PHYC10001: Physics 1 Advanced

Weekly questions on WileyPlus (15%), ~7 Lab classes and lab reports (25%), Final exam (60%)

Overall, the issue with this subject wasn't with the content (which could be quite interesting), but with the way the lectures, assessment, tutorial classes and overall faculty administration was handled. I can't speak for the regular Physics 1 stream, but certainly this was quite a disappointing subject, and dampened my enthusiasm for physics.

Lectures
David Jamieson is extremely passionate, but will incessantly speak in tangents and sidetrack himself, making the lectures quite hard to follow. His slides are also quite busy and the maths gets skipped through very quickly (not stepped through like in maths subjects); I felt there was a lack of coherency to the flow of the lectures, and it was often hard to discern what was actually examinable or the critical parts of the lecture.

I found David Simpson to be much more calm and methodical, and whose slides were much less busy and more focused, which I appreciated much more. Interestingly, however, some students found the reverse; I suppose it's just a matter of taste in lecture style.

Lab classes and lab reportsThis was single-handedly the

Yes, but demonstrations were sometimes posted separately or not possible this semester

David Jamieson (1st half) and David Simpson (2nd half)

Yes, 5 past papers with worked solutions

1.5/5

Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday and Resnick. This textbook is incredible, definitely worth getting a copy and learning from it. The explanations, diagrams, and examples are super helpful when learning the content .... often more so than the lectures.

~7 pracs (3 hours), 1 tutorial class (1 hour), 3 lectures (1 hour each)

2020 Semester 1

H1

15% - 10 weekly homework assignments (1.5% each)25% - 8 weekly practicals (5% was prelabs, 20% was the prac and writeup)

Being brutally honest - this subject was not done well. This subject may change in the future, but when I did it this semester it wasn't taught well, went too fast, and was very disorganised.

Pracs:
These pracs were timetabled in for 3 hours but it was usually 10 minutes or so of explanation, and around 2 hours of doing the prac and writing it up. So, the pracs usually finished around half an hour early (one demonstrator said no writing after 12:30, the other helped us out and let us have extra time).
These pracs were usually where we learned the content. We often learnt the subject material in lectures around 2 weeks after we had a prac on it. There is also pre-lab work, and it can take a while to wrap your head around the pracs and concepts. Usually there were 2-4 sections of the pracs to complete, and you were lucky if you got 2 parts done. Each is like a separate prac and you will be rushing for a lot of it. In my pracs, most of the marks were from the analysis, regardless of how far through you got, so leave plenty of time for this. The amount of content that needed to be completed was ridiculous, the descriptions of the pracs were confusing, and it was often on new content we hadn't been taught. Pracs were a major source of stress for me.
The prelabs, though, are the easiest marks you can get, basically a free 5% for the subject. Takes 5 minutes or longer if you're researching the answer, and it's 3-4 multiple choice questions with some obvious answers.

Tutorials:
Some tutors were better than others. In my class, we did our own work while our tutor walked around, checked up on how people were going and answered questions. When things were explained, they were explained in a very complicated way that was difficult to understand. I found this very unhelpful, but I'm sure other classes were better.

Weekly Assignments:
10-13 online questions. They took 3-10 hours per week but were good marks if you were willing to put in the time relearning content and sticking with it. You were given 3 chances to get the right answer, so that was good. The questions were often confusing and difficult but the assignments did relieve a bit of the pressure off from the exams. The questions are by the textbook manufacturers not the lecturers, so they can end up being difficult.

Lectures:
The lecturers often went through concepts too fast and didn't explain things well. They seemed to like physics, just being a bit lacking in the teaching area. I didn't feel like I learned any more by being in the advanced, if anything I learned less. The lectures were also at inconvenient times - there was only one stream (half full). There was limited time for each topic (think we spent 1.5 lectures on special relativity, around 2-3 lectures for other topics). The demonstrations were enjoyable, the best part of lectures, but again not explained well. The lectures tended to go through things very fast and the lecture notes were difficult to understand, with very few examples. I walked out of many lectures having no idea about what they just taught. They also had a lot of "aside"s, where they talked about things not particularly relevant to the course. While these were interesting, they reduced the time we were taught assessable content.

Exam:
I calculated that I needed 23% in the exam to pass, and I'm not even sure whether I got that. The fact that I received 79% overall shows the massive scaling they had to have done on the exam - I'm doubtful anyone passed. It was difficult even if you studied for hours/days/weeks/months. It covered things we hadn't really been taught and didn't have any standard questions, just lots of hard ones. They had to have a similar / higher mark than the regular physics for this subject though (as there was a higher caliber of students) so they had to scale it, I expect by 50% or more.

Overall
I don't know anyone who's continuing on with advanced this semester - if you're thinking of doing it, wait until they have things organised. I'd recommend doing the regular, it's larger with more support and more understandable classes. Overall, this subject was disorganised, difficult, and not worth it (was my lowest mark by quite a bit). I was expecting this class to give me more insight into physics and how things were derived, but it seemed to be an excuse to not explain things properly.

Yes, with screen capture

David Jamieson for the first half (kinematics, motion) - enthusiastic but goes too fast for the class
Robert Scholton - second half (special relativity, gravitation, waves etc) - similar problems but tends to go a bit slower

Yes. Exams from 2011-2016 with numerical answers (not detailed answers or working)

2 Out of 5

Halliday & Resnick, Fundamentals of Physics, 10th ed., Wiley 2014. Not required but the lectures were difficult to follow, so I'd recommend getting a version of this book (9th edition and earlier are much cheaper).

3x 1 hour lectures
1x 3 hour practical
1x 1 hour tutorial

2017 Semester 1

High H2A