PHYS 1425

The lectures were pretty boring but the demonstrations that Prof. Norum did very interesting. In terms of homework, the load is not too bad - you only have 1 weekly web assignment. That said, the homework can get really, really hard. The exams were pretty difficult but it helped that they were multiple choice questions. The class is curved, so be on your toes to keep ahead of the pack. I was averaging a 80s in the first two midterms - on route to an A/A- after a curve, but slipped on the final and ended up with a B+ instead.

Blaine is a decent professor, not the best, but he's sufficient. The demos are usually pretty cool. The course is not extremely difficult. Two exams with 20 multiple choice and a final. He is sort of helpful with homework questions. Usually the TA is better to ask for help. Decent choice of professor, don't expect him to be amazing though.

Norum is a very nice person but is a fairly “stereotypical” professor. He isn’t the best at explaining and lectures can be boring when there aren’t a lot of demos. Material is a lot and moves very fast but good homework. Fills the requirement and isn’t too bad with a little studying.

The lectures are worthless, the only reason it is beneficial to go to class is because the clicker questions are 10% of your grade. Norum's demos are interesting and they definitely help, but for the vast majority of classes he just sits in the front going over solutions to various problems the whole time. Many of the solutions are hard to follow because he reads the problem and then goes directly into the solution, giving us zero time to think about it ourselves. Almost all the things I learned in this class were self taught from the textbook. There is also a weekly homework assignment due at 5 am for some reason, with ZERO credit given for lateness. I would not take this class unless you have to. Physics can be a fun subject but this class doesn't do it justice.

Unless your major will directly use alot of this class's info like in Civil Engineering etc... its practically useless (and UVA being a CS and BioMed focused school, this is probably a lot of you) and thus you should take it at a Community college or something. Tests are impossible, averages being between 50 and 60% and the final worse than that. You have to pay to make an account on MasteringPhysics to do hw and its just busy work that you learn nothing from. Lectures are as bland as watching paint dry and even if you do manage to pay attention, good luck trying to decipher Norums explanations of problems or formula derivations. You have to show up because he has clicker questions tho. All in all, its p obvious Norum does not care about this class, he lectures from slides that a textbook gave him, he assigns hw from a pre-designed website and makes us all pay for it, and he has his TA grade everything so do yourself a favor and avoid this class. If you do have to take this class, do not fall behind, take notes on the pre lecture before class, go over them after class, and chill in the back w/ your laptop doing other work because lecture is a waste of time apart from clicker questions. Godspeed.

The class was pretty boring, but Professor Norum does his best to make it interesting. The midterms are curved a lot, which helped the people who only kind of understood the material do okay on the tests. A lot of student have already taken Physics in high school, which puts them at an advantage. I had never taken a Physics class so it was tough to keep up with the material enough to get the grades I wanted on the exams. I ended with I at least think should have been a B+, but only the top 25% of people with B's get a B+, so even if you have an 87/88 you can still end with a B like I did.

Prof Norum is very sweet, but brace yourself because this is going to be a difficult semester. I took this class during COVID so lectures were all asych, but I imagine that they are better in person. Learn from a few of my mistakes:
-If you haven't taken physics before, don't start with it here. A lot of folks in this class were able to sail through the first part of the semester because they had taken it in high school.
-Write down formulas as you go. If it looks like a formula, write it down. Later, you can go through and organize them onto a formula sheet with their appropriate unit. A problem that Norum has is that it's not always clear which formulas he wants you to be familiar with, so it's easy to get lost looking for the right one to use.
-Start the homeworks early. This is hard if you are a procrastinator like me, but it honestly really helps because then you can go to office hours before they are due at 5 am on Thursday. One thing that helps motivate me to do this is going to office hours to work on it and then work until you have questions, or scheduling a tutoring session to work on it.

I took this class completely online and it was not good. His lectures are hard to follow and by the end of the semester I was barely holding on. Norum seems like a nice guy but the class is big and my lectures were asynchronous so it was difficult to get help on lecture topics (but I never went to office hours). He gets EVERYTHING from MP and the homework can be difficult and time consuming, but are good help. The exams are all multiple choice and not very long, but also not weighted much. The final exam on the other hand is long and counts toward a lot more of your grade and is cumulative but is weighed more with content that hasn't been covered on the other exams. I'm going to be honest, I barely passed this class, but if you stay motivated and enjoy physics, it shouldn't be too bad. The only other things is that it is basically impossible to calculate your grade because he is not clear at all of what your grade will be when he curves it, so do not rely on calculating your exam grades for your final grade.

Quick disclaimer, I took this course during covid so I'm sure the online format was only a detriment. That said, I really really struggled in this class and I don't want to completely attribute that to the format or content - I truly believe that this class is simply not structured or taught very well. First, Prof Norum is really unclear about what's important during lecture; he spends half his time deriving equations beyond the scope of the course and fails to explain what's important and what isn't, which makes exam prep really difficult. The Mastering Physics problems are also really variable in their difficulty, and a lot of the time you need to extrapolate pretty far from what you learn in class. This can be really frustrating and time-consuming, but that isn't my main issue with this class. My main issue was how the exams fit into the rest of the class. The practice problems provided for each exam were almost never representative of the actual exam difficulty (being either too simple or far too challenging), which made it really hard to feel confident in your level of preparedness. That sort of uncertainty doesn't serve you well when the exams are really hard. I strongly recommend against taking this class with Blaine.

DO NOT TAKE IT!

I was one of the few kids who actually showed up to lecture, and it still did not help. You would learn the same amount even if you did not show up. The professor barely explains anything and almost assumes you know everything. I literally rely on youtube to teach me everything- and I mean everything. Good thing I took AP in high school otherwise this class would be even worse.

I like the curve aspect, but what sucks is that since the exams are all multiple choice, there is NO partial credit. If you can, transfer this credit, or get a different teacher because you really will not learn in this class. The examples in the slides are so easy but then everything else is super complex. Textbook isn't bad but it's so hard to read all those pages when you have no basis and need to work on other classes.

The grading is also bad, 20% HW, 40% midterm, and 40% final. The other teachers spread it out a bit. This class is basically cruising by all semester and then cramming right before the exams.