How to Do Well in Physics?

CalDud
Sun, 27 Oct 2013 04:43:53 +0000

I don’t know if they’re harder than they need to be. I don’t know much about engineering, although one of my friends is ME and taking physics classes alongside me.

We just had our midterm Wednesday. I spent my Sunday doing all of the homework (basically procrastinated for 4 weeks and skipped one week of class) that was assigned to us as practice up to a certain point and then spent Monday going over the new material after a long day of classes. Tuesday I got with a friend and we worked problem after problem until our eyes grew tired. I only had an early morning class that day. Lots of coffee involved. I even bought a monster energy drink.

When the actual exam came, it was nothing like the homework. It was just two questions we had to do in class over an hour. So those weren’t bad. I brute forced the first problem and my friend tried to do something elegant with it. He would’ve gotten the same answer if his algebra skills were stronger. The second problem involved a proof. The take home portion of the test was alright except this one problem I got stuck on and left half finished. I consulted my friend about it and we spent probably 3-5 hours on it getting nowhere, just coming up with a bunch of theories really that were already proven on the internet. Even after we turned in the exam the next day we were still trying to solve the problem afterwards. I eventually found the answer after a few hours of googling (not kidding) and our ideas that morning closely paralleled what was going on in the problem. But yeah, the take home portion was all derivations.

Now that we know that homework doesn’t help at all with the problems on the test, we’re probably going to do the bare minimum on the homework and really just focus on the theory. Sometimes though doing a lot of problems helps, but the hardest ones that we did that involved a lot of drawing and thinking were not even touched on. I don’t know why he assigned so many problems on those.