PHYS 2010

Taught over zoom, I was very disappointed in this class. Teo's lectures were essentially the textbook word for word, and little was done to make Physics interesting or engaging. Teo was not very approachable, not many office hours were offered. Exams inconsistent, some easy some immensely difficult; in general there was very poor communication.

I want anyone reading this review page to be very cautious when thinking about enrolling in PHYS 2010 here at UVA. I took this course as a third-year out of general fear that the negative testimonies I've heard about the class were true. To preface what I am about to say, I will not be taking PHYS 2020 at UVA simply because of how poor the instruction/ design was for this course. The class itself was somewhat hard to engage with Professor Teo, in the sense that I could not grasp the material he was presenting - his accent was somewhat thick and his sentences are concise (assuming that you SHOULD naturally think like a physicist, thus he does not state everything explicitly). There were not a lot of office hours to attend in the sense like other classes where there are many TAs; we only had 2 graduate student TAs and 1 grader that I felt somewhat intimated to talk to (as again they assumed that being physically oriented was second nature). There is no online discussion board/ Piazza to consult with your peers. The homework assignments are typically 8-9 questions and are at times a little bit of a stretch from what is discussed in the book, but doable (note they do not represent exam-level questions). The exams were awful. Horrid. The exams were divided into multiple sections (i.e. a different assignment on WebAssign for each section); in order to go to the next section, you had to complete the previous section of the exam. Okay, that's not great, but then they made it so you had only one attempt to submit your answers. So essentially you had to jump-the-gun and just bite your tongue on a lot of questions. I typically star and come back to the more difficult questions, but this formatting forced you to move-on and never look back. Then for the final, they also designed it so that each section would count down from a timer once you opened it and would automatically close itself. To top it all off, the questions were pulled out of hell itself; yeah maybe 35% or so were pretty easy, but the rest were far beyond the book and the homework. I spent at least 12 hours a week practicing for this course, desperately trying to understand an already difficult topic (I assume most people like myself are not "physics wizards"). I just wish that I had taken physics at another university where maybe instruction could have helped illustrate the concepts more or offered more resources to help me learn physics when concepts were difficult, as opposed to me just wasting so many hours of my life on a class I despised and struggled with. I ended up with an A in the course after working consistently on the material, but again, I will not be returning for PHYS 2020; believe the rumors you hear and try to stay away from the UVA PHYS department.

This class was a train wreck primarily, I think because it was taught online. Lectures are essentially from the textbook, and I just did not attend them at all, and Professor Teo sets up the class so you are essentially just competing with classmates for the top grades (rather than actually caring about your level of understanding of the material). The exams were not curved but the grades for the entire class were set off of the class average score (aka, if the average score was a 56%, that would be a B). The exams were wack, insanely timed/set up, and really hard, basically going way beyond the scope of the problems on the homework or even in the back of the textbook (to prepare for the final, I basically did every single problem in the back of the textbook and none of them were of the caliber at which the exam questions were written). I would expect that this class would be substantially different if not for COVID, so take this review with a grain of salt, but just know that Teo is pretty ruthless as a professor in general.