PHYS 1425

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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+).

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.

DO NOT TAKE IT!

I was one of the few kids who actually showed up to lecture, and it still did not help. You would learn the same amount even if you did not show up. The professor barely explains anything and almost assumes you know everything. I literally rely on youtube to teach me everything- and I mean everything. Good thing I took AP in high school otherwise this class would be even worse.

I like the curve aspect, but what sucks is that since the exams are all multiple choice, there is NO partial credit. If you can, transfer this credit, or get a different teacher because you really will not learn in this class. The examples in the slides are so easy but then everything else is super complex. Textbook isn't bad but it's so hard to read all those pages when you have no basis and need to work on other classes.

The grading is also bad, 20% HW, 40% midterm, and 40% final. The other teachers spread it out a bit. This class is basically cruising by all semester and then cramming right before the exams.

Quick disclaimer, I took this course during covid so I'm sure the online format was only a detriment. That said, I really really struggled in this class and I don't want to completely attribute that to the format or content - I truly believe that this class is simply not structured or taught very well. First, Prof Norum is really unclear about what's important during lecture; he spends half his time deriving equations beyond the scope of the course and fails to explain what's important and what isn't, which makes exam prep really difficult. The Mastering Physics problems are also really variable in their difficulty, and a lot of the time you need to extrapolate pretty far from what you learn in class. This can be really frustrating and time-consuming, but that isn't my main issue with this class. My main issue was how the exams fit into the rest of the class. The practice problems provided for each exam were almost never representative of the actual exam difficulty (being either too simple or far too challenging), which made it really hard to feel confident in your level of preparedness. That sort of uncertainty doesn't serve you well when the exams are really hard. I strongly recommend against taking this class with Blaine.

I took this class completely online and it was not good. His lectures are hard to follow and by the end of the semester I was barely holding on. Norum seems like a nice guy but the class is big and my lectures were asynchronous so it was difficult to get help on lecture topics (but I never went to office hours). He gets EVERYTHING from MP and the homework can be difficult and time consuming, but are good help. The exams are all multiple choice and not very long, but also not weighted much. The final exam on the other hand is long and counts toward a lot more of your grade and is cumulative but is weighed more with content that hasn't been covered on the other exams. I'm going to be honest, I barely passed this class, but if you stay motivated and enjoy physics, it shouldn't be too bad. The only other things is that it is basically impossible to calculate your grade because he is not clear at all of what your grade will be when he curves it, so do not rely on calculating your exam grades for your final grade.

Prof Norum is very sweet, but brace yourself because this is going to be a difficult semester. I took this class during COVID so lectures were all asych, but I imagine that they are better in person. Learn from a few of my mistakes:
-If you haven't taken physics before, don't start with it here. A lot of folks in this class were able to sail through the first part of the semester because they had taken it in high school.
-Write down formulas as you go. If it looks like a formula, write it down. Later, you can go through and organize them onto a formula sheet with their appropriate unit. A problem that Norum has is that it's not always clear which formulas he wants you to be familiar with, so it's easy to get lost looking for the right one to use.
-Start the homeworks early. This is hard if you are a procrastinator like me, but it honestly really helps because then you can go to office hours before they are due at 5 am on Thursday. One thing that helps motivate me to do this is going to office hours to work on it and then work until you have questions, or scheduling a tutoring session to work on it.

The class was pretty boring, but Professor Norum does his best to make it interesting. The midterms are curved a lot, which helped the people who only kind of understood the material do okay on the tests. A lot of student have already taken Physics in high school, which puts them at an advantage. I had never taken a Physics class so it was tough to keep up with the material enough to get the grades I wanted on the exams. I ended with I at least think should have been a B+, but only the top 25% of people with B's get a B+, so even if you have an 87/88 you can still end with a B like I did.

