Petitioned to switch to a different physics class during week 4. Very bad at lecturing, speeds through everything so fast that you won't even have time to take a picture of the slide. Explains nothing in depth and expects you to magically understand what he is doing. Highly NOT recommend.

hate this class and hate this man. don't be fooled. he seems super nice and down to earth but trust me that is not the case. we have 4 hours of lecture a week and i swear i learn nothing every damn class. he flies through examples and problems writing on his little ipad. doesn't explain how or why he is solving problems the way he is, and expects you to understand it. you have weekly quizzes instead of a midterm which is good and bad. if you ask questions during the quiz he gets really butthurt and blames you for not knowing the material. if you haven't taken physics in high school, good luck. the only reason im surviving in this course is because i have a physics background. idk if i can fathom how much i dislike this class.

Editing review: Okay y’all, I was extremely salty when I wrote that last review, and also I think the professor saw it :( it was very mean of me to comment on him as a person, when obviously I don’t actually really know him at all.

I did have some difficulty requesting extensions and such, although I am registered with CAE. But for the most part he was actually very generous with allowing extensions. I will say, be careful that you submit the homework before noon every Tuesday! He will NOT accept any late work as a general rule, even if it’s only a little late. This is pretty fair though because the deadline is the same every week and you have a whole week to work on it.

Also, he lets you submit answers as many times as you want to Mastering Physics, and doesn’t take points off for wrong answers (which I’ve heard some other professors do). He said his intention is that everyone gets 100% on the homework. I’m not sure how manageable this actually is, as some of the challenge HW problems are extremely difficult even if you attend office hours, go to tutoring, read the textbook, and watch the lectures (as I did). I ended up having to look up some answers to get full credit, which the professor totally knew because he can see how long you’ve been working on Mastering Physics.

I’d say try your hardest to complete the problems on your own and DON’T look them up if you can at all avoid it, because it’s a lot harder to motivate yourself to do the HW when all the answers are there - and most of the learning in class pretty much requires you to do the HW and just do tons of practice problems to really understand it.

Also, his office hours aren’t the best - I’d recommend getting a friend to help or maybe using the free tutoring options (which Saltzberg does do a good job of emailing everyone about). In office hours we would often end up on tangents that weren’t exactly central to the learning material, especially if you were still struggling to understand the basics of the material.

Still, I’d say this guy is pretty good, especially as far as Physics professors go. He’s friendly and cheerful, does demos, and basically gives “cheerful sweet grandpa” vibes. But his deadlines ARE still pretty strict, they are what they are, and in general STEM classes are more black-and-white and less accepting of late work than humanities or social science classes would tend to be.

Also, his quizzes are HARD. There’s weekly quizzes so that you don’t fall behind, but if you do fall behind it can feel really difficult to ever catch up, as you’re trying to catch up while also prepping for the next week’s quiz. If you’re actually able to do all of the HW, I think you should be alright on the quizzes - I would just frequently get stuck on the HW and try for a couple hours and then give up in frustration. I also haven’t ever taken any physics before - I think if you took it in HS, you’d have an easier time as well.

But still, the tests generally are much harder than the base material we go over in class; you really just have to do a TON of practice problems in order to succeed. Like, I would understand the base material and concepts, but this still be totally lost on applying it in the quizzes. One quiz I thought I did decently on, 60% at worst, and I got 10%.

There’s also no curve for this class as far as I know, which really sucks because the tests are hard. We tried doing a petition to get him to curve the class, so I’ll update again if that’s successful.

Also, he doesn’t give you a formula sheet at all, although we did get a 3x5in index card for the final. Not for any of the quizzes though, and basic calculators only. He likes to say “physics equations are your friends!”, which is a funny saying until the dread of having to memorize so many different ‘friend’s names’ sinks in and you realize you are actually really bad at even remembering human names, let alone physics ones.

He also wants you to be able to memorize all the different metric units for distance, from 10^-18 to 10^18 (ex: millimeter, centimeter, etc.). We had picometer on one of our quizzes, but he did warn us in advance that one of the unusual ones would be on that quiz. I don’t think it’s fully fair to test us on that because in reality some people just aren’t as good at rote memorization, and most people aren’t doing physics in their head while they’re driving. But to be fair, the problem was actually mostly solvable without even really needing to know how long a picometer was, so it could be worse.

Also, you have to attend discussion in-person to get points for the discussion sheets. Make sure you really over-explain everything on your discussion sheets to avoid getting points off; you don’t have to finish or have the right answers, but you do have to put in 50 minutes worth of effort. (One guy in my section stood up in the middle of class and started screaming at the TA for getting points off even though he wrote 2 full pages, supposedly.)

Tl;dr: This class is hard. You have to do a bunch of practice problems and memorize all the formulas to succeed. Make sure to turn your homework in ON TIME as late work will be difficult to get accepted. Don’t look up the HW answers if you can avoid it, because you’ll really be in bad shape if you don’t do the homework yourself. Success is possible but you will have to work for it!

Gives quizzes every single week and wastes a lot of time doing useless shit instead of teaching. We have 4 hours of class each week where he spends only 2 or less hours teaching and the rest trying to crack jokes that aren’t even funny or taking quizzes. And get this the quizzes are 40 percent of ur grade! No curve or extra credit either. He also wastes a whole bunch of time in the beginning of class trying to figure out zoom and other technical stuff . This happens every single class. I might not have learned a lotta physics from this class but I sure hope the professor learnt how to use the tech stuff after the technical stuff had to teach him every single class of the quarter.

You either like him or you don't. I think he lectures well, but his final was hard. the cut-off for an A was an 85.5% and I got an 85.3% and he didn't bump me up ! Arrrgghhh !