PHYS 1425

Grouchy is a pretty good professor and teaches the content fairly well. Sometimes she was a bit dry and it was easy to zone out. Even if you don’t fully understand a lecture or miss a lecture, she posts the notes and supplementary materials. The weekly group quizzes can also be finished outside of lecture time and were due 10pm. The textbook homeworks aren’t that difficult. The most annoying parts of the course, in my opinion, is the chapter summaries, which are designed to introduce the concepts to you before in-class lectures. I found them not useful and a chore to complete. Towards the end of the semester, it was very hard to reach out to the TAs for grading discrepancies, as they would not respond. I personally never attended any P2L sessions and ended the semester with an A, so as long as you put in the work it isn’t a terribly difficult class. It just moves a bit fast.
#tCFS24

Overall, this course can be difficult if you have no experience with physics, but if you work hard and seek help you should have no problem. The weekly work consists of reading that you're supposed to do (but I never did, because the reading quizzes provided a summary with everything you need to know), a reading quiz, chapter summary, and homeworks that usually had about 6 sections with multiple parts in each. This definitely wasn't my most time-consuming class but you need to stay on top of the work because there is something due every 2 days.

Out of 3 class meetings a week, 2 of them were lectures and one was a group quiz. The lectures were okay, I usually had difficulties trying to pay attention, but I'd recommend redoing the in-class problems before exams because they were quite helpful. The group quizzes could be tricky, but you can ask a TA to check your answers while in class (plus you're working with 6-7 other people) so you shouldn't have much trouble with them.

Professor Grouchy is an extremely kind woman who truly wants her students to succeed. Everyone bombed the second midterm, but she let us do corrections to get up to half of our points back. Additionally, she felt so guilty about that exam being so difficult that she gave us ~40 problems and told us that she was going to be creating our final exam from those questions. This took a lot of stress away from my finals season. I would definitely recommend taking this class with her if you can.

Professor Grouchy has really lived up to her name.

I have never had a professor that seems to have so much enthusiasm for her subject yet manages to explain her work in such a horrendously dry manner. Listening to her lecture felt like drinking hot sand from an old boot.

This professor would write the solutions to the practice problems without giving any explanation of the work she was doing, why the variables were suddenly transforming into random numbers, and she would regularly miss my raised hand amidst the sea of bleary-eyed students playing wordle and connections, which was honestly a better use of their time.

I am not sure if this is common for intro college course exams, but the median on the 2nd exam was a 51%. Let that sink in. 50 percent of the class scored below or at a 51%. In an intro physics course. It was SUCH an awful exam that she had to give out two sets of test corrections, with the first only having two questions from the entire exam that took the same block of time to complete that we were allotted for the entire 12 question exam. This, admittedly, was not intentional by her, but it caused an immense amount of stress for all of the students, and she did not let anyone know how the test corrections would impact the final grade until 10pm before the night of the final exam, allowing all students' grades to exist in a state of limbo.

The thing that really pushed me to write this review, however, was not the sub-par lecture skills, but it was her incredibly rude attitude. There were several occasions in which students in my table group would ask her questions during quizzes just to receive snarky, antagonistic, and honestly unprofessional responses from her. She was consistently rude when questions were asked, to the point where my table felt safer asking the TAs (god bless their hearts, they were amazing) the questions. Finally, I ended up getting very sick from a medical procedure and I politely requested a slight postponement of my exam. While I am not pre-disposed to any messages of well-wishing, as I am not a deity, I was declined in an incredibly rude manner, with her email not including any explanation for the rejection of my request. I even received an email later on from UVA staff that revealed that all professors are able to extend exams until as late as the 8th of May, which is within the range of days that I requested my exam to be postponed until. She simply decided to say "nuh uh".