Introduction to Experimental Physics · Physics
The workload was ridiculous. The lab reports easily took at least 8 hours a week to get it decently good but the TA would probably just find some random thing to dock massive amounts of points for.
Negative: Weekly lab reports, 3+ hours of writeup and calculations, with pretty graphs Positive: No midterm or finals, which is nice.
1 lab report per week: each takes on average 4-6 hours to complete
Unnecessarily heavy, because of Arne's curve.
Pretty light: weekly lab reports, no midterm, no final.
This class easily claims the title for absolute worst class I have ever taken. The grading was wildly inconsistent with massive amounts of points being docked for no real reason aside from minor grammatical or formatting. The TA running the actual experiment was completely useless, sometimes he would actually be asleep instead of providing any help (probably because it was from 7:30 to 10 at night) and then has the audacity to dock points over pretty much meaningless things. The lectures were also pretty much useless since 95% of the stuff that was mentioned was already in the lab manual and was just repeating what was there. When the prof asked how we all felt about the class during one lecture, not a single person said they felt good about it and this was with dwindling attendance for the lectures. Avoid this class at any and all costs, only do it if you for whatever reason absolutely have to.
Physics Lab was required for my major, unfortunately. After not learning anything in previous physics classes, the physics itself actually wasn't so hard. You simply go once a week to a lab and follow instructions. The average lab took an hour and a half, even though it was scheduled to go three hours. Then you write up the lab and turn it in the next week. For the lab reports, the hardest thing to do is error propagation; the rest is pretty straightforward.
Painful and useless class. No one takes it seriously. Most of the experiments failed with horrible data since we either didn't perform them correctly since the manual sucked or because the equipment was bad. The lab reports were a pain to write and took up a lot of time that I could have spent doing something useful. Our TA was pretty chill and didn't really care as long as we explained the catastrophic results in our reports. Find a reliable buddy to work with so you can split the work during the lab and check with each other when you write the lab report.
Switch out of the section if you have him. Arne is not a mean person; he just makes the lab class ridiculously difficult. He curves around B/B+ for every lab report with most students falling around the middle. (Don't dismiss this just because I talk about grades--read on.) For most of you that means however hard you try you will find yourself getting scores between 4.8 and 5.2 (over 10.0) every single time. You may work harder, but so will everyone else. By the end of the semester the curve becomes insanely competitive. Now, I don't think that students should only care about grades, but I personally (and I would venture to guess that most people will agree) don't think it makes sense to curve physics lab like Arne does. First of all, although he thinks he never makes mistakes (he said it himself), evaluation of lab reports isn't numerical and objective. Does it make sense to curve essays? And unless it's something major, he doesn't really tell you what is wrong with your work. You can be doing flawless reports and still getting 4.8's and not knowing why (because the other reports are spectacular). More importantly, there is absolutely NO point making an INTRODUCTORY lab class so insanely competitive. Every lab report took me 5/6 hours of stressful work, and every time I got a 5.0 back (all checks, no mistakes), not because it wasn't good, but because everyone else's was just…
He lectures once a week for physics lab, and it's a complete waste of time to go. Not only is he hard to understand (and get confused when students ask questions), the things he teaches is seem to pop out of nowhere... All of a sudden you'd see all these variables on the board and you have no clue what they are and what they do. Most of the information are in the lab manuals, and reading through that gives you all that you need to know for the course. There's no midterm and no final, just lab reports every week. Just get to know your TA cuz everything goes through TAs, including grading, attendance, participation, etc..