The workload is heave indeed. Besides the way this course was taught, 158 itself is hard. Students would be accepting new material on the days that this course began, as well as on the days that the final was coming. You really need to focus on BOTH the understanding of new knowledge AND practice questions. If you are not a good learner you may fail.

Avoid Dr. Hasinoff at all cost.

Despite all the problems of this course I wish you who are going to take this course trust physics and enjoy physics!

The material covered in this course is very typical for an introduction to E&M and there are no surprises in that respect. Unfortunately it seems to be the primary duty of the instructors to make the course as confusing and frustrating as possible. I'm not even exaggerating when I say that the course administration and lectures were an active nuisance and hinderance to my learning. I would do readings for several hours over the weekend, complete the next week's homework, and then go to class to make sure I wasn't missing anything. I would start the week with a solid understanding of the concepts and have to actively ignore convoluted and unhelpful explanations in lecture. The introductory homework problems were at times extremely inappropriate, giving a 2nd year electrical enginee...read more

I would avoid this course if at all possible. If it is required, then make sure to spend your time reading the textbook and understanding the homework and focusing on the tutorials. The tutorials have TAs that are orders of magnitude better than the professors at properly conveying course concepts. Don't expect to go to a lecture and learn something. Use YouTube or any other source, the lectures are a waste of time.

The topics covered are very interesting, however, the organization is poor. Professors expect a high level of prerequisite knowledge and design the course to be particularly challenging. The course is meant to weed people out rather than actually give you a solid understanding of the material without a lot of extra work or prerequisite knowledge.

If possible, do some prep before taking this course. This can help you follow along in lectures which is very helpful as there's lots of good info if you can keep up. The core concepts are not too challenging but you typically need to invest a lot of time into this course to be successful.

For the typical student, this is a terribly taught course. The flipped classroom approach simply does not work as there is too much material too be covered in just a few pre-reading assignments (which tend to be useless). Lectures are very hand-wavy, fail to reinforce concepts, and leave students in the dust if they don't understand something. There tends to be little correlation between homework and textbook questions (at least, not without meticulously going through every question in the book). Unlike PHYS 157, the profs fail to review basic concepts to ensure everyone is on the same page (not everyone takes IB lol). The profs' warning on how PHYS 158 is harder than PHYS 157 is not an excuse for the abysmal course organization and structure.

If you can take PHYS 118 instead, go for it. Like others have said, don't go to lectures if you don't understand what's going on. Refer to YouTube to learn the material and practice textbook / homework questions. Tutorials are useful so do those.

This course is disorganized, and none of the professors are capable of conveying information properly. Written homework and quizzes are brutal and unforgiving. Concepts are barely covered in class, and the reason for this is because this course follows a flipped classroom structure. You're expected to know everything before class through the pre-readings. This structure might be fine for easier courses, but it's a terrible idea for a challenging course like this one.

If you're gonna take this course, make sure to do the pre-readings. Skip the classes, they're completely useless. You may lose the 3% iclicker marks but considering the amount of time you'll end up wasting for this, it's a worthwhile trade-off.

Course is much too confusing with too many homeworks that jump the gun all too often. The profs office hours consisted of "I'll talk about that in class" with them talking about it for 3 seconds without answering the question. The TA's literally spent 3 hours trying to get the class to understand 1 question that the profs did a terrible job of explaining. All in All, the profs are all terrible and the course has too much material for the time given.