PHYS 1429

Take it at a community college. Class is unorganized, poorly graded, poorly taught, and poorly run. TAs will be incorrect about the right way to do things and assignments, and the TAs who check your work and direct classes are not the same ones who grade so the entire grading scheme is totally random and inconsistent. Content isn't hard but grading is random so you can't even expect a decent grade knowing the material. By far the worst class I have taken at UVA so far, and I will not be taking Physics 2 lab here because of that.

Way too much work for a single credit hour class, grading is very harsh, not enjoyable at all (to even someone who likes physics). Don't recommend taking it if you have a choice.

The TAs thought this course not the professor. The course itself was a pain - both uninteresting and tedious. A good portion of your grade comes from lab reports and your grade in that depends on what group members you get so it's essentially a lottery. The TAs were great people and helpful.

This course is a lot of work for one credit. I took this course when it was online, so all of the Pre-Labs, Post-Labs, and Lab Reports were due on WebAssign. The class is taught primarily by TAs so make sure to email them if you have a question. Your lab group is extremely important to your success in the class, I was fortunate to have all of my group members pull their weight. Definitely GO TO OFFICE HOURS if you have questions and write lab reports strictly according to the rubric they give you, because they are graded out of 20 points and they take off points for the smallest of things, such as not having the correct number of sig figs or not explaining the experimental setup properly. The TAs are extremely helpful and understand what you're going through because the majority of them have taken the course.
It is doable to get an A, but it's a lot of work. Physics 2 lab is much better and had fairer grading in my opinion.
ALSO: Kazu is an amazing TA for this class, if you get him, you're extremely lucky. He gives great explanations of the labs and helps walk you through it!

This class was really quite terrible. I took it during covid which probably didn't help, but it really seems like every element of the course was working together to make it the worst experience possible. The professor never had any sort of interaction with the class at all and was essentially unreachable - the lab TAs introduced the content and the grading TAs looked at our assignments, so I'm not sure what this guy was getting paid for. One of my lab TAs was actually a pretty nice guy, but the other was generally unhelpful and seemed to get really frustrated every time my group didn't understand something (which didn't exactly inspire a lot of love for the course). The grading TAs seemed really arbitrary in their decisions, and if you got one of the worse ones, too bad! I understand that a lot of folks have to take this class (and for that I'm sorry) but if you've tested out and are considering taking it again for some reason, reconsider.

I'm writing this less to tell you anything that hasn't already been said and more as therapy for me to exorcise the nightmares of this class from my brain.

This will be the most unjustifiably difficult and most deeply unsatisfying B you will ever receive in any class, period. If your lab group includes the second coming of Albert Einstein (one guy in my section filled up two blackboards with uncertainty propagations every class and his group was ready to build a statue to him by the end of the semester), you'll be fine. If you're stuck with normal, fallible human beings who are swamped by the rest of their courseload, godspeed.
Maksim Bychkov puts in an appearance about once a month to remind you that he exists and is just as terrifying as you remembered him, but other than that, he has close to zero involvement in the class. There was no hands-on element in this class, even in person - each class we were given a video of Bychkov doing the lab (that invariably looked like it was shot on an iPhone 5) that we would have to painstakingly track frame by frame because, 9 times out of 10, the autotracking feature of Capstone would lose its mind trying to stay on the right pixel. The only instructors you will actually interact with are the three lab TA's (Chris is a g) but they don't actually have a say in what your lab grades are - no, that honor would go to the grading TA's, who you never meet (unless you decide to show up to an office hour session and get gaslit the entire time while not getting a single point back on your lab) and who have no qualms whatsoever about handing out 12/20s like candy. The inconsistency in the grading is staggering - you could submit the same exact lab two weeks in a row, get a 18/20 on one, and a 11/20 on the other because the grader you got randomly assigned for that week woke up feeling dangerous.

I learned nothing from this class other than basic data analysis skills I could have figured out in 20 minutes. Just work your butt off, try to avoid making Bychkov mad, get a half decent grade, and then scrub this class from your memory.

Fuck this class. I wish I would have studied a shit ton and got a 5 on the AP physics 1 exam so I could get out of this. Worse course at UVA. Assignments fill me with dread, super unclear instructions, terrible TAs, insanely harsh grading. 5-6 hours a week of work plus 2 hour lab just for a 1 credit class. This class needs to be shut down. Instructors are not understanding of the fact that we are taking other classes outside of this one.

Coming from someone who got an A, my biggest tip is to make very clear roles for each group member. They told us to switch it up but my group decided not to and it worked very well for us. We had only three members (while most groups had 4) so I was initially afraid that that would mean more work and make the class harder. But we all took on the role that got best with out strengths; there was someone who handled the math, someone who read up on the lab set/procedure so they set stuff up and collected data, and then someone who worked to put it all together. It was bumpy at first because you don't really know what the TAs are looking for, but eventually it got to the point where we would just silently work because we had such a flow. We all left with As in the class. While you can't pick your group, everyone in your group has to have a strength in one component of the lab. Split it up in this way, master your own section, and then put it all together.

An incredibly poorly run and poorly taught course. Maxim delegates his entire course load to undergraduate or graduate students who are clearly instructed to give limited guidance. The concept of the class is to build on ideas learned in Phys 1425(incidentally a well taught class) and use it in practical applications. Instead, maxim has turned it into an amalgamation of grammar nitpicking, formatting guide deep-dives, and what can only be explained as willful negligence of responsibility to teach a class, or otherwise a direct and vindictive decision to create difficulty in an inherently straightforward class through vague direction, purposeful absence and grading criteria based on marks wholly irrelevant to a physics courseload. You will certainly spend more time on a single pre-lab(which will be both difficult and neglect helpful resources) in this class then you will interact or learn from maxim all semester. It is remarkable to me that such a fundamental science class at a university of our level continues to exist in such a developmental, non-contributory form. If you have any other option to pursue this class in any other form, I would seriously consider it.

This class will make you wanna rip your brains out. It's midway in November and haven't seen the Professor speak to the class once. The lab guide will tell you to do one thing, the lab TAs will tell you another and then the grader TAs will tell you another. So you have no idea what to put on the lab report. Best part the report can only be 1 page, good luck answering the 18 questions on 1 page. The grader TAs are the reason why this class is terrible. You can turn in Einstein's report on Special Relativity and they will find a way to give you a 80. They also look for obscure words which if they aren't said exactly as they want you say they will cut down your grade faster than a truffula tree in the Lorax. These words won't be asked for in the manual but they were told to look for. This is an abomination of a class and I recommend you not take it unless you have to.