Is your guy's Physics Labs like this?

College Majors Engineering Majors
1

<p>Just out of curiosity.</p>

<p>Mine: We do experiments, take a bunch of measurements, and do worksheets/lab reports that require us to calculate uncertainty a bagillion times (not just estimating but actually going through the partial differentiation and all that jazz) for every single formula.</p>

2

<p>Yes. I absolutely despise working through those uncertainty calculations.</p>

3

<p>Yes. It SUCKS. I hate physics lab yet I find some topics of physics fascinating. The work just sucks.</p>

4

<p>Hmm, we don’t spend a lot of time on uncertainty in our labs. Although for every lab we do, we always calculate percent errors or percent differences between a measured property and what the property ought to be according to the formula. The focus in our labs has always been on understanding the formulae, the underlying physics, seeing how changing one variable at a time affects the process, gathering lots of data, and seeing before your eyes the phenomena under investigation (if doable). But these are calc-based classes, so far I haven’t taken a physics class that required stats.</p>

5

<p>In my freshman physics labs we didn’t spend a lot of time on uncertainty analysis & error propagation. In my junior engineering labs it is the bane of my existence.</p>

6

<p>My physics lab is around 3 and a half hours. During those hours we have to have a quick lesson, explanation of what we are going to do, we complete the lab, we write a lab write up, and then we have a quiz. The lab write up and the quiz is worth 50% of the grade for the class.</p>

<p>How many credits is this lab worth? 1 credit -_-
As an engineer major who has other classes and work to do I cant stand physics lab. It tires you. Yes you learn from it, but cant it more easier?</p>

7

<p>This has always been a problem for natural science courses with labs such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology and Astronomy: the amount of time you have to spend and work you have to do for the labs is wildly our of proportion to the credits you receive for them.</p>

8

<p>The formula for my classes was always “three hours of work for every hour of lecture.” So if your course is one credit, you should be expecting to spend four hours on it total.</p>