Taught By: Richard Epp, Karen Cummings

Term: 1A (Fall 2020)

This course was very different when compared to a traditional Physics course, as there were no tests, or exams, only group work, and small individual assignments. Now, on one hand, I liked it, as I got to meet a lot of new people, which was great because I was not going to go out of my way to do that. However, what really sucked was the group ranking system, where every week you have to rank your group members with no ties. This was rough because in essence you can get either get a 1,2,3 out of 3. It is very easy to see how it is very easy to get a very bad grade in these rankings. Moreover, since no one is monitoring these rankings, what is stopping someone from just giving low marks to people they don’t like? nothing really, which can hurt since the majority of your mark came from group work. We would have to meet 2-3 times a week, to do worksheets or problems together, and after submit our individual work. Additionally, we had group projects every 2 weeks, in which your group had to make a physics problem pertaining to the current material being studied. Now I will say that the way they went about teaching and presenting this course made it so that learning was the main goal which is always a good thing, however, by the end of the term I physically could not stand group work anymore.

The lectures by Dr.Epp were very informative and taught intuition not whatever memorization techniques they tried to push on you in high school Physics. I also really enjoyed all of the actual work we had to do, as it was all relatively challenging in some manner and was enjoyable to complete. However, the obscene amount of group worked really killed the course for me. Moreover, compared to what I learned in IB physics, we really did not learn much more. In general, this course was a bit more in-depth than a high school grade 12 Physics class.