TLDR: Not an easy A (as someone who took this class with no physics background). The professor has framed the class so that he drops one of three big assignments (two exams and a physics project), meaning you can only miss a set number of points to get an A. The two in-person quizzes are where you need to put in your maximum effort because the exams are online take-home. However, overall, it's not worth it for a general education...

How Things Work with Dr. Neu is honestly a great class. The workload is very light overall—the homework takes almost no time, and I did not really find it necessary to do the readings outside of class. There are in-person quizzes, which can be annoying, but they are not very hard if you study for them. I never took physics seriously in high school and still finished with an A-, so it is definitely manageable for non-science people.

That said, because this is UVA and a lot of students do very well in the class, I would not necessarily call it an “easy A.” The course is curved, so a strong raw grade does not automatically guarantee the highest final grade. For example, I had around a 94/100, and that still was not enough for an A. There are also two take-home exams, but they are not difficult if you pay attention and use the material. My biggest tip is to take the quizzes seriously because they matter a lot. If you do well on those, you should be in a very strong position to get above an A-. The TAs are chill, and Dr. Neu is extremely enthusiastic, with a lot of cool demonstrations. Attendance is not strictly mandatory either, but there are PollEV questions almost every class for participation.

How things work is an interesting class, but I struggled as I had absolutely zero physics knowledge beforehand. That being said, Professor Neu made the process a lot more bearable. Professor Neu is by far one of my favorite professors that I've had the pleasure of knowing. He is very passionate about what he does, and always super excited during each class. You can tell that he cares about the course and wants his students to learn. There's a lot of emphasis on pretty basic formulas (which I struggled with as there were many to cover), as well as applying concepts to working problems. The textbook readings are pretty important, and necessary if you have no physics knowledge, as Professor Neu assigns pre-quizzes that take information found from the textbook before the content is taught in class. Overall, I think that if I had a little more knowledge regarding physics, I wouldn't have had as much trouble with understanding the content, but being a slow learner as well as completely new to physics, I had a difficult time. All that being said, Professor Neu is genuinely such an awesome professor and I definitely want to see if he has any other courses I could take.
#tCFS24