PHYS 3650

If you are taking this course for fun, first of all what is wrong with you, and second of all don't take this course with Kolomeisky. If you are a physics major or are serious about learning quantum physics, definitely take this course with Kolomeisky. It is by far the most difficult class I've taken so far at UVA. Homeworks take a very long time (typically 10+ hours / week), and lecture material is incredibly dense. Professor Kolomeisky's lectures are pretty much straight out of Landau, which itself is a very dense and complex textbook. I highly, highly, highly recommend having a copy of Griffiths on hand for this course and reading about anything you are confused on there.

That being said, Kolomeisky really knows what he's doing and is an incredible lecturer and physicist. He takes some time to get used to, and can seem condescending when you ask a question, but he really does have your best interest at heart and will gladly make a time to meet with you outside of normal office hours. Give it a few weeks and you'll adjust as long as you commit to the class.

Also, there will most likely be a curve to be determined by Kolomeisky at the end of the semester. I believe there are many ways he can do it depending on the grade spread, but for our section he dropped the standard SIS grading scale by 12% so that an A+ was an 88% and a D- was a 48%.

Some keys to success in this course:

1) Make sure you have a good group of people to do homework with. Homework makes up the largest portion of the grade, and it is imperative to do well on homeworks as exam averages are often in the 60s.

2) Don't overthink exams. They are very fair, but also very easy to lose points on. The exams will NOT be on the most complicated stuff you go over in lecture, and they will NOT be close to the difficulty of a homework assignment. Make sure you know the basics of everything and make sure you understand all of the homework assignments that the exam covers.

3) Go to class. Kolomeisky will post his lecture notes, so it can be tempting to just skip class, but his notes are essentially a more difficult to decipher version of Landau. They should be used to go back and check anything you forgot from lecture, not to replace lecture. Go to class, ask questions, and you will be much better off.

Ultimately, this course is very hard and painful, but it's very rewarding on the other side and I highly recommend taking this course with Kolomeisky if you are serious about learning Quantum Physics.

#tCFF23

The way the entire course was set up was completely inconducive to learning. The first month was all about abstract math, and then once we got to doing actual physics it was all abstract and still not explained in a way where anyone understood anything, if it was explained at all in a broader sense other than specifically what he was doing while deriving. The class was taught in a completely different order of topics from all other introductory textbooks or online resources, so I could not try to further my understanding on my own. We were told we could use the Griffiths textbook, but the order of topics did not match up, since the professor taught out of Landau, a graduate level textbook that I'm pretty sure is not meant to be a first introduction to quantum mechanics.
The homework assignments take extremely long to complete and are very tedious except if you know the exact trick needed to complete that problem, which we are never taught. In class, the professor only ever derived formulas and discoveries and never did any practice problems to show us how to go about solving problems. The lectures were only rarely helpful for the homework assignments, and both were only rarely helpful for the midterm/final problems.
Before the midterm, he was asked to provide practice questions so we could gauge the difficulty of the midterm and see if our understanding was adequate, but he straight out refused. Although I think now that he has taught the class once he will just reuse past midterms for that, but him not wanting to put in the work to make up a few more problems to help his students already shows the type of professor he is. I did not feel comfortable asking questions because, while the professor was telling us to ask questions, we would be ridiculed and judged if we didn't know something deemed 'obvious'.
The averages for the midterms and the final were in the 60s. He ended up curving the class by 12 points so that no one would fail, but then he blamed the low grades on the fact that most people were co-enrolled in Classical Mechanics instead of already having completed it. I was one of those people, however now that I have completed both classes, I can say that nothing I learned in ClassMech would have helped me in quantum. The issue was his teaching, or lack thereof. He was talking and doing math, but he was barely explaining anything in a way that was accessible.
However—ending on a positive note since I don't want to discourage anyone reading this, with this being a required class—despite all of this, no one failed the class. He curved the final grades, the homeworks were graded fairly leniently, and he was usually nice about extensions.

There are three main components to the class: the lectures, the homeworks, and the exams.
The lectures were ripped straight out of Landau, which is a graduate-level textbook renown across our own Physics department for its incoherence. At the beginning of the semester Prof K-dog indicated that either Landau or the commonly-used Griffiths quantum books would be acceptable. The Griffiths book is not useful for the material taught in the class, despite its usefulness as a, y'know, normal comprehensible enlightening textbook. Go to lecture if you want. Or don't. He'll post his lecture notes which are word-for-word the blackboard derivations he'll do in lecture, and he's not particularly good at answering questions. To be frank he seems quite irritated when you interrupt his lecture to ask a question- surely the sign of an astounding educator.
The homeworks are not like the lectures. Some of them were fine, some of them were nightmares. The only good news is they're graded pretty kindly, and I found it difficult to score low on a homework. The bad news- that is, the rest of it- is that his allegedly "in-depth" solutions are in-depth in the same way a beach at low tide is, technically, in some depth of water. Some people claim he's useful if you ask him questions; I never had any useful successes.
The exams are wacky- not wacky like your uncle who travels a lot, more wacky like a baseball bat. They hit me hard. The average was in the 50%-60% range for both midterms and the final. Some people did very well, and I offer them props. I was, it seems, a deterministically average student, however. The exam questions are not like the homeworks are not like the lectures are not like the exam questions. Despite requests, he offered no practice problems for the exams. I remember him saying "You will not need practice problems, because there is nothing complicated I can give you to do in 50 minutes". I think he has forgotten the difference between complicated and comprehensible.
I recommend taking Math for Physics or Linear Algebra, as well as Classical Mechanics, before taking this class. It's a miracle the department does not require it.
The saving grace is the 12-point curve he applied to final grades. Granted, if your class needs a 12-point curve so that 2/3s the class can pass it, there's probably some other issue in the class, but to my knowledge he did not fail a single student. We are all lovingly permitted to take Quantum 2 with next semester (with him, of course). #tCFFall23