PHYS 2699: Physics Lab

The other review of Arne is pretty accurate, if not a bit biased because of caring a lot about grades. Arne is a nice enough guy in the lab, willing to show you what to do. He also makes some good explanations sometimes too. The idea of grading this class on a curve is pretty stupid (the other person probably would have been happier too if it wasn't graded like that) because you can have two lab reports of the same quality get different grades if that week's competition was stronger. It also makes the grading seem arbitrary. Unfortunately, Arne doesn't really help the situation by not summarizing what you did well and what you didn't on the lab. He simply puts a percentage and a few check marks. Come on, it's got to be teaching 101 that you need some explanation to why a grade was earned. The labs are a lot of work and you won't learn anything, except how to make some graphs in Excel. I think it's one of the worst required engineering school classes. The lab time itself isn't too bad and except for a couple of times never took more than two hours to finish.

Workload:

10 labs. Each takes a couple of hours in the lab and at least 3, and up to 6 hours to write the report. Completely unrewarding considering the time required.