text: Winter 2019 - I'm leaving this review for Physics 110A (E&M). Professor Bachtis was a nice lecturer with a sense of humor and a not heavy, perfectly understandable accent. I'd advise that you attend class frequently and go to the discussion sections as missing a single class can set you back in the course material. He is a fairly happy understanding person. Feel free to approach him if you have questions or need assistance. The median was an 86% on Midterm 1 (Mainly Physics 1 content) and 50% on Midterm 2. The final was fairly difficult. SELLING course materials including past exams (BOTH midterm/final) and HW solutions. *************
  Winter 2019 - Professor Bachtis is a pretty cool and helpful professor who clearly enjoys the material and teaching students. For the final exam, make sure to understand the midterm exam solutions in high detail as we were tossed questions that were highly similar with minor changes/nuances. The first midterm exam was pretty simple and mainly based on more advanced Physics 1 material. I would have done much better in this course if I didn't bomb the first midterm. The median was an 86% on Midterm 1 and 50% on Midterm 2. Make sure you also get all the points possible on HW since the solutions are widely available. The professor has a pretty lenient grading distribution and does not fail any students with around 35% getting an A+, A, or A-. I recommend taking 110A with this professor. Selling a collection of all past exams (both midterm and final) with full solutions and detailed grading rubric, homework solutions, and highly organized course materials including lecture notes and grade distributions for the exams/homework: *************
  Fall 2022 - Bachtis is one of the most entertaining professors in the department. I would love coming to lectures and especially because the content of this class was amazing. Everything from 110A comes together in such a beautiful way imo. The grading scheme consists of homework, two midterms, and a final. The homework was pretty straightforward and straight from Griffiths. The two midterms I thought were not very representative of what we learned throughout the class though. They were difficult and worded weird. The final was very fair however. Despite this being a tough class it was probably my favorite class in undergrad so far, especially when you get to special relativity.
  Fall 2023 - The entire class, you just do one experiment with in a group of 3-4 students. Most of the quarter you're setting up circuitry and the last few weeks you collect and analyze data. Generally at that point you start running a program and check in with it in a few hours/the next day to see if the data you're getting makes any sense. There's a written midterm and an oral exam/practical, which isn't super hard but might be intimidating. The final report had a very low page cutoff for my group and we really struggled to fit what we needed to say in the limit. Our data was kinda awful and we didn't have room to explain why or what we would have done with our analysis if our data was more like it was supposed to be, which led to a pretty bad grade on it. You'll be needing to reach out to the prof and TA a lot since generally a lot of stuff breaks in the lab that you won't be able to fix yourself. Most of the lab work is done in your own time so this can require a lot of communication.