fun part - the exams. They are a fucking disaster. They are all multiple choice exams, which doesn’t sound bad until you realize that for the midterms they were 20 physics questions given in 50 minutes with very little partial credit (the final was also 20 multiple choice questions, however they were considerably longer). The exams involved extremely conceptual questions that were completely different from the style of the questions given in the homework, discussion section, and lectures. Nearly all of the questions on the exam covered material and problem solving strategies never taught properly by Freiman, with midterm 1 even involving material that had not been officially taught yet.
There were supposed to be five extra credit labs, but one of them was never published and another was only assigned yesterday after the final. The extra credit labs are extremely tedious and take hours to do, and because Freiman has been extremely vague about how the extra credit helps you, if you’ve done enough work to earn the extra credit, etc. it’s honestly not worth wasting your precious times over these stupid labs.

I should’ve made my point clear by now, Freiman is a fucking joke, and should not be teaching anyone, let alone college students. Frankly, it is insulting that UCLA, a school that calls itself “the #1 public university” thinks that someone like Freiman is an acceptable lecturer, much less a lecturer you’d expect from such a highly renowned university. Had I known that by choosing to come to UCLA, I would’ve had to go through the misery that was Freiman’s physics class, I would have definitely went to another school.

TL;DR: Don’t even consider choosing Gabriel Freiman as a professor for any class. It’s appalling and telling that I’ve spent 100x more effort writing this review than Freiman spends teaching classes.