Professor
HongWen Jiang
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2020 - I took this class during the corona quarter as well so please keep that in mind. Here's a breakdown of the class: 10% HW 15% Lab 20% MT1 20% MT2 35% Final Jiang's lectures were pretty dry (perhaps because I wasn't that interested in the material), but I think he explains things pretty well. He recorded his zoom lectures so I ended up watching them on CCLE at a faster speed. He kind of has an accent if that bothers any of you at all, but it didn't make that much of a difference for me. He did open note midterms on MasteringPhysics with 4 multi-part questions. Each part had 3 tries and if you did the homework he assigned and maybe the problems at the end of each chapter, you were pretty much set to get a 100. The homework he assigned each week was usually 7 or 8 mastering problems which were pretty easy if you a) went to lecture or b) read the book. I personally didn't take the final because of everything that happened at the end of this quarter, and he was kind enough to let us take an optional final. I looked at the final and it wasn't too bad as long as you paid attention in class and did the practice final he sent , but I was thoroughly checked out by the end of spring so it looked hard to me. Anyway, Jiang is a really sweet professor
Spring 2020 - I took this class during the corona quarter as well so please keep that in mind. Here's a breakdown of the class: 10% HW 15% Lab 20% MT1 20% MT2 35% Final Jiang's lectures were pretty dry (perhaps because I wasn't that interested in the material), but I think he explains things pretty well. He recorded his zoom lectures so I ended up watching them on CCLE at a faster speed. He kind of has an accent if that bothers any of you at all, but it didn't make that much of a difference for me. He did open note midterms on MasteringPhysics with 4 multi-part questions. Each part had 3 tries and if you did the homework he assigned and maybe the problems at the end of each chapter, you were pretty much set to get a 100. The homework he assigned each week was usually 7 or 8 mastering problems which were pretty easy if you a) went to lecture or b) read the book. I personally didn't take the final because of everything that happened at the end of this quarter, and he was kind enough to let us take an optional final. I looked at the final and it wasn't too bad as long as you paid attention in class and did the practice final he sent , but I was thoroughly checked out by the end of spring so it looked hard to me. Anyway, Jiang is a really sweet professor
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2022 - It's a difficult class, but the professor manages to illustrate how cool the content is (most of the time). The midterm was very easy, the homework was moderately easy, and the final was brutal. I don't think the curve was super nice, I was significantly above average on both tests and my homework was >95%, but I still didn't get an A. If you supplement the course with online lectures and any pair of QM textbooks, you're going to understand the content. We covered time-independent degenerate and non-degenerate perturbation theory, the variational principle, the WKB approximation, time-dependent perturbation theory, Fermi's golden rule, absorption and emission of radiation, the adiabatic approximation, Berry's phase, pure and mixed states, and the EPR paradox. Basically everything from Griffith's except the chapter on scattering. The professor wanted to talk about topics of personal interest like quantum computing and superconducting qubits, but we didn't have time.
Winter 2022 - It's a difficult class, but the professor manages to illustrate how cool the content is (most of the time). The midterm was very easy, the homework was moderately easy, and the final was brutal. I don't think the curve was super nice, I was significantly above average on both tests and my homework was >95%, but I still didn't get an A. If you supplement the course with online lectures and any pair of QM textbooks, you're going to understand the content. We covered time-independent degenerate and non-degenerate perturbation theory, the variational principle, the WKB approximation, time-dependent perturbation theory, Fermi's golden rule, absorption and emission of radiation, the adiabatic approximation, Berry's phase, pure and mixed states, and the EPR paradox. Basically everything from Griffith's except the chapter on scattering. The professor wanted to talk about topics of personal interest like quantum computing and superconducting qubits, but we didn't have time.
Most Helpful Review
Fall 2019 - The subject is very interesting and challenging, although this is just the preliminary stuff. The book, Kittel, is horrible and goes over a lot of stuff in an unsatisfying level of thoroughness making you want more. Jiang is OK as an instructor, not amazing and he basically sticks with the book. The exams, especially the final, are carbon copies of the homework. Nearly every question of the 8 questions on the final were exact repeats of the homework, so if you just spend quality time on the problem sets and study those, you'll get an A in the class.
Fall 2019 - The subject is very interesting and challenging, although this is just the preliminary stuff. The book, Kittel, is horrible and goes over a lot of stuff in an unsatisfying level of thoroughness making you want more. Jiang is OK as an instructor, not amazing and he basically sticks with the book. The exams, especially the final, are carbon copies of the homework. Nearly every question of the 8 questions on the final were exact repeats of the homework, so if you just spend quality time on the problem sets and study those, you'll get an A in the class.
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