PHYS 1425

I took this online. The prerecorded lectures had some interesting demonstrations, but I missed being able to hear other students' questions. It was nice to be able to do everything at your own pace and fit it into your own schedule. The exams are given with the in-class section and graded with theirs, but this did not seem to be too big of an issue. The professor spoke very monotone, and did not have an approachable attitude. Overall, not the most terrible option to tak this class. I didn't try terribly hard and did decently.

Thornton is by far the best of the worst for mechanics. He loves conceptual questions that trick you on tests.

Make sure you're awake for the iclicker questions, they do indeed have an impact on your grade. Other than that, make sure you have a comprehensive equations sheet made for the exams- if you're given this advantage, don't waste it.

Worst class ever. Thornton blazes through slides at light speed and nothing he says is really pertinent to the HW/exams. When I took this class, the average on the second midterm was "too high" (~83), so to make up for it he wrote the next exam to be so hard that the average wasn't even a passing score on a ten-point scale (~55). Just answer the clicker questions and as long as your within the stdev on the exams (~65-75) you'll manage a B.

Best of the Physics teachers. Clicker questions so you have to go to class because he knows it's worthless. Allows a one page formula sheet. You will learn everything on your own from the homeworks

Boring class. Thornton just reads off his slides the entire time and posts them online, so there would be no reason to go to class other than the daily clicker points, which are 10% of our grade. Supposedly Thornton is one of the better of the 3 intro physics teachers, and the class itself wasn't difficult, so if you're an engineer and have to take physics, you might as well sign up for this class.

He seems like a god compared to the other professors...which shows how poor this entire department really is. Thorton is a terrible lecturer and asks a lot of clicker questions which forces people to go to class. The problem is I get more from sitting in my room reading the book for one hour than to listen to him ramble on and on about how to derive formulas. Happy to be done with him.

Professor Thornton is probably the best of the 142E profs. He knows what he's doing, and has cool demos, the problem is that it is often difficult to follow his train of thought during the lecture or during his working out of problems. This means lots of looking in the book to figure out the homework sets.