PHYS 3650

I have a controversial take in that I enjoyed this class with professor Pfister - I learned the Fourier transform extremely well, which has given me a leg up in other classes, and we still got a fair amount of QM treatment, albeit at a faster pace than I would have liked.

Pfister makes it very easy to succeed in this course (by setting a ridiculous curve - a 25% overall is a C-) but does not set you up to succeed in the individual assignments of the course. He is a fantastic and engaging lecturer, but his lectures usually cover material that is helpful for learning the material (especially the math) instead of the actual material. Most of the learning in this course comes through the extensive homeworks he assigns weekly. These homework assignments (which varied in length from 5 to 15 hours) usually do not tie into material covered in class and require you to learn the quantum mechanics to complete (the textbook, Cohen, is not much help here as it is at the graduate level and hard to understand without background in the material). To do this, you are almost forced to spend hours a week in office hours to complete these homework assignments and learn the actual material of the course.

I learned a lot from this approach, however it forced me to put a huge amount of effort into this class (for reference, homework averages were usually in the 60s). This approach also made it very difficult to tie different concepts together making this course feel relativelty directionless.

Pfister's exams are not necessarily hard, but the averages were still around 60. He asks fair questions, however the way he taught the course made it very diffcult to piece together exactly what to do for the problems he posed in the limited time given (in class) (and the final was so hard he had to curve the scores 20+ points before applying his final course curve where a 58 is a B....).

It is very possible to do well and get an A+/A/A- in this course, but not without a lot of work and some luck on tests and I still don't think I was prepared well for Quantum 2.

The class is curved a ton so the grades aren't as terrible as you feel like they will be throughout the semester. This class is very hard, and from checking out other Quantum courses and hearing from other people, Pfister does not teach this the way it normally is taught. He spent the first half of the class teaching linear algebra (since it is needed for the class but not a prerequisite), which was helpful, but then not really used much in the rest of the class. He spent each lecture deriving complex math equations that rarely seemed to tie into any physical phenomena. The lectures were out of order with the homeworks almost every time, and the book was not much help either. I would recommend trying to follow along throughout the semester with some other lessons or books on quantum mechanics if you want to somewhat learn the subject, but you'll also have to understand Pfister's version of quantum mechanics for the tests.

I really disagree with how Pfister operates this course. It's not super hard to do well in it, since a 50% is curved to a B on his scale, but you won't come away with an understanding of quantum mechanics. Instead, you'll get a really long treatment of concepts like electromagnetism, fourier series, and linear algebra. Then, in the last week, you'll get a rushed treatment of the infinite well, harmonic oscillator, and hydrogen atom, at a level of depth less than what is taught in Modern Physics. His priorities for this class result in very little being learned and he makes Paschke's life very difficult in Quantum II because students come in with very little knowledge of quantum mechanics.

This course is very difficult. Pfister is an engaging professor and appears to want to help students, but ironically is not much help in office hours. The homework poorly reflects what is learned in class, so don't expect that going to class will help you understand the homework better. The good news is the homework is graded very generously. The tests are absolutely brutal, but at least there's only a midterm and a final and he wants the average to be around a 50 so there's a strong curve.