PHYS 1425

I cannot recommend taking this class. The lectures are terrible, he just reads right off of the slides and for practice questions just quickly shows the fully worked out solution on the board and says "you guys can look at this solution on your own time." He does not explain how he gets anywhere. The grading for the class is very strict, and even though there is a curve on all of the midterms (which you will do poorly on) the curve isn't really that nice. The homework questions are new and something you have never seen before, and you will end up googling solutions to more than half the problems in later homeworks.

If you've taken physics before at least the first midterm is all review and you should do fine there, but for the second midterm you are going to be teaching yourself everything.

Overall I would for sure not recommend versus other physics teachers my friends had who did short quizzes consistently and had a much more spread out grading system.

Norum's a nice guy who really does care about his students, and is very helpful and responsive on Piazza, but that's about where the nice things to say about this class end. The material is very fast paced, and it's sometimes unclear what material will actually be relevant and needed versus things added in for interest. Some of the demos are pretty neat, though. For a 9am MoWeFr class, this is a bit of a painful one... though as someone who attended all lectures, it was amusing to see the lecture hall empty during most lectures but packed for exams.

The grading breakdown is 20% homework (Mastering Physics online problem sets, usually about 10-13 questions per week due at 5am on Thurs [seems like a weird time, but tell yourself it's due at midnight, but with a grace period], 10 tries per problem, and open note/open person. Not hard to get 100% on the homeworks), 40% midterms (2 midterms - the second one is cumulative but weighted more towards recent material), and 40% final exam (very cumulative, weighted slightly towards the material since the second midterm). Our midterms were 16 questions MC (like, with Scantron sheets), and the final was 38. One question is for which version of the exam you have; one is for the honor pledge (so really 14 or 36 questions for midterm/final). Then, the average score is made to be a B, with people scoring about 0.5 standard deviations above the mean receiving an A, and 0.5 below a C. The means on our exams were 10.8 for the first, 8.8 for the second, and 21.7 or 23.1 for the final (depending on which section it was taken in). If it seems confusing, that's because it is, but Norum is willing to meet with you to determine roughly what your grade is going into the final. And in the end, the average GPA for our year was 3.24 (almost a B+).

AVOID NORUM AT ALL COSTS. I wasn't able to take physics in high school, which really made things difficult for me. Norum might be a knowledgeable physicist, but he's a terrible lecturer and simply rambles off a powerpoint for the entire class.

I found the online textbook to be really useful. That's the only way I studied for this class. I came into this class without having ever drawn a free body diagram in my life before, so the only way I really could learn was to sit down and read every chapter of the textbook. The online version is, in my opinion, actually written really well and can teach physics INFINITELY better than Norum ever can.

If you are unable to take this class over summer at a CC, take it with Zheng instead. It'll save your sanity.

Disclaimer, I never took physics in high school. This class was the first to show me that sometimes, going to lecture is a complete waste of your time. Instead, I read and took notes on the textbook and went to office hours for the weekly homeworks. Start the homeworks as early as possible, because they are DIFFICULT.

Pros of this class:
- the textbook is amazing and homework questions are taken from it
- many of the textbook questions can be found online answered in videos
- tests are curved

Cons of this class:
- NOT an intro course by any means. No one will teach you how to draw a free body diagram (I learned thanks to my amazing PHYS1429 TA’s)
- Norum is a horrible lecturer. Seriously lecture is not worth your time
- If you go to office hours and ask Norum to help you solve a problem, there’s at least a 30% chance that he won’t be able to help you. Keep in mind this is an INTRO class and he has a PhD. That should let you know how hard the homework problems are and how little he cares
- Norum is intimidating and mean. I knew students who were too scared to ask questions or go to office hours
- The tests are stupidly hard
- The course is too fast-paced
- The pre-req for this course is Calc 1. Norum (and the textbook) will use up to ordinary differential equations to explain concepts. Once again, this should NOT be an intro course.

Seriously, just take this class over the summer at your local college.

As other reviews have noted the lectures were generally dry. Norum was generally responsive to emails and willing to answer questions during lectures. Having taken AP Physics 1 and 2 in high school there was very little new content covered. I had been warned against taking this class by the registrar during my first semester at UVA because it requires vector calculus. I disagree with this, I do not think there was much (any?) difficult vector calculus or concepts in this course and that they would have been sufficiently explained in the textbook if there were. Norum's test are all multiple choice with no partial credit except for the final which had 5 questions where the work is graded. This made grading kind of rough because 1 or 2 questions wrong would hurt grade significantly. Weekly work includes a written chapter summary, MasteringPhysics assignment, open note quiz, and a group quiz(also open note) which help dilute the test grades. I would expect a very difficult class without prior physics knowledge.
#tCFS24

Professor Norum is a really sweet guy, but he is definitely not a great lecturer. The midterm exams are harder than the material that is given in class, and the class was painful to sit through. He does not go over the material well, and the practice problems in class are not explained, so you just have the answer without knowing how to format the information into an actual approach for a physics problem. He grades quickly, but other than that the class is mostly miserable.

Honestly, Blaine is chill. Sure he was present when the asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but overall he's a decent instructor. The lectures are super boring and no one shows up, but he is just a little old man on the verge of retirement.

Once, he spent 20 minutes out of a 50 minute class trying to fix the projector and just ended up trying to explain everything by waving his hands.

Even then, he cares a lot about his students and he's super helpful and kind during office hours (since it seems like everyone hates him, there's no one ever there so I pretty much had him all to myself for an hour every week and I could get all my questions answered). He'd even sit outside the classroom for 20+ minutes after most classes just to finish up answering people's questions. Even though his tests are harder than the other sections, he gives an extremely generous curve at the end of the term—I got a 77% and 67% on the midterms and a 86% on the final and still ended up with an A. His "rule" is as long as you get decently above the average you're going to get an A-/A. Despite all the negative things I heard about Blaine when I first signed up for his section, he was actually a good professor (maybe a bad lecturer, but very helpful otherwise). You just have to know he's just so so so so old lol.