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PHYS 3420 Electricity and Magnetism I
Last taught: Spring 2026
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Spring 2026
3.3
Average

Professor Paschke is an alright lecturer. We covered the first 6 chapters of Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics. The textbook is phenomenal, and I found myself learning much more from reading the textbook than from the lectures. If anything, the lectures should be treated as a supplement to the textbook reading (a sentiment which Professor Paschke agrees with). The other nice thing is that Professor Paschke writes good lecture notes, which I found useful for studying.

The homework was fairly straightforward. Oddly enough, Professor Paschke would mostly just copy and paste Griffiths problems instead of assigning problems from the textbook directly. The exams were also fairly easy. The midterms were a little quick but not conceptually challenging. The final consisted of 6 problems, of which only 4 were graded, allowing one to take the exam at a leisurely pace. I found this all very fair. This allowed me to learn the content (which I found very interesting) without stressing me out too much.

However, I have some criticisms. We had weekly quizzes, which took up far more time than they were worth. We were constantly behind schedule, and I think we could have sacrificed the quizzes for more content at little cost to the students' understanding. If anything, the quiz questions which he wrote could instead be used as practice problems before exams.

Another criticism I have is that he did not publish exam statistics. Since the class is graded on a curve, if someone does not know how they're doing relative to the class, they have no idea how they're doing at all. I think this is completely unfair especially to students who may be struggling more than they realize.

Overall, the content of this course is very interesting, and Professor Paschke is certainly a fair teacher for the most part. Just study the textbook and you'll be fine.

Instructor 3.0
Enjoyability 4.0
Recommend 3.0
Difficulty 2.0
Hours/Week 4.0
Spring 2025
2.0
Average

I did not enjoy this course. Professor Paschke also did not seem like he wanted to be teaching this course.
He would give us printed out versions of his notes that seemed like they were directly from the textbook, and then he would lecture through said notes, often not being able to get through it all because of how long they were. In addition to this, Fridays we would have quizzes, but they would often take up the entire class period, resulting in us effectively only having two lectures per week. The homework's would often be unreasonable in their length, sometimes being as short as two questions or as long as seven questions. We would have homework's the same weeks we had exams. Score distribution sharing was inconsistent amongst the two midterms that we had, with statistics given for the first one and not for the second one for - reasons.
I did ten percentage points better when I stopped going to class and started watching a different E+M professors lectures (search "Govind Menon electrodynamics" on YouTube) online. I didn't like this course because it was "bad" necessarily, I just didn't like it because it could've been SO much better if the materials had been taught by someone who had an enthusiasm for the topic at hand. I don't think he realizes it, but the Professor often comes across as condescending in his tone and aggressive in how he answered questions in class. He generally comes across as a bit stern.
Some benefits: SDAC students were exempt from the quizzes because the Professor could not accommodate them; I heard about this and thought that it was very fair of him to do. Additionally, for students who did poorly on the first two exams, he would allow those students to do in-office-hours retakes to get back points within a certain percentage threshold. I found that to be quite reasonable and kind of him to do as well.

Instructor 2.0
Enjoyability 2.0
Recommend 2.0
Difficulty 4.0
Hours/Week 4.0
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