Unless your major will directly use alot of this class's info like in Civil Engineering etc... its practically useless (and UVA being a CS and BioMed focused school, this is probably a lot of you) and thus you should take it at a Community college or something. Tests are impossible, averages being between 50 and 60% and the final worse than that. You have to pay to make an account on MasteringPhysics to do hw and its just busy work that you learn nothing from. Lectures are as bland as watching paint dry and even if you do manage to pay attention, good luck trying to decipher Norums explanations of problems or formula derivations. You have to show up because he has clicker questions tho. All in all, its p obvious Norum does not care about this class, he lectures from slides that a textbook gave him, he assigns hw from a pre-designed website and makes us all pay for it, and he has his TA grade everything so do yourself a favor and avoid this class. If you do have to take this class, do not fall behind, take notes on the pre lecture before class, go over them after class, and chill in the back w/ your laptop doing other work because lecture is a waste of time apart from clicker questions. Godspeed.

The lectures are worthless, the only reason it is beneficial to go to class is because the clicker questions are 10% of your grade. Norum's demos are interesting and they definitely help, but for the vast majority of classes he just sits in the front going over solutions to various problems the whole time. Many of the solutions are hard to follow because he reads the problem and then goes directly into the solution, giving us zero time to think about it ourselves. Almost all the things I learned in this class were self taught from the textbook. There is also a weekly homework assignment due at 5 am for some reason, with ZERO credit given for lateness. I would not take this class unless you have to. Physics can be a fun subject but this class doesn't do it justice.

Norum is a very nice person but is a fairly “stereotypical” professor. He isn’t the best at explaining and lectures can be boring when there aren’t a lot of demos. Material is a lot and moves very fast but good homework. Fills the requirement and isn’t too bad with a little studying.

Blaine is a decent professor, not the best, but he's sufficient. The demos are usually pretty cool. The course is not extremely difficult. Two exams with 20 multiple choice and a final. He is sort of helpful with homework questions. Usually the TA is better to ask for help. Decent choice of professor, don't expect him to be amazing though.

The lectures were pretty boring but the demonstrations that Prof. Norum did very interesting. In terms of homework, the load is not too bad - you only have 1 weekly web assignment. That said, the homework can get really, really hard. The exams were pretty difficult but it helped that they were multiple choice questions. The class is curved, so be on your toes to keep ahead of the pack. I was averaging a 80s in the first two midterms - on route to an A/A- after a curve, but slipped on the final and ended up with a B+ instead.

I came into this class feeling pretty confident about physics but boy was I wrong.. this class goes super fast (new unit every week, aka every 2 lectures) and it's very easy to sort-of/not-really understand things and google your way through webassign, until the exam comes and you're fucked. Did this for the first two exams (which are straightforward but very hard if you don't thoroughly understand the material), but actually took the time to learn everything before the final and got a 95. I learned that the nice thing is that physics is not really studyable so if you stay on top of things, and actually figure out the webassigns throughout the class, you won't need to study for the exams since they just test concepts.

This class was probably different for me because I took it during the summer, but I didn't think Norum was all that bad. His lectures were pretty much straight from the book, but he was easy to understand and follow. He would even crack a joke or two. Homework was time consuming and tests were very tough, with the average hovering around a 60%, but there is a big curve and he was generous with partial credit. The final was along the same lines as the test, but if you were able to Ace it, it would replace your final grade.

50% of the 2011 class cheated on their final. Honorable people who had above-average scores throughout the course ended up with below-average grades. If you take this class, have some integrity.

The class was really boring. Norum is an awful professor. The tests are really hard but there is a very generous curve for this course. Doing HW problems doesn't help much in this class as the problems on the test are completely unrelated to the HW problems.

One of the most complained about class for a first-year e-schooler. Lectures don't help at all, no one ever goes, you can't hear him or read his blackboard notes, tests have average of 40% to 60%, homeworks are totally irrelevant, and one of the most frustrating classes EVER. Many opted to take physics somewhere else, you should too.

The problems on the mid-terms and the final are nothing like the homeworks. Lecture doesn't help very much, and reading the book will only help you but so much. My suggestion: study and do the work in groups, it helps a lot.

Awful class.

This class is really hard but unfortunately it's required. I've heard bad things about Conetti, so I recommend you take it with Norum. Everyone fails the exams so as long as you stay above the average you're fine.

He made many mistakes during lectures which hindered my ability to learn, because I stopped trusting what he was telling us.

Don't waste your time going to class